Kate Chambers, portfolio director at Clarion Events, challenges the traditional notion of the industry conference – and what happens next.
I HAVE spent almost 20 years of my career planning and organising events for numerous industry sectors around the globe only to come to the devastating conclusion that conferences are dead.
Well, at least in the format we have been producing them over the past decades. So, now I am preparing myself to spend the rest of my career trying to work out how to try something new.
There was a time when we were all sure how conferences were supposed to work: your team wrote up a conference agenda based on your perception of trending topics within the industry, you invite leading personalities from the industry to give their view and interpretation and then lock your delegates into an auditorium to listen – and perhaps ask a couple of questions after the session. The format prioritises the speaker above the delegate, content above consumer.
Digital disruption is hitting us This world is broken and it is terminal. Like so many other trades, from print publishing to music, the conference industry is feeling the disruptive impact of digital. In the new world, people expect to consume information in a similar fashion to their online experience. They want to be able to quickly and effortlessly identify relevant content. They want to decide what is relevant for them based on efficient browsing and searching and social recommendations.
To put it in simple terms, we the consumers want to be in the driving seat. The wealth of information and access points to it has made us rather impatient and more demanding. The way we’ve learned has changed as a result of this. Clarion recently commissioned a large research project on this issue and we found that conference delegates these days rate peer-to-peer learning above lectures by experts. This, of course, is the result of the disruption caused by the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter generation. And it is here to stay.
Our research shows that networking is still the main objective for many conference attendees – 75 per cent of respondents said so - but the vast majority also said that they wanted more than just catching up with industry friends. In fact, 70 per cent of our GiGse audience this year selected learning and keeping up-to-date with industry trends as their key reason to attend. So, how do we meet this new challenge? How do we change traditional conferences into a place that better reflects the way people interact and learn in a digital age? How can we create a face-to-face format that replaces old-fashioned linear learning with an interactive, personalised and relevant experience? I want to be totally honest and say that I don’t know the answer to this. What I do know and feel passionate about is the fact that we have to try new things.
Read the full article in the latest issue of iNTERGAMINGi
