As once famously written by mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal to a friend, “I have made this a long letter because I haven’t the time to make it shorter.” Sorry about that. You might want to get a snack…
The Maelstrom
I intended to push this post off until after Event Camp Europe, and then to compare and contrast how that event and Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 each chose to deal with the complexities of hybrid meetings. What worked, what didn’t work. I intended to be working on my presentation that I’m giving at ECEU last night, but instead found myself immersed in a whirlwind of comments, criticisms, reflections, and suggestions for the future of Event Camp. Some kind, some a bit harsh. “Did you see this?” asked one sponsor in an email to me. “Here’s a podcast,” in another email from someone else. Suddenly I have my laptop, iPad, and phone, all actively engaged and I’m listening to Mike McAllen at 250% speed so I can get through the podcast faster.
I still want to do the tech comparison, and will try to this week. First, though, I want to take a moment to talk about sponsorship.
The Reality
I feel a very strong need to defend the sponsors. Sonic Foundry, Martin Bastian, BeEvents, BizBash, eventMobi, Active Network, Heroic Productions, and others. None of these companies had anything to do with the content or organization of the event, yet already I’m seeing some of their names associated with the negatives of the event. A pit forms in my stomach when I think that by sponsoring this event, my, my company’s, or my fellow sponsor’s names might be tarnished in any way. It makes me feel physically ill.
Sonic Foundry’s feed was rock-fracking-solid as usual. I recommend and use Medisite on our own events for our own clients. BeEvents brought beauty and functionality to the in room experience, and I say that knowing full well that we are at least peripheral competitors. Martin Bastian, another competitor in some arenas, produced two very nice, very high quality videos for the game. As for metroConnections, my employer, we provided the name badges and staff, the white lounge furniture and chairs, and lended production support in the forms of myself and one other guy, who wound up running audio in the Johnson Room due to cost concerns. In that production role, I brought in Heroic Productions, my most trusted AV provider and the one of the best damn crews in town. They sponsored what we thought was going to be overkill in the equipment department, and we still pushed both the gear and the crew well past the red line on this one.
I’m pretty sure Pink’s fabric structures didn’t have anything to do with the “problem with the pods”. All of these sponsors that I worked directly with executed their portions with near perfection in all the areas that they controlled.
Aye, there’s the rub…
“The areas that we controlled.” And so my friends, I get to lesson #1 learned from ECTC11, and one you might not have been expecting from me: Do Not Lend Your Name to That Which You Do Not Control.
The Risk
Problem is, that’s an unrealistic lesson. There is, and always will be, an inherent risk in sponsoring an event. If you could control everything, it would be your event, not someone else’s. What happens when the NASCAR car you’re sponsoring breaks down? You can only hope that in the long run there’s enough room for error and enough positive to outweigh the negative. What happens when the plan for how to handle a 7 way Skype call fails in spectacular fashion? You write a blog post doing your best to explain it so that others can learn from the mistakes, and hopefully keep the good names of your fellow sponsors out of the mud in the process.
Event Camp is about innovation and experimentation. The guys tried a lot of things, and an unfortunate amount of them failed. They took on too much, tried to do too many things at once, and it came off as a jumbled mess in parts. They could have just as easily gone off without a hitch, and we could all be standing around now going, “By Jove, they’ve got it!” Maybe Mike McAllen is right- maybe it needs to go back to more of an unconference style. By making it seem more like a traditional event, has the tolerance for failure gone down?
Perhaps then, the lesson should be: Do Not Lend Your Name to That Which You Do Not Control, Unless You Are Prepared to Deal with the Consequences, Positive or Negative.
You want to be on the bleeding edge? Be prepared to fall off sometimes. And to bleed. I can only hope that when we do get that “By Jove” moment all the companies and sponsors involved get the credit they deserve.
To That End
I cannot speak for metroConnections or any of the other sponsors, and I don’t. I speak for me, Brandt Krueger. And I will say here and now that I will be volunteering my time next year should it be decided to have another Event Camp Twin Cities.
I welcome your criticisms, I welcome your thoughts, I welcome your ideas on how to make it better, and I’ll do whatever I can to try and implement them if it’s within my power to do so. I wouldn’t be hurt or surprised if metro or Heroic have nothing to do with it or another Event Camp ever again, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit. But I’m in. Why? Because lately I’m obsessed with trying to figure this hybrid event thing out. Sam and Ray tried something new on the Pods. It failed on many levels and for a variety of “perfect storm” reasons which I will go into soon. I learned at least three things I didn’t know last week about how to do it and five on how not to do it. The Event Camp Europe crew is going to try something different. I’m going to learn from that too.
I believe in a cheap, scalable method for bringing in remote audiences for a near in room experience. I believe we’re very close to that. But how do you know if you can’t test it full scale? And if you’re going to test it full scale, you better be ready to fail and fail spectacularly. As for me, I’m going to keep attaching myself to these things. I’m going to keep striving for perfection within the confines of experimentation. Either I’m going to figure this thing out, or I’m going to be close to the person that does. And I want my company to be on the inside track of how it should be done when we figure it out. Do you?
As I said, I was supposed to be working on my presentation for Event Camp Europe last night. In a weird sort of way, I think I have been…
Standby. 
Brandt-
I do appreciate the work that Sam and Ray & company put into this event. I also appreciate your role in this event. I have been in your shoes literally…. I don’t think anyone thinks badly of the sponsors or you or anyone. Helping out with an EventCamp you do risk a bad rap but more importantly you risk being thought of as a company that will try new things and will bust your ass to get them done. I think the actual live event looked really cool and worked well. The sound, lights, camera work were perfect (meaning I did not notice them at all) My beef is more of the execution, communication for the PODs, the game was confusing and took over the event for us. Once we were lost we were left behind. We received our Learning Journals, T-shirts Thursday afternoon in Oakland(which is an hour away) So we never had them.
So as a regular event it seems it was perfect. Any sort of hybrid event component seems to be kind of a farce to me. maybe if I was watching in my office alone it might have worked. We as a pod felt like we were just part of the scenic design for the live room on a Plasma. I felt like I wasted my sponsors time and money for our pod. None of them stayed and I frankly looked really bad for talking up the event.
My biggest question is why we couldn’t test this hybrid model before the event? If we are only using Skype?
Anyway, On to the next one. I would not worry about what anyone says. Learn from it and move on to the next one… Excited you are going to Eventcamp Europe? That is awesome! I look forward to watching it virtually.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Mike
Beautifully said! Thank you for saying it. I have nothing but admiration for the sponsors who were courageous enough to support an event and event people who are willing to do whatever it takes–even risk some fails–to figure this out.
Thanks, guys. And really, I’m not looking for a pat on the back, but I wanted to make sure that things didn’t get too far down the road in a bad way.
I’m sorry the Pod experience didn’t work out so great- I’m sure Sam and Ray will take any and all feedback to heart, and it’s great info for anybody else trying to do something similar, and better.
As to your biggest question, it’s a fair one. I started writing up my notes for “what went wrong in podland” to be published probably later tonight, and to be honest, a lot of it wouldn’t really shake out unless you were in a full scale test. And I mean FULL scale, which isn’t something so easily done. They tested the lines, they tested the calls, we tested the audio out, we tested the audio in, we even jury-rigged a way to route you the main camera feed which I think they’re going to expand on at ECEU, but I’m not sure yet what the final set will be. (How did that look, by the way?) Unfortunately, it really was several factors all working against each other to create such a mess, I think you’ll see what I mean when I lay it all out. I think the fullscale test was ECTC11.
Brandt,
Nice, well thought out post. At no time during the two days did I ever have the thought that the Sponsors were to blame for anything. I was amazed that Sam Smith and Ray Hansen were able to pull off the inaugural ECTC last year with all the things they were trying for the virtual audience.
That is one reason why I opted not to attend this year’s ECTC in the flesh and chose to participate in the Philly pod as I was interested in seeing how the pod equipment needed to set-up and experience the event as a hybrid since it was a rave hit last year. I am glad that I was able to have this experience. Even though a few things had technical issues, it was still educational to me.
If I were to say anything negative, it would be that this year they were trying to pour a 2 liter bottle of Coca-Cola into three 20 ounce bottles and they were overflowing. That said, having too much Coca-Cola is never a bad thing…. Looking forward to ECTC12!
Greg
Glad to see Greg got in his Coke reference…I’m assuming they were a sponsor 😉
I also did not think this event reflected poorly on sponsors. But I do think the sponsorships were poorly executed. You have a registration company sponsoring an event that does not use their registration system? Baffles the mind. As a viewer and pod attendee I did not really make any connection at all to the sponsors. To me they were simply logos on signage on on the website. That’s not a sponsorship. I also assume that many donated time and equipment and products and services etc. Yet it is very confusing as to what exactly was donated and who donated what.
I think the lesson learned here for the sponsors is you really have to be involved in creating the sponsorship package. Not only does the event need to benefit from your sponsorhship but you do as well. You have to thoroughly decide what your goals and objectives are to come out of your sponsorship and be very proactive to ensure you get what you are promised. There has to be a good fit and there has to be more benefit to just getting your logo plastered on a website or signage. Good sponsorships take time to develop. Getting a good contract that both sides agree on is the first step. Leveraging that opportunity is the responsibility of the sponsor with assistance from the sponsee.
I personally have two sponsors for our pod that I need to focus on. They were promised exposure on the event website which they do not have yet. I will keep working on that to get it fixed. But we did ensure they got a mention via Emilie Barta with an explanation of what exactly they do and what they sponsored. So we’re almost there.
I do hope that each sponsor has an opportunity to meet with the organizers and discuss what went wrong. I also hope that the sponsors take the time to really analyze what worked and what didn’t internally and grow from the experience. Don’t quickly write off sponsorships…just be very careful about the partnership from the beginning.
Hello Event Campers,
SPONSORSHIP – Sometimes sponsors join a cause or event because they want press and increased business. Sometimes sponsors make a donation to a cause or event because they believe in what the event producers are trying to do.
TECH – The tech on Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 was simply amazing. Check out a few of the tech innovations that worked:
—-RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) FACEBOOK TAGGED NAME BADGES – These were used to “LIKE” Sponsored areas on site.
—-GAME DYNAMICS: Encouraged “Sponsor Named Teams” to create or locate social media profiles and also create different multi-media presentations. Very hands on and participant driven. There were pieces that any event could use to its advantage.
—-VIDEO: From high end webcast to pre-recorded challenge videos – videos were really executed very well for a low cost event. We are continually reminded that video is the future. Sam and Ray pushed us closer to that future.
—-ELECTRICITY: There was always a plug when I needed it. For a tech driven event this was key!
—-WI-FI: High speed WI-FI was available throughout the meeting. This is absolutely essential for a tech driven event that incorporates GAMES, VIDEO, TWITTER, etc. into the event. So many events get this wrong that Ray and Sam deserve getting credit for getting this right!
(There was a problem with WI-FI on first day due to a University Hacking issue – I am looking forward to Sam’s report on this because this will be something to learn from “How do you prevent spammers from piggybacking on your bandwidth?”.)
—-FACEBOOK APP for VIEWING: Ray broadcast both rooms through a Facebook App – I am not sure how many people were viewing feeds through Facebook but that was really cool because you could view and comment in real time to fellow viewers.
—-MULTIPLE PODS and ROOM VIDEO FEED: We were able to see PODS video feed on screens in main room and their was a video camera (remote controlled movement!!!) pointed at us in the room. VERY COOL!!!
Forget the rest of the education. That was just the tech!!!!!
Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at us. At times you felt dizzy from the blow but most of the time I was just blown away by all of the different elements that we can bring back to our events and our clients.
This is the point of Event Camp. See ideas in motion. Pick the ones you like and improve upon them. Some things did not work and Ray and Sam let us know that would happen at the beginning of the event. I know that Sam in particular felt really badly that the pods were not able to interact as much as he had originally envisioned. I am sure it is something he will fix for next years event.
I hope that sponsors feel that they contributed to pushing the events industry forward.
Thank you to ~~> Active Network Events, OmniPress, Sonic Foundry Media Site, BeEvents, BizBash, eTouches, EventMobi, MetroConnections, Lantern, The Conference Publishers, McNamara Alumni Center, Martin Bastian and all the other sponsors that I missed from both the onsite event and the pods!
Cameron Toth
Thanks for the comments, Cameron. Sometimes it’s easy to be blinded by the what went wrong and we need to be reminded what went right. I had completely forgotten that they’d run power to every table in the room- a really nice touch, and one that gets overlooked at almost every conference. I was told at one point the WiFi was running 16Mbps down- basically 16x faster than my DSL at home! That was all Ray and the MacNamara facility and they deserve all the credit in the world for that. I know the guys have been actively doing post-con calls and emails at a furious rate, and they’re digesting and collecting the data, positive and negative. Please be sure to send comments their way as well, and encourage all of you to fill out the post event surveys. The only way we learn is by getting feedback from the audience!
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