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Sue: Welcome to the 5 Minute Skinny, I'm Sue MacKimmie, your host for this edition, where
we talk about event technology and its role in business today. And joining us is Patrick
Cava, Senior Product and Partner Marketing Manager. Welcome Patrick.
Patrick: Thanks Sue.
Sue: We want to talk a little bit about user conferences. Why are they so important today?
Patrick: Well user conferences today can play a major role in organizations in terms of
driving new business, building brand awareness, and maintaining that connection with their
customers that is really vital to continuing the success of their business.
Sue: So it's about engagement and exposure...
Patrick: It is. It's about your customers and driving new awareness among prospects
out there. Launching your products, getting your word out about the organization, and
what you're doing.
Sue: What about whose watching you? Would it be competitors or maybe analysts that are
really interested in user conferences as well?
Patrick: Definitely. User Conferences are highly visible events. So you have your competitors
watching what you're doing -- especially if you're launching new products, new announcements.
And then you have your industry analyst who are watching to see what new trends are happening
in the industry -- so they see what you're doing at your user conference.
Sue: You've got a lot of moving parts. So you have logistics, you have stakeholders.
What are the challenges that event marketers are facing today with user conferences.
Patrick: Well I think you really hit it on the head there with that and your last question.
User conferences are probably one of the most complex events that an organization can put
on. And not only that, but they are highly visible. Not only do you have many stakeholders
involved -- everybody from partners, your internal stakeholders, your attendees, exhibitors,
press and analyst -- you have all these stakeholders and attendee types. Each of them needs to
have their goals met. And then they all have their own needs around the event. And then
you have all the logistics around that as well, things like travel, hotel. If you are
doing a very large user conference you might have a complete city wide buy out. Then of
course, they are highly visible events, both internally among all your executive stakeholders
and across your entire organization, but also externally to analyst and press. So it is
a high stakes event and a lot of difficult challenges to overcome.
Sue: How is it that event technology can really help the event marketer?
Patrick: Well, user conferences are obviously nothing new. They have been around a long
time. But I think the great thing about today's technology is there have been a lot of advancements
in technology that can help the user conference organizer address those logistical challenges
and then also continue to deliver value to your attendees despite increase in scale or
size of your event. So many of these user conferences have grown. You see some user
conferences like your Dreamforces or your OpenWorlds, reaching numbers up to 6,000/7,000
attendees. And so how do you maintain that value for all of your different types of attendees.
Technology out there can really help user conference organizers both overcome the challenges
of a really large scale event and then also continue to deliver that intimate experience
for each attendee that will make sure that they achieve their goals.
Sue: And then with event technology they can do that through all of those digital touch
points where you are gathering a lot of information and data and really finding out about the
personas as well. Is that correct?
Patrick: Yes. You have different management tools that help you overcome all of the logistical
challenges -- like how do you book many hotels at once, how do you keep track of everyone's
travel, and all the payments around the user conference. Then, of course, there are all
of the engagement tools -- how do you deliver the information at the event to all of the
different attendee types during the event. Is it through mobile, is it through HTML,
or a unique event site for that attendee type. And then of course there's all the measurement
around it. How do you measure the success of your user conference and connect that to
the rest of your systems.
Sue: So a lot of information to wrangle and process and provide that to stakeholders as
well.
Patrick: Definitely. Not only are they one of the most complex events that an organization
might hold but they are also one of the largest investments that an organization might make
in terms of events. It is vitally important to have that measurability come out of your
user conference.
Sue: Thanks Patrick. If you want to find out more about user conferences please make sure
you go to www.certain.com and download our white paper of user conferences and also check
out our webinar on user conferences. As always, I'm Sue MacKimmie, Event Specialist for Certain,
as well as your host for the 5 Minute Skinny. Join us again.