Anyway, great post! Thanks, John (co-chair, BlogTalk 2008).

A little while back I posted on conferences using web 2.0 tools to bring user generated content to the homepage eg. a communal Twitter account, a Flickr tag, a Technorati tag…one conference brought all this together in a groupstream (as opposed …

Something I’ve started doing recently is to post my slides slightly in advance to slideshare.net, and reference that fact from the very first slide of the live presentation - so people can hop to it for thmeselves. Has worked beautifully so far - hiccups on slideshare.net not withstanding.

All great points though Stuart - it’s a brave new world, and the more ways to engage the live and in-person audience, the “shadow” (virtual) live audience, and the Long Tail, I’m all for it. Not much point in talking if only a handful of people hear the message!

I’m getting a nice extra Long Tail on my presentations - a presentation I gave live to 25 people has now been seen by over 1100 on slideshare.net. That’s a nice magnification.

Some thoughts out of my personal experience:

Organizers may fear their event becomes less important because people can read everything in the web (”bloggers give away my conference for nothing”):

a) half of an event’s value is the knowledge the attendees gain - the other half is the live networking they enjoy
b) live bloggers not only write on the presentations and the facts - they write on the atmosphere / ambience and the networking, too
So live blogging adds more value and more “want to be there” feeling to your event. Same arguments applies for presenters respectively.

Presenters fear their slides being publicly available for competitors:

So why are you presenting them anyway? If you have secrets, keep them secret. Because your competitor may be in the audience just as a “normal” attendee.

Presenters should comment live posts:

Use a blog search (i.e. Google, Ask.com, Yahoo) and social tagging services (i.e. del.icio.us) to find and identify post on your presentation (like you already suggested). Read them and comment on them. Don’t blame the blogger for having misunderstood your presentation. Give him and all the blogger’s audience the correct information. Ask for feedback on what you could do to avoid future misunderstandings. Write on additional aspects that you couldn’t cover at the event (i.e. lack of time or focus). Provide links to downloads and Slideshare.net (where you uploaded your presentation a day before the event).

Advice for organizers on blogging infrastructure:

- Live bloggers sooner or later desperately need a power outlet with extension cables right into the audience.
- WiFi is essential but in case of security concerns (i.e. event takes place within a company’s venuew) direct connection with ethernet cables to routers could suffice (provide long cables!). More and more bloggers take a real bunch of pictures and have a camcorder. So be sure there is stable and broadband connection.
- Live bloggers often have a camera but no high-end camera. So provide them seatings near the stage (and think of good illumination, too).
- Live bloggers and as well as journalists appreciate having some kind of a lounge where they can interview presenters, the organizer or some people from the audience without being disturbed. If you have a get-together after the formal event: Keep the lounge open. Remember the other infrastructure.

Speaker bureaus I cannot help with as I don;t use them and generally do the big events for expenses and treat it as marketing, although that may change. However that may change, but fees such as $80K seem to be wrong. My experience is that speakers from those environments are delivering a standard performance and are unlikely to be interested in feedback.

Not sure on the twitter point (I have tried an equivalent), presentation is a performance, especially a keynote and you read the audience directly in effect starting to create a symbiosis of non-verbal interaction. Where you get lots of small feedbacks you tend to start responded to them as they happen. In a seminar, good but not so sure in a larger pitch.

Pictures on Flickr are a good idea, if you prepare in advance. I tend to put the slides together in the half hour before I get on stage, but given wireless link they could be directly posted.

Dave

One element I didn’t work up too much was the presenter / blogger who is represented by a speaker bureau. If the Speaker’s bureau did a little more negotiating they could significantly improve things. The cost of an expensive keynoter makes a little wifi nothing when compared to the benefits for both organizers and the presenter.

I think I made Samuel’s point to by saying put a key diagram on flickr in advance. Put them in a group so it is easy to find them. You could put them in your own photoblog too, just a bandwidth etc trade-off vs where do you link to. My learning is… less on slides. I cannot use really view slides if I am listening and typing. Slides take away the focus in many cases. They are often not in synch with what is said either. So key word, one picture, one link etc. Telling the story forces us to be more compelling. I think this is also why Ross Dawson says “my slides aren’t my talk” and puts them up with a little protest. The flickr approach may get around that.

I also take my ipod and recorder and simply put it on the table. That way I can check something later. It would never make podcast material; it is a possible way to check back quickly later for a missed fact or statement. May also save me from a “mad” presenter or enable me to recognize and correct a mistake I’ve made.

It also helps the blogger if time is allowed for questions. They may not come fast, but 10 minutes can make a huge difference to reinforcing their takeout of the presentation, what the audience is interested in or wants to learn more of etc. Otherwise it’s framing in a vacuum.

Another, for making life simpler for the conference blogger. First provide power! if there is no power you get no blogs and chasing plugs becomes an issue. There were no plugs virtually anywhere at KMWorld.

If you want to experiment with the right crowd.. give them the opportunity to live twitter your presentation. Set up a Twitter account for the presentation to auto follow and let it run on the screen… Most would need some training in twitter first. Use it like voting on american idol. or pose questions before… IE what makes you curious about what the presenter is going to say? …. then at some point break and use for questions etc.

Better go and post this comment on my blog too!.

Steven, I spoke to Jane Dysart briefly about both of these conferences. There is no doubt that the Librarians are way ahead; this may also be partially due to identifying with their community rather than working for company x. Still no effort was put into KMWorld to build this platform, support and community. It require preplanning, requires letting attendees know we will be trying different things this year.. bring along laptops, mobiles etc. Attend some bootcamps.. etc. I’d even run these in the future.

Dave, I too listen better when I have to write the notes and just like Luis says, if you don’t post them then you may never post them. For the most part I went out after each session reconnected to the hotspot and pushed publish. Some of the results lack links as I couldn’t do them there and then.

Isabel, Thanks for picking up on the “It’s a Community” I really believe this and there’s a huge opportunity to help organizers to facilitate this more effectively.

Read my lips: Terrific post by Stuart Henshall. Conference organizers need to learn how to leverage conference bloggers, and presenters can contribute. PR firms should be the enablers. Stuart tells us why and how. My favorite quote out of many…

So much so, that after having put together a bunch of blog posts I had a few more and gave up on writing further reviews since a) couldn’t do live con-blogging, so writing something up at a later time becomes more difficult, not only from the perspective of timeliness, but also from getting busy with other stuff, usually catching up after you come back b) lost the motivation since hardly any of the folks at the conference engaged further in co-blogging the event. Disappointing, indeed, so I am hoping that next year things would improve quite a bit and your blog post shows that it can be done!

Thanks for putting together such a thoughtful resource which I am more than happy going to share with a bunch of other folks, too!