Updated June 17, 2010
Conferences have not changed their formats much in the last 20 years, they are still mostly about one-way communication: a guy telling you his views on things and showing you slides about it. Your role as a delegate is to sit still, perhaps take some notes and hope that the speaker will tell you something you don’t know already.
These types of events are inefficient if the goal is to to communicate, inspire and create real learning. And it is out of synch with all the other evolving forms of media in the internet age, where it is about two-way communication and the users are active participants in creating experiences together with the publishers.

Advice to all types of conferences and seminars

Do’s

1. Look for a mix of well-known speakers that draw crowds, and unknown but brilliant minds that can surprise people and give them unexpected insights.
2. In the agenda, describe the speakers in terms of what they have accomplished and what they are actually doing now, not just by their business titles. Also use descriptive and catchy session headlines and describe what each session is about and who it is for.
3. Put the audience as close as possible to the stage in order to facilitate two-way communication.
4. Be fanatic about keeping the time schedule. First of all, don’t delay the start because there are many people still arriving at the door on the official starting time. Start on the official time, exactly!
   This is paying respect to all the people that made the effort to be there in time, instead of letting the latecomers make everybody suffer.
   Start buzzing the crowd 15 minutes before the start, then every 5 minutes and then start on the second. Have a big countdown clock or a “traffic light” for the speakers showing green during their speech, yellow when it is 60 seconds left and red when their time is out. And when their time is out, have the moderator step in and make a short summary and then get them off the stage immediately! Letting speakers run over is an insult to both the other speakers and the audience.
5. Play energetic walk-in and walk-out music before/after every break. It sets a good mood, creates energy and is a powerful signal that the next program is starting.
6. Use big name badges where the names can be easily read from 2 meters away in low light conditions. Put a photo of the attendee on the badge if you want increased security. Use a neck string that is attached to both outer sides of the badge so that it does not flip around and displyas it backside.
   It is also very good to do like the TED conferences and add conversation starters on the badge; “Talk to me about:” followed by their interests that you ask them to fill out during the registration.
   If it is an international event, put large national flags in colour on the badges so that you also can see the nationality of the delegate.
7. Don’t waste time of reading a thank-you list of sponsors, speakers and volunteers. Instead make a slide presentation of them and run it in a loop 10 minutes before and after the event. (See Seth Godin’s post about this.)
8. Try to mix on-stage discussions/conversations and fewer stand-alone speakers. Mix short and long talks, but don’t allow any speaker to use more than 30 minutes. The shorter the better! This is the biggest success factor of the TED conference, their talks are between 3 and 18 minutes!
   Also, be sure to show a lot of visuals during the panels, for example the web sites that are being discussed. This can for example be done by having a small wireless laptop connected to the big screeen and pass it around the panel members as they talk.
9. Display the name and organisation of the speaker. Either on the main screen at the start of the talk or use a separate screen for this so that it can stay on during the whole talk. The audience want sto know who is talking, and people come and go so the name should be displayed all the time.
10. The time flow is crucial:
    - Avoid switching computers on stage.
    - Have quick runners that hands out the microphone to the audience during Q&As.
11. Encourage questions from the audience, but only allow one, very short question per person at a time. Cut off people that are blabbing away or posing more than one question.
12. Invite a couple of interesting thinkers in the audience to prepare some interesting thoughts in advance and let the moderator do a short (5 minutes) interview with them standing in the audience. This is an easy way to create variation in the program and introduce more interesting thoughts in a time-efficient way.
13. Videotape and/or write a blog from all the speeches and put them on the conference web site with a searchable index of content.

Don’ts

1. Don’t allow the audience to ask more than one question at the time. Neither the speaker nor the audience can remember two questions!
2. Don’t allow the audience to pose long-winding comments or questions that are more about presenting themselves. This steals the show from everyone else.
3. Don’t allow one person to pose more than two questions per session.
4. Don’t use badges on a long string to hang around the neck. They hang too low, often flip over to show the backside and they are sometimes hidden under the jacket, (if you must use them, print the name on both sides).

Conferences 1.0

Most conferences today are organized like this:

1. The web site is used only to display the program and sign up the attendees.
2. There is no list of attendees on the web site, so you cannot research and connect with interesting people prior to the conference.
3. As soon as the conference starts, the web site is dead.
4. In better 1.0 conferences the web site links to the presenter’s slide shows a week or two after the conference, but that is too late for most attendees.
5. There are no speaker videos on the web site, due to fear that videos will make people want to enjoy them at home instead of paying to be at the conference. (Actually it works the other way around, for example the  TED conference attracted many more people to pay $6.000 to attend when they dared to oppose this wisdom and started publishing all their talks online for free, see this amazing talk about it by the TED executive Producer June Cohen)
6. They drag on for 2 days with a dinner or a drinks “party” sponsored by a tech company that you barely know about and where the delegates hang out with their friends.
7. They are all about 45-minute long key-notes, with speakers presenting to the audience. Top-down communication with no participation from the audience other than the usual awkward, longwinding questions from attendees that want to show off themselves.
8. The events are big, with thousands of attendees, making it very hard to make contact with new people.

Conferences 2.0

My vision of conferences that are more engaging and immersive for both the delegates and the speakers:

1. Strive for small conferences, 100 – 250 people. Smaller is usually more productive. (But once per year or so it could be nice to attend a really big event with more focus on relaxing and re-charging and networking.)
2. The conference web site is the central collection place both before, during and after the conference for inspiring information, links to the speaker sites, blogs, back channels etc.
3. Encourage business networking among the delegates prior to and during the conference. For example, have a delegate list on the conference web site where you can search for names, companies, types of business, nationalities and perhaps also list what people offer and what they seek.
4. Use online tools to let the attendees present themselves and their interests and search for other people to meet at the conference.
5. Concentrate the conference to one day and evening (or afternoon + evening) where everything is designed to catalyze business networking.
6. Have multiple screens around the stage and the lobby outside, showing the talks as well as the back channels.
7. Use small round tables in the auditorium, to enable conversations. Put numbered flags on the tables and arrange the tables in a logical order so you realize where in the room the table is located. So that it is easy to book meetings at a certain table.
8. Make people rotate between the tables during every break, so that you meet new people.
9. Put big signs with discussion themes on the lunch tables, to encourage constructive lunch discussions.
10. Have a big screen showing the agenda with the current session highlighted.
11. Display short teaser loops running before each talk; Coming up: name, subject, background, interesting fact etc.
12. Engage a live blogger that writes notes during all the talks with all names and links etc in a stream displayed to the audience in the room and online. Communicate that people can copy this to their notes. Or use a wiki that everybody can produce live, (crowd-sourced note taking!).
13. Provide electrical outlets near as many seats as possible.
14. Provide free wireless internet all over the conference area with capacity for everybody.
15. Use back channels (e.g. Twitter) that enables both the audience in the hall and the internet visitors in the outside world share their questions and comments. Let the backstage people extract the best questions and send them immediately to the moderators laptop (or iPad) using an IM client. These questions are often better than the questions from the audience in the room, since it is easier to formulate in writing than standing up with a microphone.
16. Broadcast everything that happens during the conference  live on the web site, including all the speaker videos, since:
    a) it will inspire many more to come the next time to experience the immersive networking and participation of the physical event.
    b) it is a useful tool for the delegates to use when they summarize and report back their experiences after the event.
    c) It increases the value for the sponsors.
17. Have mostly moderated discussions on stage with one or several speakers and show many concrete examples of what is being discussed.
18. Mix short and long talks, but don’t allow any speaker to use more than 30 minutes.
19. Encourage the attendees to blog during the conference, and put links to all the blogs on the conference web site.

See also my post on “Presentation skills Do’s and Don’ts“.

I recommend reading Seth Godin’s blog post “The new standard for meetings and conferences“.
Excerpt: “Here’s what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.
And here’s what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.”

                 

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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The LeWeb3 was one of the most professionally produced conferences I have attended in several ways.
The video projection was the best I have ever seen and the audio quality was top notch with very engaging musical intros.
I also liked the schedule with lots of time for networking in the coffe and lunch breaks. The lunch offering was a totally staggering buffet of french gourmet cuisine at it best. A two hour lunch break with hundreds of small dishes makes it easy to relax and network!

Loic LeMeur and his wife Geraldine, organizers of LeWeb3

Most of the speakers were very inspiring and I liked the mix of key notes and panel discussions. But the conference format was still 1.0, (OK, more like 1.4) it is now time at least for internet conferences to live like they preach and move to 2.0! (See my separate blog about this.)

Some of my notes from LeWeb3:

Hans Rosling
his presentations at TED have made him world famous, don’t miss them!
“Storytelling works! There are 10 000 watchers for every clicker”
“Just putting facts on the internet does not work, storytelling does!”

Panel: The Internet’s impact on design
This was a somewhat confused panel discussion, as it consisted of very different types of peope that did not know anything about each other.
Rafi Haladjan, the creator of the smart online rabbit Nabaztag (rabbit in Armenian). This rabbit is much more interesting than it looks, since it is a good example of an important trend: EVERYTHING will be internet-connected, not just computers and mobiles. The moderator missed this trend and Rafi should have demoed the rabbit. (I have just ordered one to get the feeling)

Panel: Monetization in the Web 2.0 world
A trio of entrereneurs presented their models, it showed just how difficult it is to come up with ways to earn real revenue.
A successful blogger mentioned that he made $25 last month from Adsense ads on his blog…
Another entrepreneur reported having bought a Facebook ad campaign with 1 million impressions that generated just 3 (three) clicks.
My conclusion: Nobody knows what will be the keys to monetization, but ads as the only revenue model is not working now and probably not in the future either, as the competition for ad dollars increase tremendously.

Panel: making things personal: investing
Morten Lund, Danish entrepreneur and investor
“I believe in revenue and profit” (applause from the audience).
“I don’t invest in porn and entrepreneurs that are assholes”
“I go for stupid things that make real money online like nails, eye glasses, socks”

Another investor gave the tip: “Don’t invest in companies selling to big companies, since big companies never buy anything! They have like 18 month selling cycles…”

Why Enterprise 2.0… isn’t
JP Rangaswami from British Telecom Design was very inspiring:
” I don’t worry about Google’s policy of letting their employees use 20% of their time for their own projects.
I worry about the other 80%! Why do they still have the punch-clock thinking?
At my office, we focus on the output rather than the input!. What do I care when or where my people are doing their work?”

Evolving entrepreneurship
Martin Varsavsky came on stage with the message that there are indeed investement opportunities also in Europe, and that our 22 languages can be turned into something good. He also mentioned that 17% of Googles total revenue comes from the UK market alone!
His blog is a must fo everyone interested in internet-related entreprenership and international business.

The Future of TV
This is my own favourite topic, excellently moderated by Jeff Pulver, http://pulver.com/ a very energetic and typical American (Hawaii shirt and all)
“TV got the idea of Web 2.0 first and they have corrupted it! Using audience phone-ins and user-generated content such as American Idol…”
Also in the panel was the experienced blogger Robert Scoble, his videoblog at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/

Other interesting video services that were mentioned:
Asterpix, a new, highly interesting video site reviving the old concept of “Hypervideo”, (interactive video). There are clickable areas in the video that lead to notes and links. You can also see annotations in a list and use them to navigate inside a video clip. Very smart!
http://www.blogtv.com/
http://www.kyte.tv/
http://dotsub.com/

Janus Friis
(co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost) made one his his rare appearances. Being an unusually shy Dane, he gave an inspiring, laid back and personal tale of the serendipity of his entreprenurship, from Kazaa to Skype to Skype. He and Niclas have disrupted the music industrcy and the telephony industry and they are now re-inventing television, not a bad feat! See also his blog

Also interesting is the fact that they have invented nothing new, they “just” saw that nobody was using the existing technologies to make really simple solutions and then market them. When Skype was launched, it had been possible for years to talk via MSN chat, but Microsoft had not realized that this possibility could be used to replace telephony.
But Joost is a more complex service, since it depends on offering good content and therefore deals with hundreds of programme rights holders around the world. But the biggest obstacle to overcome before Joost is a Skype-like success will probably be to make people more active in their viewing habits. Coach-potatoes are more common today than the stats show, even among the young!

Also, there is a link missing that can enable us to watch Joost on our big-screen TV in company of our friends and relatives. I see two ways for this:
1. come up with a simple Joost set-top box that connects to the TV (or have Apple integrate Joost in a smarter Apple TV model)
2. Integrate Joost into the digital cable TV offering from the triple-play operators.

The only mishap at LeWeb3 was the strange ending. The last two sesssions was somewhat disconnected from the conference topic and the speakers suddenly found themselves alone on the stage. One of the speakers that I wanted to hear, (David Weinberger) was inexplicably dropped from appearing on stage. All this caused the energy in the room to drop at the end and people left the conference with a feeling of anti-climax.
A grande finale session with uplifting foresights into the future was sorely missed!

                 

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Yesterday I moderated the Hubbub ’07 conference in Stockholm, a very energizing experience. The organizers, young college students from Singapore, studying in Sweden in the Nustart programme, impressed me much with their talent and energy. They managed to gather a very interesting mix of speakers, ranging from young startup entrepreneurs with interesting internet services to experienced high-profile serial entrepreneurs like Hjalmar Winblad.

Hjalmar gave a very interesting view of how the telcos worldwide are milking us all for 700 Billion USD for simple stuff like voice and SMS services, and encouraged us to use our consumer power to break their strong-hold by using IP-telephony such as his own Rebtel etc.

We used a very effient communication system during Hubbub that I think should be used at more conferences: on the Hubbub Live site there were backchannels for everybody in the audience and around the world to use during the conference. Jaiku for commenting and asking questions, Flickr group for posting pics etc.

The backstage group of students edited the video feeds and fed me the most interesting qustions coming in via Jaiku to my laptop (through Skype). So I got great questions and feedback up on the stage and did not have to read through the whole Jaiku channel, very efficient!

I found that the questions posted to Jaiku (from both the audience in the room and elsewhere) where often better than the verbal question from the audience. When you have to stand up in front of a crowd and ask a question into a microphone it is not easy to formulate a clear, short question. So this system is smart for both the audience and me as a moderator.

                 

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I am moderating a fun conference on Saturday, Hubbub 2007. The theme time is about Convergence on the Fixed to Mobile landscape (FMC). You can register here for the conference. It is free of charge and promises to be fun-filled & educative. The event is on Saturday 24th November at KTH Nymble from 13:00 – 17:00.

Psst, there are some surprises lined up for those coming in on Saturday. Read through the website & you will have a hint!

Follow the event live from wherever you are by clicking here

Have a good evening!

                 

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Updated June 17, 2010

I have collected these tips from attending numerous events and conferences, for example:
The Future of Web Apps in London.
Beyond the Printed Word in Dublin
SIME, Disruptive Media and Hubbub in Stockholm
LeWeb3 and LeWeb08 in Paris
Moving Images Malmö
Rework the World in Tällberg

The first two had a conventional setup with a moderator who introduced the speakers, and then let the speakers talk for 20-40 minutes, most of them using Powerpoint to illustrate their talks. I found that the majority of the speakers had interesting things to communicate, but the way they performed their presentation effectively eliminated most of the value for me in the audience.

SIME used a different method, relying on a moderator that held discussions with 1-4 invited speakers on stage. I find this approach much better, as it tends to focus on the issues and not on the speakers and the history of their companies etc. But it of course puts a lot of responsibility on the moderator who must be able to distill the value out of each speaker, but Ola Ahlvarson did a great job of this at SIME. The only thing I missed was visuals, displaying the websites etc as they are discussed. Using a combination of voice, pictures, video and text is always preferrable.

Since so many conferences suffer from these problems I felt that I must share my thoughts on how to hone your presentation skills. Comments are welcome, please help me add to this list!

The importance of presentation skills
It is very sad that so many influential, bright minded presenters with a deep expertise in their fields lose their audiences due to their poor presentation skills. It is also about respect for the audience. People pay a lot of money and travel from far away to attend conferences, so their time should not be wasted. Both the organizers and the presenters need to do everything they can to add value to the audience, so here are some useful tips.

For the professional speaker

Do’s

1. Think carefully before the event: what does this audience want to hear?
2. Hint: they are not interested in hearing how great you or your company are, they want to learn new things that can make THEM more successful.
3. Find a story about people (yourself and/or others) that illustrates your message and tell it with passion.
   Storytelling always beats lectures!
   
4. Start by urging the audience not to take notes, say that you will post your presentation online immediately afterwards. The presentation that you post should be complemented by short texts, speaker notes describing your pictures (since you show very little text during your presentation!)
5. Keep an eye contact with the audience, and move around the stage, don’t hold on to the speaker stand! Use a remote clicker to control your presentation. Remember that 70% of your communication is in your body language!
6. Speak slowly to increase the understanding and respect for what you are saying. Never try to cram a 30 minute speech into a 20 minute time slot!
7. Be visual, use pictures and videos that illustrate your points. Read my lips: less text, more visuals! You can do great presentations without any visuals,  but then you have to me a master storyteller.
8. Avoid monotony by using variation and surprises in your slide styles during your presentation.
9. Engage the audience! Ask questions and have them put their hands up. But don’t insult them with silly game play.
10. Focus on 1, 2 or maybe 3 things that you want to talk about. Explain the problem you are working with and then tell the story and visualise the solution.
11. Construct your presentation based on the classic drama: Start with a Set-up, then Present the problem(s), then proceed to the Confrontation and finally the Resolution. This has worked for thousands of years!
12. Hire a speaker coach that helps you trim you body language and voice.
13. Use a spell checker on all your slides. Takes only a minute, improves your image.
14. Use a dark background on your slides, as it is easier to read for the audience and better for video cameras.
15. If you present in another language than your native, consult a language tutor to improve your pronuncation as much as possible. Getting your message out is about being understood and respected.
16. Test your presentation on other people beforehand and videotape yourself. Listen to their feedback and watch yourself: would you understand and appreciate your presentation?
17. End by showing a slide with your contact details and the link to your documentation on your blog or on an internet service like Slideshare. This documentation should NOT just be your slides from the presentation! Instead post special slides with your highlights explained with relevant post-analysis for the audience. Make sure that all the links to web sites that you have mentioned are active.

Don’ts

1. Don’t read word by word from your script. You will sound like a robot and miss the all-important eye contact with the audience. Instead use stiff cue cards with key words and starter sentences.
2. Don’t talk too fast and try to cram a 45-minute presentation into a 30-minute time slot by speaking at machine gun pace. You might just as well stay at home.
3. Don’t read from text bullets in Powerpoint. If you have to use text bullets, keep them very short and very few per slide, then first let the audience read it and then, on your own words, expand on the subject.
4. Don’t use complete sentences in your slides. Your voice shall tell the story and the slides shall only support it.
5. Don’t start talking immediately on top of your slides. Let the audience interpret the slide for a while, then add your comments.
6. Don’t use hard-to-read fonts or garish backgrounds that obscures the text.
7. Don’t use cute or unusual photos that are not illustrating exactly what you are talking about. It distracts the audience, nobody will hear what you are saying.
8. Don’t use effects, such as texts that fly into the slide or ANY other disturbing transitions. You’re not running an amusement park, the interesting stuff should be in your content, not in your fireworks.
9. Don’t waste you audience’s time by presenting the history and organization of your organisation. Unless it is essential in order to understand your presentation, which is very seldom.
10. Don’t mention tips like “be sure to check out the website www.fancynewstuff.com, it has great features” without displaying a slide with both a picture of the web site and the URL in big letters + a note stating that the URL will be in your posted presentation.
11. Don’t hide behind the computer or speaker stand. Make sure the audience sees you and maintain eye contact with them.

See also my post “Time for Conferences 2.0“.
I also recommend the presentation: Death by Powerpoint, it is useful!

                 

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Next week I am attending an interesting conference in London: FOWA The Future of Web Apps.

For me, web apps have quickly become a standard tool for most of my work the last two years, and I strongly believe that this is only the beginning.

After having used Google Docs, (I started with Writely long before they were acquired by Google), Remember the Milk (superior to-do list manager), Netvibes, and now lately Stixy (promising Swedish start-up, bulletin board online) I can no longer imagine going back to using local apps and local files.
Why?
- No more application updates
- No viruses in the files
- No backup problems
- No shuffling files with USB sticks
- No wondering “Is this the latest version of this file, or has my colleague changed anything?
- No more agony about having accidentally erased an important part of a document

and, most important:
- totally awesome for group work since several users can edit a document simultaneously
- easy to add or remove users with access to my documents

So I am surprised that not more people have realized this and started to use for example Google Docs. Today the also added presentations, so now you can do word processing, spreadsheets and slide presentations in the same web app, and export the files to Word, Excel or PowerPoint if you need.

But my hope is that The Future of Web Apps will be about the next step, there are many big opportunities in this area!

                 

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I have written before that I think radio has a great future, since it is now available in many more flexible forms than just tuning in to the airwaves. We no longer have to follow time tables and dial between stations, and radio is easy to consume while doing other things, such as commuting, jogging etc.

This summer I have downloaded a lot of podcasts to my Nokia N95 smartphone. It has a very easy to use podcasting application that lets me search for and download both audio and video podcasts using the 3G network.
But I strongly feel that podcasts could become much more appealing if the existing technology was used more creatively;

The big drawback with podcasts compared to text is that you have to play through the clip to know if it is interesting. You cannot just glance at it and then go someplace else if it bores you.
I can browse through 60-second clips on YouTube if I feel like killing some time. But I mostly find it boring to listen to or watch a 5 minute segment anywhere, unless I know it is about something of key interest to me.

What is the difference between a regular radio and a mobile phone with radio capabilities or and MP3 player? The display! So why not use it?

I get lists of podcasts from different publishers. They are mostly named just with a date and show name. No hint on content, participants or who the publisher is.

I want:

1. Text information for every media file: Headlines, who is participating, when was it published? Also there should always be a description of the publisher.
2. Tags describing the clip content, with interactive tag clouds.
3. A clickable text menu listing the program “chapters”, so that I can jump directly to for example the news item I want.

And why are so many video podcast shows just a talking head? What”™s the point? It just adds megabytes of useless video to my downloads and looks like television did in its infancy! If the resources for producing a professional video program are not available it is way better to work with audio and texts/still pictures.

And please, standardize file formats and controls. Now I get error messages like “This file type is not playable on this device”, but often they still work. Other times I download a huge clip and then find that it fore some unexplained reason will not play at all.
And the controls are different depending on what media player I happen to be using. Imagine if the pedals and steering wheels did not work the same in all cars!

                 

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