Making content conversational (or just better) at events

Is it just me or does content suck at events? Sure, that question probably just offended a lot of event organizers who might be reading this–or even their comms and content marketing partners who spend a lot of time rushing to meet deadlines for keynote scripts, product demos, speaker proposals and so much more.?

But if you really sit and think about it for a minute and allow yourself to get past the sting of the question, I think many of us might agree that event content can be a whole lot better. And our communities agree. They’ve been asking us for years to make content more engaging. Which we as an industry read as make it “shorter” or with a live band at the beginning, or even worse–move the “boring” stuff we have to do to a breakout session.?

These aren’t solutions to the problem. And from my perspective, making event content better isn’t even really the right problem to solve. It’s not a what problem, it’s a when problem.?

Why’s it gotta all be saved for the actual event?

Step one–ask yourself, why do I really need to save all of this content for the actual event? We don’t all sit around the radio or television together to get our information anymore, so why are we still presenting it like this at events? Invest those same resources used to create content for events to create content in the formats community members are getting the rest of their content–and give it to them now, don’t wait until the event.??

Share that same content as articles, posts, videos, podcasts, interactive infographics–you name it. And don’t just pick one format, pick a whole bunch of them. Make the content accessible to align with the myriad of ways your community wants to receive and consume information from you. We’ve become experts at taking in large amounts of information, synthesizing it and developing our own conclusions through various mediums–all in our own time. No event required.?

So what should happen at the event instead?

Which brings us to what should happen at these corporate events. Now that we’ve got all this extra time and community members have all of the information they need before they walk in the door, we can refocus the experience to be about connection.?

This isn’t saying that every event should focus solely on networking–at least not in a traditional sense. Corporate community engagement at events is most often about learning from and connecting with others. So cocktails and lawn games won’t really do the trick. A form of content is often still required to help facilitate the right type of experience that will support both deep learning and meaningful connection building. It just won’t look like your standard talking heads-type content we just nixed.?

Here are some examples:

• The Build. Ask your speakers (who just graciously shared their presentations with you ahead of the event to repackage into awesomely rich content that you shared with your community), to talk about what happened next. Bring your folks in the room into this conversation. What conclusions did they come to from diving into the content? Then let the speaker share the outcome and what they plan to do next. This should be centered around building the path forward together.
• The Debate. Maybe you have some really incredible voices you think your community will be excited to hear from at the event–and it’s not stuff you can share ahead of time. But don’t let them just become talking heads (sorry David Byrne–really not coming for you), let them lead the debate with the folks in the room. Bring a killer facilitator into the room to moderate and challenge. Encourage rich dialogue to come from everywhere that brings the words to life for everyone, not just the few who caught that one thing they said at the end of that last slide.?
• The Workshop. Many of us are probably most familiar with this format. Workshops (or solution rooms) are becoming increasingly part of the breakout programming experience. I’m widely supportive. But these shouldn’t just be reserved for those few precious hours on Thursday afternoon. Your workshops could take over the entire event, encouraging community members to float between one to another, bringing new perspectives and ideas to the table in every room. Make your event about crowdsourcing solutions, not crowd wrangling attention.?
• The Lab. Distinct from workshops which should be all about solution building, labs should be all about solution testing. Not all ideas are great ideas–at least not in their original form. They often need some real world pressure testing to get out all of the kinks. Or looking at it a different way, even the greatest solutions are hard to implement without a little help from some experts who have applied them before. That’s the type of work that should be done in labs at events. It’s all about building a safe space to play and experiment with peers before bringing these solutions back into the world.?????

As you can see from each of these formats, the emphasis is on collaboration and learning from each other. It’s about true community engagement. But the key is really to ensure you’ve taken at least some of that content you were saving for the event and share it with your community ahead of time so they can feel equipped with enough information to use their time wisely when they’re in the room. They’ll be more than willing to do the work if it means a better (and more valuable) event experience.?

So apply a few of these ideas–test, learn, build slowly and see what works best for you, your team and your community. It doesn’t have to be an overnight shift as we all know that just isn’t possible. But when you start to play with solving the right problem, you’ll find out pretty quickly that your event content won’t suck (quite as much) anymore–and your entire community will thank you for it.?