Today a guest post from SEO Mary Bowling, who I had the pleasure of meeting at PubCon last month:
I’ve attended 3 unique internet marketing conferences this year, each hosted by a different big-name producer. Each had their own strong and weak points and none of them were ideal. So, I started thinking about all the best things that would go into planning the absolutely perfect conference.
Here are the ingredients I crave:
Registration
- A really enticing preregistration discount. Give me some ammo to take to the controller to get her to shake the money loose to pay for this.
- Quick and easy registration. Maybe even online.? Self service kiosks where you can print your own pass?
Venue
- The venue’s in a big hotel or directly adjacent to one. It is so much more relaxing to be able to go to your room if you need to during the day than it is to have to commute to the conference area and make your headquarters there.
- Free wireless in the hotel rooms. Come on, the internet is a required utility for the set of people who go to an INTERNET marketing conference. You don’t charge them extra for water or electricity. Why make them pay $10-15 a day for internet access? And no, if we’re going to get any work done at all during the conference, please don’t expect us to conduct it in noisy and distracting common areas, so free internet in the lobby doesn’t count. If you can’t negotiate free internet, then at least get the hotel to include it in the room price. Then, we’ll never have to know.
- Free wireless internet access in the conference area and adequate bandwidth to accommodate all the laptops in the audience. A lot of the people typing away are blogging about what’s going on at the conference. Do you want them complaining about inadequate internet service?
Amenities
- Power to the people! Electrical outlets would be everywhere so that we could stay fully charged throughout the day and into the evening sessions and events.
- Good food. You will be judged by the food you serve and the way it is served. A cold box lunch from a long table? or a long buffet of catered food we’ll all be blogging about?
- Comfortable chairs. We can sit on hard plastic chairs all day, including at lunch, but we won’t be comfortable. Can we have a bit of padding, please?
- Tables, as well as chairs in every session room. They call them laptops, that’s not really the preferred way to use them.
Sessions
- Good acoustics and audio equipment. We want to hear what everyone says in every session. That’s what you’re selling and that’s what we’re here for.
- Prepared presentations. No matter how celebrated a speaker may be, it ‘s disrespectful of the audience if they do not make any effort to prepare for their conference role.
- Coordinated sessions. It’s a total waste of time when more than one speaker in a session gives us the same information. The moderator should review and coordinate the presentations to insure against the dreaded duplicate content.
- No pitches. Nothing ruins a session faster than a speaker trying to sell the audience on their product or service.
Networking
- Networking opportunities. Give us plenty of meals together, parties, evening sessions, exhibit hall time and creative events, like charity poker tourneys and roll-playing extravaganzas. Who we hook up with is often as important as what we learn.
- Friendly, accessible speakers. It is so cool to have breakfast with an SEO hero or two. Meeting and speaking with the speakers is a highlight of any conference.
Here are a few niceties I’ll throw in, too: dimmable overhead lighting in the session rooms; comfortable temperature; snacks and drinks available throughout the day and at least a 10-15 minute break between sessions.
Mary Bowling is the senior SEO for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc and blogs about optimization.
