It's About the People, Stupid

Back when I was wading through the underbelly of the conference business, I had the opportunity to meet so many different individuals from walks of life generally foreign to the likes of people like me. These people were all supporters of the actual events we attended - from the sales people to the support staff, an entire ecosystem exists.

One of the more interesting finds - though not entirely surprising - was the belief that the content was the driving force behind attendance. In some circles, this stripped down even further into direct “buyer-seller” events where people literally did the speed dating thing to find sales and opportunities - but I digress. My point then, and still now, is that conferences are more about the contacts than the content. By my gross estimation, I peg it at an 80-20 split (good round numbers).

It’s referred to as many different things: the hallway track, the backchannel, or, if you like the old-fashioned lingo, “networking”. Kathy Sierra today makes a wonderful post regarding this very phenomena:

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y'all are building, we now have more far-flung friends--including people we've never met f2f--than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Source: Creating Passionate Users, “Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video…”

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