Event people putting on events for event people, recipe for disaster or what could go wrong?
The crux of the matter here is the branding, positioning, and marketing around these events.
If you’re a networking event, say so, if you’re a really good one, you won’t need to soon as your delegates will do that job for you.
If you’re putting on an event to share knowledge, educate an audience and deliver real measurable takeaways that will help people the next day, well hell, shout it from the rooftops.
And so on and so forth.
The difficulty comes when people try to cover all the bases and ‘hide’ the profitable part behind a façade of something else.
This, is not cool.
We’re all in business to make money, some of us know it’s a by-product of doing a damn fine job, however, there’s nothing wrong with being honest, your audience is adults, so treat them so.
If you’re an exhibition, networking, B2B show or the like, please don’t think by bunging in a few speaker sessions, panel Q&A or case study presentations (where the people delivering them haven’t been paid for their time let alone their expenses) will fool us.
It’s not big or clever and everyone talks to each other anyone so your reputation might not be what you think/hope it is.
Yes, you’ll continue to flourish as there’s only a few that people clear their diary for anyway, however just think what you could do with all that lovely, time, money and headspace if you stopped focusing on the smoke and mirrors part.
Next time you have your pre-prod meeting, take this quote with you…
“the thing about knowing you’re broken is knowing is not enough to fix it”
John Goode
