Vendor-led Conferences: Marketing in Sheep’s Clothing?
Jan 18, 2010 In Events By Thomas LewisCan a vendor conference be anything more than a self-indulgent marketing campaign?
Lately, I’ve been lurking around the Twitterverse, listening in on some conversations about conferences.
To my surprise, there seems to be a general mistrust about vendor-led conferences such as MIX, which tend to elicit statements like this:
- Why should I pay $X to hear a sales pitch?
- They are only telling their spin.
- The sessions are not based in any reality I live in.
- M$FT sux and their conferencez r full o fail.
I can understand why people try to avoid dog and pony shows for products—but some conferences are more than just dog and pony shows. I believe MIX10 is one such conference.
I have been part of the MIX Conference (Mix Online’s sister event) since its inception in 2006. Before we launched the conference, we spent a lot of time internally convincing Microsoft that this conference should be different than anything we’d done before.
We came up with philosophy and brand elements for the conference that still exist today:
Open
The first thing we did was to open up the conference to non-Microsoft speakers, including our competitors. Our idea was to provide a way for attendees to see things from different perspectives—the web is made up of many different people and technologies, after all. This year we introduced Open Call, which lets our audience choose a handful of the sessions themselves.
Unexpected
Each year, we try to do something unexpected. It might be a DJ or Johnny Cash-inspired music guest, or having our executive speakers hang out and answer questions in a common area. Last year we had a keynoter who talked about how design helps save lives. Doing something unexpected every year is probably one of my favorite brand elements of the conference (just wait until this year’s event).
Innovative
When I say innovative, I’m not talking about invention; I’m talking about “extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known.” (Thanks Bill Buxton!) One of the innovative things we’ve always done is to make all session content, keynotes, etc. freely available after the event. People were afraid that free content would cannibalize our attendance at first, but it turned out to be a lot like a football game—could you just stay home and watch the game? Of course, but it’s not the same as being there.
Conversational
From giving attendees opportunities to interact closely with speakers and keynoters, to having Guy Kawasaki interview Steve Ballmer—we’ve always tried to keep things conversational (and yes, Guy Kawasaki had his Mac with him on stage). I’m astounded by how much interaction I have with attendees via Twitter, too. I get everything from site feedback to info about meetups with some that I’d only recognize from their avatars.
Practical
Finally, we try to make sure conference content is practical, approachable and appropriate for developers AND designers. We focus the content on how you can “do” things, rather than just an API crawl. And it’s not about product pitches; it’s about speakers outside of Microsoft discussing things from web site redesign to web content.
Conclusion
So I think that vendor conferences can be more than just marketing events—as long as vendors take the time to figure out what makes their conference unique. This is why I look forward to working on the MIX conference every year.
What do you think vendors should do to make their conferences more beneficial to attendees? Do you think the MIX conference embodies the brand elements I’ve discussed or do you think we’re falling below the bar? Leave a comment with your opinion. Hope to see you at MIX10.
Also, you can follow my crazy adventures at MIX10 on Twitter and make sure you follow MIX Online too.
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10 Comments so far. You should leave one, too.
I believe it’s common knowledge that vendor lead conferences will involve some level of marketing, otherwise how could you justify the expense to the bean counters.
Last year, there was a lot of hype about Blend/SketchFlow, Silverlight, Azure, and IE8. Some products lived up to the hype, others not so much. Regardless, the message was pretty one sided, MS has some great new tools to help the designer/developer workflow improve and deliver outstanding content to your users.
One thing I am seeing this year both from MS as a company AND in some sessions is a real commitment to Open-Source and alternative technologies (JQuery, HTML5, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Python to name a few). Seeing MS include these technologies in the box with their software makes me smile. I also love seeing the lab work with projects like Oxite, Gestald, and Wordpress. I’m also seeing more session content revolving around these technologies. That’s a good thing.
I attended an event in Seattle put on by Interact Seattle http://www.interactseattle.org/?p=283 a few months ago where two software evangelists Adam Kinney (Microsoft) and Ryan Stewart (Adobe) showcased their respective products Blend & Flash Catalyst side by side. This session created an amazingly interesting dynamic. It wasn’t about which features were better, it was about how tools could help execute and ultimately realize ideas.
Seeing Open-Source technologies being talked about and used at MIX is a great step forward as far as breaking out of the “Marketing Marketing blah blah” of vendor conferences. I am hopeful that today, when the Open Call sessions are announced more of these alternative technologies will be showcased.
Finally, the part of MIX10 I’m looking forward to the most is getting a chance to talk with other industry professionals, most of which use MS technologies, but not exclusively. It’s those conversations that I find the real value of a conference regardless of who is footing the bill.
See you in Vegas!
The main reason I went last year was to meet and hang out with people in the industry. I found very little of the content compelling. In fact, I was bored by a lot if it, and by the last day stopped attending any sessions. This year’s Open Call was a great idea. Unfortunately, it was decided that only 10 out of the 150 or so sessions would be selected. The truth is, when I compare what is listed on the Mix site session list, to what the community submitted, I feel that the community responded with much more applicable and compelling content than Microsoft. It’s a shame that we will only get to hear 10 of those talks.
I’m with Rob. In fact when I saw so many great selections but with only 10 available I asked around about perhaps organising a 2 day post-MIX Silverlight conference, given that most of us travel a long way for this event and a week helps spread the cost.
Alas, it was too late this year, with folks having booked flights already and apparently Silverlight Insiders having already ear-marked the Thursday after MIX for their own event.
Maybe community can organise something for 2011 (happy to get involved). With some great instructors who run full-time training attending the conference (Sparkling_Client, Shawn Wildermuth) at the very least we should be able to offer a 2-day post conference course as one “track”. I realise we have Pre-conference workshops but honestly, with the number of attendees in each room and half day limits these are not great training (as indicated by the cost) but just elongated sessions. I’d like to see the event (or another one held immediately after it) using all the expertise that descends on the location for MIX to offer something more than just 3 days of rushed networking and often rather dull marketing sessions.
Rob and Ian aren’t the only ones that feel this way about the Open Call sessions.
I bet if the MIX organizers offered more then the 10 winning Open call sessions (maybe next 20) the opportunity to present their sessions, the presenters would still present them even if they didn’t receive a free ticket in exchange.
I realize how difficult it is to organize additional sessions and book rooms, but lots of great content will end up being missed when it could possibly be included…
“Make it work!” – Tim Gunn
+1 on the open call comments. Honestly, we had no idea how many session proposals or how much voter participation we’d get, and we underestimated by a lot. Agreed about the quality of the submissions. We’ll definitely be looking at ways to improve it next year, some of the ideas here are pretty interesting.
Of course there will be some degree of vendor specific technology, but I was blown away with the amount of open source and other solutions at MIX09. I was most appreciative of the non application based session info such as those on UX, more of that angle would be great.
@nerdstalker – +1. I’m particularly excited about several of the sessions on that front this year. There’s another batch of sessions that’ll be released in the near future which carries the remaining UX sessions. If you haven’t checked out the already released ones, I recommend you do so. We’ve worked pretty hard this year to strike the right balance across all the topics (UX, RIA, Standards, etc.)
As someone who’s not from Microsoft but who has been to every MIX to date and spoken at some of them too I can say with my hand on my heart that this is unlike any other vendor gig- I go to a lot of those too :-)
Probably the most interesting moment for me since MIX06 was Andrew Rashbass (former editor of the Economist) at MIX07 where he really didn’t hold back on calling a spade a spade.
Now MIX has changed a bit over the years and I do have to say that those early events were maybe a bit more indie than they are now, but, this is no TechEd or PDC to be sure!
I’ve been to several vendor sponsored conferences and I can honestly say that MIX is quite different.
The biggest difference is the sense of community. In all honesty, I usually spend about half of the session blocks in the hallways or community areas. There is a definite effort to make an environment that favors comfort and conversation.
The other big difference is the speakers. At most conferences, the speakers have a few minutes of Q&A after their session, then they dissappear. At MIX, the speakers actually hang around the whole conference.
I would agree with Rob that the content is hit or miss. The Adaptive Path and Bill Buxton sessions were awesome, but there tends to be some overlap in session content.
Open Call is a welcome improvement, but not a magic bullet. Adding more non-MSFT speakers is a great idea, but don’t go crazy with the community voting. SXSWi has become a mess because session content is determined by the # of Twitter followers rather than quality of content.
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