COLORADO SPRINGS — Our brilliant Denver freelancer Traci Pearson and I have been onsite this week at The Broadmoor Hotel, producing a daily newsletter for a software user group meeting organized by Karen and Gary Brown, the tireless and effective co-owners of Conferences by Design in Salisbury, MD.
I’ve acquired new respect for the distribution industries whose IT departments form the special interest groups (SIGs) at the heart of the conference. I’ve found out that you don’t have to be a technical writer to distill strong, solid content out of a highly technical conference, as long as you know the subject matter well enough to understand the business objectives and strategies that the software is designed to support.
(At this point, I can imagine our son Adrian, who covered part of a major IT conference for us in 2008, rolling his eyes and grinning. When I get home, I’ll have to show him the published proof that I understand the world of sockets and cores, processors and chipsets. Or, at least, that I’ve visited that world and found my way back.)
But I also learned, once again, that the best value we can offer our clients and their participants might result from a chance encounter that no one foresaw when their conference first went onsite. When that kind of opportunity knocks, it’s a good idea to answer.
I was on deadline for our second edition Wednesday afternoon when I was approached by a team of videographers who had just arrived onsite. They’d been called in to record selected sessions and interview participants on behalf of one of the conference sponsors. The sponsor was sharing the raw footage with the organizers, and everyone thought it would be a great idea to coordinate efforts with the newsletter.
I had a few opinions on the matter, because we’ve been thinking long and hard about how to integrate conference text and video online. Our senior account manager, Andrew Horsfield, was the first to point out that commercial news organizations have the format that should be the future of conference content: Whether it’s CNN, the CBC, or The Huffington Post, news sites are finding different ways to combine video clips with written news capsules. It means that any site visitor can find the format and level of detail they need, when and where they need it.
There were just a couple of problems. We’d been hired to produce a print newsletter, with online versions posted as PDFs, not Web text. And the video will be coming in verbatim—which is just fine, if we think site visitors will have time and patience to sit through a series of 60- or 75-minute recordings.
But the mix of raw material in text and video form opens up a tantalizing possibility. By producing shorter summary content from individual sessions in both formats, organizers of this or any other conference can lay the foundation for an online community of interest, by posting up-to-date knowledge that was important enough to be included in the conference program. The audience online could be two, five, 10, or 100 times the size of the participant group onsite. And by pulling in fresh content from other events through the year, organizers can build a loyal audience of repeat subscribers—who will still be there when it’s time to begin marketing next year’s face-to-face meeting.
I’m hoping Karen and Gary will take some time off before they begin considering whether a post-conference content site is the right option for this group. But it was exciting to see an unplanned, unexpected conversation mushroom into an opportunity that could transform their client’s presence online.