Little waster wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:21 pm
Squeak wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 1:34 pm
I've just received an email regretfully informing me that the international conference I am supposed to have a poster at will have to be held online, due to covid. It's in April.
I can only admire the, umm, optimism of the organisers in delaying the decision this long.
I might have mentioned previously but I changed my role in Nov 2019 to one which involved a lot of conference attendence as a sponsor/vendor; spent most of November, January and February jet-setting, got back in March fancying a little time at home and I've barely left the house since
Anyway we've spent a lot of time looking at virtual conferences but it looks like a Catch-22 for the organisers; a virtual conference doesn't have the appeal of a meatspace conference so attendence is down so the only way they can cover their overheads is to maintain the existing conference prices for a far-inferior experience further reducing attendence making them a non-starter for us.
In the end we've spent the money saved on producing our own webinars, SEO, PPC, MQL and the all the other three-letter acronym digital marketing dark arts with a lot more impact.
Last weekend, the BBC "
Click" show reviewed the virtual "
Consumer Electronics Show" which is one of the electronic industry's big showcase events and even people supposedly as tech savvy as them produced something resembling the sort of
electronic Argos catalogue* you would have accessed on your dial-up internet connection in the late 90s. Bit of a step down from Vegas.
*the paid-for version is no better, the only difference is you can click on the exhibitors' squares (browsing for one is a PITA as it is merely gives you the logo and name) and it just brings up a short blurb about the company and a link to the website, you be better off JFGI.
I was extremely impressed with the (free) online SAS* UK conference last year. Slightly different from some conferences in that it's always free anyway and is run by SAS for their users. I've never actually been to the physical one but it being virtual last year made it easier for me to attend. The interface was a move-through-able 2 storey building laid out as a typical small conference might be. A welcome desk where you could access timetables, map of the venue, etc. A room for sponsors with individual stands where you could either just go to standard info pages, or could live message with the sponsors. An area with some other interactive stuff, I can't recall exactly what now. And up the stairs to the presentations themselves where you could select from whatever was live at that moment, and watch live.
I also "attended" the virtual "Data London" exhibition/conference thingummy a few weeks earlier. The interface was less swish but easy to navigate, they had some good speakers, including Hannah Fry, and the interaction with the presenters was well done.
But I do wonder how well any of the sponsors did out of either event. In the Data for London event, you really would have had to go out of your way to find the info on them. The SAS one did that better, with a visible room that tempted you to go and explore, but I wonder how many people bothered to talk to them. I don't often get to go to conferences but when I do, unless I have a specific mission to find out more about something, I tend only to talk to the sponsors in idle moments, between talks, etc. When you're at home, idle moments between talks can be filled by so many other things, you're just not going to bother to talk to them unless you really want to. But then, do they end up with fewer conversations, but still the same number of quality leads, as the mostly useless idle chatterers are excluded, or do they end up with far fewer quality leads as well, as people just don't bother at all?
*Stats software, not airline, military organisation, or any other entity going by the same initials