Make Your Events and Conferences less Boring

One of the key challenges that marketing leaders facing in planning events/conferences is how to generate dynamic and compelling content that will engage the audience. The de facto approach to conferences remains a back-to-back series of PowerPoint presentations which are interrupted only for lunch and vendor exhibits. While formal presentations remain the best way to educate a large audience about a topic, too much repetition in this format will lead to declining audience interest. I recommend mixing up the format of conference sessions with four alternative session approaches to keep the audience better engaged.

Ten Guidelines for Panel Moderators

A panel can be a very effective technique for sharing information on a particular topic at a conference or tradeshow. The panel format is becoming increasing popular alternative to formal PowerPoint presentation sessions. Many have found that the multi-speaker, informal nature of the discussion tends to lead to more audience attention. However, there are several best practices that should be employed to ensure that the panel does not fall into the pitfalls commonly associated with formal PowerPoint presentations.

Extending Your Customer Profile Library

In my last post I described a best practice that marketing professionals can employ to track, trend and analyze customer profiles. If you are agreeable to the concept you may want consider extending the profile data you track to a broader set of information such as investor filings, press releases, executive biographies and 3rd party vendor case studies.