Great post on the “ideal conference”. I was at PubCon the past two years, and I have to say some of Mary’s points really hit the mark in terms of nice-to-haves that would have kicked up the conveniences of PubCon a notch. Some of those basic amenities, including internet access would make it much easier to miss four days of work to attend the conference.

Overally, here was my takeaway from PubCon. The very best presentations were top notch, and I really learned a great deal. I enjoyed the great people and the opportunity to learn some extremely helpful approaches to SEO and SEM. We keep helping each other take our craft to the next level.

I had breakfast with Mary and her colleagues several mornings and really enjoyed the chance to visit and learn about each other’s work.

Thanks for the great post, Mary! And thanks, Aaron for maintaining a great blog on SEO. And, Brett, keep up the great work with PubCon!

Some events have too many parallel sessions. I can easily choose one-from-two, but choosing from three or four is often a lot more tricky. I once went to an event which at several points had five sessions running at a time. Everyone hated it. Three-sessions-at-a-time seems to be some sort of standard these days. What does everyone else think about that?

Location. Location. Location. I don’t just mean where in the world, but the arrangement of all the conference rooms relative to each other on site. Get them all close together, hopefully on the same or an adjacent floor, with close, easy, access to both stairs and lifts between them.

Have all food and refreshements very close to the sessions area, as well as adequate toilets for all attendees. If there is only 15 minutes between sessions, I need to be able to get out of one, get a drink, have a comfort break, and get along to the next session… pronto.

Signage. Every session room entrance to show a list of all the sessions for that room (with current session highlighted if you can) as well as at least some simple arrows showing which direction to go for the other presentations.

Some sort of “next session starts in 5 minutes” announcement. It can be very easy to be distracted with all the other things going on, and miss the start of the next session. I really don’t like entering a session once the main speaker has started, but have done so a few times. Ooops. I really don’t mind a single simple short announcement letting me know that I need to move along, right about now.

Room size. That must be very very difficult to plan in advance, but book rooms that don’t mean packing the last 20% of people as standing-room only. Also, don’t go for rooms that are so large that less than 50% of the seats are taken (makes it look under-attended, as well as wasting money for the organisers). This must be so difficult to plan in advance, as topic popularity can be very difficult to anticipate.

As I said; not aimed anywhere in particular, mainly minor things, but a few more items that go towards making the perfect conference.

I am sure that many others can add to this….

Thanks!
Aaron

Brett,
For the number of people hitting pubcon, you as always did a rocking job. I can not even imagine pulling it all off with over 2000 people. Since you are the one who started this all, I think we are all best just to thank you for the opportunity to participate and be glad Pubcon is there. The staff also by the way, Engine, and Adam and the rest are world class.

Thanks for the post Mary,
dk

I certainly understand that many of these wishes mean we’d all have to pay more to attend. My perfect conference might require a $10,000 registration fee (and then there might only be 10 people there, which isn’t great for networking.) This is just my wish list for a dream conference.

Thanks for the feedback! And I’ll see you at PubCon next year, Mary

> enticing preregistration discount.

Pubcon started at $699 (was $1499) at door. That’s pretty good ammo to me.

> Quick and easy registration.

Noted Noted Noted. I have been over run with suggestions on this. We are working on an entirely new system.

> self reg

Well, think about “system abuse” and “show security”. Ya have to see an id before letting any one in.

> The venue’s in a big hotel

That can work in a city other than Vegas. Conference session attendance drops by 25% in a Vegas hotel – and preregistration drops by almost 20% by some stats. While at the same time, over all conf attendance can drop by as much as 30%. I will leave the “whys” as an exercise for the reader. So, there are lots of trade offs.

> free wifi in hotel

Ya, that’s going to be tough at almost any hotel in the US. I’ve yet to run into one willing to do that.

> Free wireless internet access in the conference area

We do try to accommodate that. The issue is bandwidth. It is hard for alot of these places to pop up with an extra 1k users and have the bandwidth to burn at any given time.

I’ve studied the internet connections at conference centers around the US (it is a real sore spot with us and convention centers). The average going daily rate for a single hard line 256k connection, runs and average of $600 with a range from $299 to $1199. Vegas is on the high end of that scale. The full set of simple internet connections for our conference in vegas are over $10k (that’s about 10 hard lines). If we got all we wanted, we would be into $25k easily. It is a real racket.

> Power to the people! Electrical outlets would be everywhere

Agreed it would be nice. It is alot like internet though. At an install rate of $75 per outlet, it can get kinda expensive in a hurry. Just to do one room properly can run several thousand very quickly. All that stuff has to go through the electrical unions, and then pass fire marshall tests. The fire codes in convention centers (especially hotels) are some of the toughest fire codes in the entire world.

> Comfortable chairs

Noted. We have no answer for that one. Wish we did. Extra/non standard chair rental can run as much as $30 per day per chair (we used 8000 chairs in Vegas).

> Tables

Tricky, but partially possible. We are going to experiment with it this year (maybe 25% of the room up front).

> Good acoustics and audio equipment.

Yep – we were quite happy with the session rooms, but not crazy about the keynote room (it was just too big).

> Networking opportunities

Yep. We were pretty excited and pleased with all the possibilities this year at Pubcon. Although it was jam backed from start to finish with events and no way anyone could get to all the events, we are going to try to squeeze in even more this year.

bt