One of the things that keeps me from attending many conferences is the inherent lack of participation. Assuming you’re not speaking, you have very little control over the experience. You get what the event organizer says you get.
Sure, you probably get to raise your hand in answer to the “how many people here have an iPhone?” question. And, maybe you stand in line to ask one of the 3 or 4 brilliant questions at the end of each presentation. But, you probably just sketch in your free moleskin, drink your bad Earl Grey tea, and thumb type the twitter-worthy stuff.
At the end of the day, you head to your hotel room and call your significant other and check twitter to see where the people you’ve heard of are heading and when. Then you grab some individually-wrapped food and head to the lobby hoping to catch up with the group before they disappear for the three-hour speaker dinner.
Skip ahead a few hours and you’re at the after party, buying Dimon a drink and yelling at beep to tell him how great his slides were. Maybe the dj cools it a bit and you can hear people talk, but probably not. So, unless you had a friend invite you into the speakers-only thing, you’re taking in the entire event much like you’d take in a webinar. I mean, a webinar wouldn’t let you see Jeff Croft on the dance floor, but you’d have similar influence over the event.
I realize there’s no way to read this and not think I’m complaining, so I’ll say this: go to An Event Apart in December. It really is a brilliant conference, and this one’s in my favorite city. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that I wish there were more options. I wish there were roundtables. Like take the three-hour speaker dinner and screw the rest of the conference.
I guess what I’m trying to say is Vegas has some really good deals lately. That’s all.