blogINDIANA 2008: A Big Success (Well, Except For That Wireless Access Problem)

Sunday I gave two presentations at blogIndiana, a local conference (held at the beautiful Campus Center at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis) that aimed to attract bloggers and others interested in the medium from in and around the Hoosier state. The organizers no doubt exceeded their goal as the event lured just under 200 people, several high profile local sponsors, lots of high quality presenters, and all sorts of media attention.

My first session, Stop Wasting Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Yourself More Efficient, was attended by a room full of bloggers and marketers. Blogger Justin Clupper said he liked the productivity tips I provided, especially my recommendation for saving time by using the free, online meeting scheduling tool, Meeting Wizard. It was a fast-paced 45-minutes delivered with my usual flair, littered with the occasional f-bomb.

My second presentation, Syndication and Web 2.0 Tools, was also well-attended, and seemed to draw the interest of a smaller crowd, many of which—I imagine—may never have thought much about my usual message: content is a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently. I made the case for a more unified approach by setting out examples of how syndication of structured content could benefit users in various situations. I touched briefly on how RSS feeds could be mashed together to form derivative information products and talked for a few minutes about the “content as a service” approach works, using the publish/subscribe model as an example.

I also moderated a lively session about building online communities with high profile Indiana bloggers Bil Browning, Tom Britt, John Ramey, Renee Wilmeth and Steve Dalton.

Twitter Feed The organizers of the blogIndiana event were savvy enough to use services like Twitter to market the event in advance. One Twitter tweet actually “dared” their followers to drop everything and head to a local coffee shop where they would score a free ticket to the event. Kyle Lacy took them up on the offer and was the first to bolt out the door and head over to the coffee shop, where he was rewarded with a complimentary ticket to conference. He then wrote a blog post about the Twitter marketing campaign, promoted several of the presenters, including me, and hyped the event. This is a great use of Twitter. The blogIndiana folks were smart to take advantage of the 140 character microblogging site to spread the message about their conference in such an innovative way. In addition to the pre-event Twitter chatter, they also projected a live Twitter feed on a large screen in the main conference room. It was being updated as participants added Tweets to the conference Tweme.

Overall, the event seemed to get great reviews and I expect they’ll be a blogINDIANA 2009 on the books. I was surprised that the event didn’t take advantage of Confabb.com, the database of conferences that allows conference attendees to rate individual speakers online, which helps the event organizers avoid killing trees and manually tabulating speaker review data (among other things). Of course, in order for attendees to be able to use the blogINDIANA Confabb page, they would have to have internet access, something that, at this event, was spotty, at best.

Improvements I suggest:

Avoid working with any university, if at all possible. Conferences held at universities are seldom of the same quality as those held in privately owned spaces dedicated to serving the needs of conference guests. The IUPUI Campus Center is brand-spanking new (and, flawlessly designed), but as is the case with most new facilities, they have yet to work all the bugs out. Parking sucks, food is less-than-spectacular, and you have to navigate the campus property, which on this day was host to a tri-athalon and some other local activities that created unnecessary and frustrating hurdles for attendees to jump over.
Get a facility that has adequate—and well-tested—wireless access. Take my word for it, there’s nothing worse than attending a blogging event and not being able to blog because the connection to the Internet is flaky. Conference organizers should be able to spend their time schmoozing with guests and coordinating the event, not assisting attendees with obtaining internet access.
Take advantage of online speaker rating system like Confabb.com. You’ll save yourself lots of time, create lots of post-event Google juice (good to promote next year’s event) and you’ll be practicing the concepts many of the speakers at your event preached about.
Move away from the weekend! Conferences usually perform better (financially, and otherwise) when they take place during the work week. There are several reasons for this...folks who can get their bosses to pay for a conference are happy to miss work i order to attend. They aren’t so happy about giving up their weekends. Having an event midweek is best, and allows conference organizers to get better deals with hotels and conference centers who often have more of a challenge booking a Tuesday-Wednesday event, than a Saturday-Sunday (most weddings and family functions occur on the weekend).
Raise the price significantly!. No one believes you can do much with $49 a person—and, the fact is, you can’t. Sure, there are some people who will not be able to afford to attend an event that costs $499, but the quality of the event—and the number of people overall who attend—can be improved with a bigger budget. Aside from that, there’s the issue of perception. Several of my corporate clients said they didn’t plan to attend because at $49, all it would attract are bloggers who blog for a hobby. Perhaps—there were certainly a lot of those type of bloggers present, which is nice, but not really attractive to sponsors. My point is that corporate blogging is also part of the blogging mix and those folks that blog for a living should be courted as well. After all, blogINDIANA sponsors aren’t sponsoring just to be nice. They want to get exposure and reach a relevant group of folks who can afford buy their tools (at least that’s the type of event shareholders expect them to be spending their investment dollars on). Folks who cannot attend a $500 event cannot buy a content management system nor a multi-site blogging platform (the kinds of tools your sponsors are selling). It’s that simple. Growing the event to attract corporate bloggers and folks with bigger budgets is a must. But, you can also find creative ways to get local bloggers who blog for fun involved as well. In fact, if you charge more for the event, you’ll have more revenue and can give away lots of free tickets to individual blgogers who may not be able to afford a full conference access pass.

Again, blogINDIANA was a big success overall and the organizers should be commended for an outstanding first event.

View the event Flickr photostream.

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