conference organizers | Writing Boots

C.C. Chapman, a prominent social-media consultant and writer, writes on his blog that he loves to speak at conferences of all kinds because "I’ve got a permanent case of travel wanderlust mixed with the urge to meet, talk to and motivate as many people in the world as I can before my time is up. …

"But, it amazes me how hard it is to work out the details with organizations no matter how big or small they are."

Chapman, an e-quaintance of mine who also serves as a judge of the Strategic Video Awards which I chair, lays out his terms.

Or tries to.

Here are the first two:

1. You've got to pay his travel costs. "That is not negotiable for me and why I put it first." Not paying his expenses is "a deal breaker for me unless you happen to be TED, Poptech or some other conference that I'd kill to be in front of." (What kind of woman do you think I am? Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.)

2. You've got to pay his speaker's fee. That's simply non-negotiable. The man has to eat, doesn't he? And there's a principle here: "Quality costs, so don't just assume you can get everything for free." Except, C.C.'s fee is totally negotiable. "I have different rates depending on the type of event or organization …." And in fact he does still speak for free "quite often." But that ain't cool, because "I've had this happen where I had to pass on a paid gig because I already had a free one on my calendar and that hurts."

After sharing his bottom line(s), C.C. asks his readers for their opinion: "I’d love to hear from other speakers out there as well as event organizers to know if I’m off base or not. I know in my heart I’m not, but I still want to hear what other people in the industry think."

Here's what I think, C.C. Actually, it's one of the few things I actually know, from two decades as both a conference organizer a sometimes-paid speaker.

The whole goddamn landscape is a wild-west negotiation, whose variables include but are not limited to the speaker's status, the speaker's skill, the speaker's availability and the speaker's bank balance and self-esteem at the time of the invitation. Also, there's the conference organizer's personal charm, the conference company's reputation, the size of the crowd, the prestige of the event, the speaker's proposed place on the agenda, the conference location.

Oh, and two more things, almost forgot: Ball size, speaker's and conference organizer's.

What else am I forgetting?

C.C., if you can usually command travel expenses and fees, clearly you're doing well for yourself. And good for you; don't let creepy conference organizers push you around like they pushed you around when nobody knew C.C. Chapman from the Sea of Cortez (and the way they'll probably start pushing you around when younger, larger-narded social media gurus start stealing your podiums).

If you sometimes speak for free, then obviously you could be doing better. But in the meantime, you'll keep taking those lame gigs, not because they satisfy your "wanderlust." You're a father, C.C.; you don't seriously want us to believe you leave your wife and kids for two days because you want to drink in the soul-saturating vista of a windowless Holliday Inn conference room in Sioux City. No, you take those gigs for the exposure. Standing in front of an audience being charming and charismatic gives you a chance to pick up some consulting work.

Hey man, I'm a freelancer too; I get it. Right now a guy has me on the agenda for a conference in Britain; he's willing to pay my expenses when I'm over there, another guy is willing to pay half my airfare, and I'm negotiating with my wife to see if we want to pay the other half of the airfare out of pocket. Meanwhile, another conference organizer is paying me $2K and all expenses to speak in Copenhagen a couple months later. Maybe I'll take that half-airfare out of that.

Here's the principle of the thing: How much can I get?

But in the interest of keeping it real, let's don't talk about what you know in your "heart" and then ask others to tell you whether or not you're "off base" with your shifting "standards."

Does that sound fair to you?

Denise Graveline is one eloquent woman. In fact, she is The Eloquent Woman, bringing her good brain and her vast experience as a writer and as a communicator to her blog posts "on women and public speaking." I'm such a fan of Graveline that I've made her posts a regular part of Vital Speeches' website.

But recently Graveline advanced a gravely misguided but currently conventional idea about the future of business conferences.

She wants to transform conferences into the very flickering, helterskelter social-media shitstorm from which they are now our only port.

Et tu, E.W?

In a post titled "Remixing the conference: 5 cues for organizers," Graveline acknowledges that traditional conferences, allow attendees to "connect with lots of others with shared interests, interact with experts, get recognition from their peers, and find lots of high-quality content and plain old schmoozing opportunities."

That's a lot to do in two or three days! Alas, say Graveline and her cohorts in confab complication, it's just not enough anymore. That's because attendees are so used to social media, Graveline says, that "they are way ahead of [conference] organizers … demanding more and better content, audio-visual support for audience-members on the backchannel, and options for watching the conference from afar and for free."

Specifically, Graveline recommends that conference organizers:

• encourage and actually help facilitate audience live-tweeting of the conference

• indulge audiences' ADD: "audiences are looking for shorter speaking times, varied session length and even more content," Graveline claims without a durned bit of evidence

• elicit and pump in the reaction of far-flung audiences who are absentmindedly gazing at the sessions on video conference or glancing at handouts online.

Though there are some good ideas on Graveline's list (for instance, she points out that conference organizers can use social media to solicit and vet potential speakers) … mostly, the post makes me wonder when the last time Graveline and has really been to a conference.

Mentally, I mean.

Because in my conference-going experience both recent and past, a traditional conference is itself a tsunami of stimuli. Surrounded by one's peers in the flesh for the first and last time in a while, one is simultaneously struggling to absorb new ideas from speakers, and to imagine how those ideas might be modified and applied back at the office.

Hour upon hour, session after session, more ideas, more reactions, both intellectual and emotional. Notes scribbled, business-cards collected, hands shaken, social fuck-ups made and self-forgiven, bad sessions walked out on, good sessions walked in on, the exhibit hall slinked through, dinearounds signed up for, at the bar for one more, blinky breakfast roundtables barely made.

There are new people to meet, old colleagues to catch up with and random encounters to contend with and to integrate into the experience. All the while checking voice mail and e-mail to make sure a hundred crises haven't erupted back at the office. Oh, and speaking of the office …

… toward the end of the event, the pressure builds to sum up the conference for your boss who fought for the budget money to send you, and for your colleagues, who have been covering for you all week.

What did you get out of it? What did you come away with? Any ideas we can use?

By the time you get on the plane, your head is overstuffed with techniques, case studies, the odd-but-nagging opinions of others, half-developed theses of your own—and if it was a truly productive event, it's a little achy from booze, too.

And to this Denise Graveline wants to add constant tweeting and live-blogging, more and shorter sessions, a sense that Unseen Others Are Watching and Listening on the "backchannel," and erratic input from a global peanut gallery?

I read Graveline's list from the point of view of a conference organizer, too. I are one.

And as a conference organizer, I realize that one of the most important gifts I can give my attendees is a respite from the random. A conference, however overwhelming for those who are really interested in acquainting themselves with new people and ideas, is a comfort, because it's here and now and us and nobody else.

To make conferences better, we ought to make them not more like a schizophrenic Twitter feed, but less.

And not less of an intimate, shared experience, but more of one.

Yes, one.