Enable live chat so attendees can talk to each other during the conference sessions
< PREVIOUS | NEXT >There are two types of people who go to corporate events. The dry sponges that want to soak up all the information sitting through every single conference session. And then there are the people who think they’ll see something new, but they’re pretty savvy about the industry anyway and don’t expect to get any great value out of the conference sessions. Instead, they see the greatest value from just networking. These people have taken on the role of a new kind of attendee, the lobbyconner. Lobbyconners “attend” conferences by just hanging out in the lobby. Their style of attendance doesn’t require them to sign up and actually pay for the event, yet they still achieve their conference-going goals by just pressing flesh with attendees. For those of us who live in San Francisco and are deluged by endless conferences, a lobbycon mentality can save thousands in attendance fees.
People at the conference and not at the conference love to chat about what they like and don’t like about the speakers at the session. Everyone wants to throw in their two cents and sadly the five minutes left for questioning at the end of the session is not enough time to get all your questions asked and answered. Many attendees relegate their online chats to instant messaging (IM). Offer an alternative. Instead of IM, place a live chat on your Web site or blog. If you’re really bold, open up the conversation for everyone to see by projecting the live chat on the wall next to the speaker as he or she is talking. This is highly recommended as it allows for more content during speaker sessions. And if the session gets dull the moderator can always turn to the chat session to find audience questions. But you should never run into that problem if you’ve read my article, “More Schmooze, Less Snooze: How to Deliver ‘The Most Talked About’ Conference Session”.
As a warning, when you make chats public, you’ll need a moderator to pre-approve chat messages before they go live. There are many applications that will allow you to post chat to your Web site. Possible tools are Coffee Cup Live Chat, Meebo, Geesee, and here’s an endless list of more options.
