I couldn't agree more. Conferences just refuse to learn, even technology ones, which is emberassing.

I saw a cool preso on slide share about influence, and you're right, it's about who trust, and who we know, not what lame ploy an organizer pulls, that simply wastes money, that could be spent making the event better.

Events seem to rely more on "You came last time, you should come again" rather than actually making the event worth the money.

Sad, but good for us :)

now, of course i have a lot of vested interest in this conversation. however, let me just say that –

conference telemarketing is dead. conference email marketing is very-soon-to-be dead. it comes down to this — in a flat media world with infinite messages, the ONLY successful marketing is the message that is wanted, expected, and valuable.

more so than in any time in history, the average person is highly skilled at ignoring a marketing message from a biased party. we look to trusted sources recommendations and data about purchases. of course, conferences know this model well — their business is largely based on being a trusted "validator" of the vendors (sponsors) in an industry to the buyers that attend their shows.

this same approach must be used by the conferences themselves to market to potential attendees. it's the same stuff with different language — attendees call their "trusted sources" "friends" or "contacts". what is needed is a new class of tools that use the web's knowledge of "friends" & "contacts" to encourage, incent, and measure trusted recommendations for conferences.

i have this crazy hypothesis that the social web is opening a whole new way to get people to conferences. and it's going to be way more about getting a message from someone i trust than from some random dude from india.

sorry about the monologue — you just hit on something i happen to have been thinking about recently :)

now, of course i have a lot of vested interest in this conversation. however, let me just say that –

conference telemarketing is dead. conference email marketing is very-soon-to-be dead. it comes down to this — in a flat media world with infinite messages, the ONLY successful marketing is the message that is wanted, expected, and valuable.

more so than in any time in history, the average person is highly skilled at ignoring a marketing message from a biased party. we look to trusted sources for recommendations and data about purchases. of course, conferences know this model well — their business is largely based on being a trusted "validator" of the vendors (sponsors) in an industry to the buyers that attend their shows.

this same approach must be used by the conferences themselves to market to potential attendees. it's the same stuff with different language — attendees call their "trusted sources" "friends" or "contacts". what is needed is a new class of tools that use the web's knowledge of "friends" & "contacts" to encourage, incent, and measure trusted recommendations for conferences.

i have this crazy hypothesis that the social web is opening a whole new way to get people to conferences. and it's going to be way more about getting a message from someone i trust than from some random dude from india.

sorry about the monologue — you just hit on something i happen to have been thinking about recently :)