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.”

                 

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