Planning stunning events

Part of a marketer's job is to throw a heck of a party every once in a while. Being in Channel Management for many years where the line between Sales and Marketing blurs, usually because of lack of resources, I have been involved in a few of these, some of them as large as 600 people spanning a week in lenght.
Here are some tips to make for an exceptional event:

Mind the audience. Always think on who is the event for. Target EVERYTHING to this audience. Focus on your niche. This is what ultimately going to show the value of the event, a high concentration of interests in one place and at one time.

Cover the basics. Make sure that you are covering your audience expectations. Ask yourself what is what HAS to be there. Make it happen.

Do not underestimate the networking. This is one of the biggest reasons why people attend events, to hook up with clients, suppliers and to pick the brains of their colleagues and competitors. Allow plenty of time for networking and make every time slot conducive for connecting. Provide means of sharing contact info, like an opt-in list to be distributed among attendees. Create activities with smaller groups, this is more conducive for peer-to-peer interaction as well as for Q/A sessions and information gathering.

Plan for the 5-year old. Well, almost. Keep changing the activities every 30-min to 1 hour. This will keep the audience engaged.

Change wardrobe. Or the drapes. Rearrange furniture. Mix it up and change the format of the presentations. Too many powerpoints? Conduct an interview on stage. Bring in a panel of experts. Show a video. Move the audience from one room to the other.

Think Hollywood. With whatever your resources are, think about making an impact. It does not matter if it is somewhat unrelated and not purely business, three months after the event nobody is going to remember the content of slide 5 of your presentation, but they will remember the CEO riding on to the stage with a Harley or the cigar roller at the Cuban-themed party.

Left brain, Right brain, repeat. Plan, plan and then plan some more. Hold meetings with every stakeholder, do a dry run on everything to make sure that it flows correctly. But be prepared and accept chaos, things WILL fall apart and you will have to make changes on the fly.

Keep tabs on the team. Remember to record all the phone numbers. Have a radio system. Hold staff meetings first thing in the morning. This will help you have a backup individual for everything and you will be able to contact them when something goes astray.

Assign shifts. Admit it. You cannot work 24/7. Make it clear who is in charge and when, and give yourself some time to participate and network yourself.

Just came in: FB replaces all platforms

It goes something like this:

Joe Posted Something on your Wall:

"Honey, we ran out of paper at the downstairs powder room"

Lucia commented on your post:

"Look in the cabinet, there should be more there"

Joe commented on his post:

"Nope"

Lucia commented on your post:

"I will be there in a minute, writing something on fb"

Edward commented on your post:

"We always keep plenty in the cabinet too, seems to work for us"

Joe commented on his post:

"Hurry up honey"

With the widespread adoption of a communication technology -or any technology for that matter- there is always a moment in time when somebody figures out a "original way of using it" or a way of misusing it.

The ping-pong email is a famous one, where people interact by exchanging one-liners through email and expecting immediate answers. The 15-minute voicemail, the two-party conference bridge dial-in are other examples of this.

Exchanges like the opening one, while exaggerated for illustration purposes are becoming more prevalent. The point here is that the parties could just talk to each other, and there is no benefit in having this conversation on fb, where usually the objective is to capitalize on your friends input, enriching the discussion, or simply because there is something worth sharing, either because it sublime or entertaining.

The parties do have a technological alternative that fits better their communication needs, but they are just resorting to fb (or whatever they choose) because of pure laziness.

Horror Gallery of Corporate

Deep in the dungeons of the corporation, some of the most cruel and horrific tortures are inflicted on those that voluntarily accept them. These are nightmares that attack me during my deepest REM sleep. I hesitated to put them out in the open, but here they are. These will be a rolling list that will get more added, but hopefully not that many. Here are the first six:

Death by Ping-Pong email

This horrific procedure is based on the fact that each short, seldom self-contained email drains the energy of the responder. It slowly bleeds away the individual involved in the conversation and warps time. Each three second email consumes about 15-20 minutes of preparation. After five iterations the procedure starts to approach lethal consequences because it slowly erodes hope that anything can be accomplished at all.

Suffocation by back-to-back meetings

Many of us have experienced this. Back to back meetings drain the oxygen around any real work and thinking. It is only lethal in instances where it is also accompanied by starvation, but the risk of permanent brain damage is very high.

The DOS attack

This is a particularly cruel practice that is applied usually to those on solitary confinement. Consists in taking away your resources to do the things you are supposed to do by introducing a resource hog that eats up any trace of surplus resources. Manifestations of this type of attack can be the "Quick question" every 30 minutes, or variations of the Ping-Pong email and the Back-to-Back meeting.

Traction torture

This is a widely utilized technique when achieve resignation or ruining someone's career is an objective. Consists in having the condemned individual report to two different bosses with different agendas. The two bosses eventually end up pulling apart the individual until it is impossible to meet objectives or put his/her body parts together.

The Trojan Tool

This is a technique that is practiced by top executives that are masters in the art of deception. It consists of making mandatory the use of cumbersome tools of questionable value. It is particularly deceptive because it is usually disguised as something useful and as a time-saving tool.

The Suicide Bomber VP

These are a common threat, but they are very hard to spot. It consists in committing to unattainable goals, some times self-proposed as means of gaining visibility in the corporation, bonuses, or just showing off. Then it is just a matter of time. It takes between 2 or 3 Quarters to build enough pressure to detonate, however it becomes very hot around the SBVP; so hot that it is unbearable. At this point it can be more easily detected but usually very few people point it out. Once it detonates, it takes the whole department with it.

Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

Time to grow up, dude...

Corporations many times are compared with real people. They are born, they die, can be sued, they pay taxes, etc. Free speech is a debate. Many of them evolve a quite identifiable persona.

Pretty much as people, we expect them to grow in all aspects and live a full life. That's what this entry is about. Social Responsibility. Very much like a guy who just steps into the picture to take care of some issue, we are OK with new and -specially- small corporations to be focused on task.

They have one thing to do, they do it well and they do nothing else.

Now, once they grow bigger and older, we start to look at them in a different light. We expect them to do all sorts of things. Give back to the community, create jobs, pay well and play nice. Just like we do with older guys. They have been around here, we expect them to pitch in somehow, be nice, don't just talk about the $%^& work, even party a bit and have a beer with us. If they don't, we call them a "Jerk" or in the best case, we declare that they "lack social skills".

So, aren't our Corporation's Social Responsibility expectations just another way of humanizing them?

The secret sauce of Social Media

I recently read the inaugural blog of a good friend, Marco Cuttin. He makes a very nice walk on memory lane going through all the communications systems and how they evolved.

However, while Marco shows the similarity and how they evolved, fails to point out the one thing that makes Social Networks, Social Networks.

The one thing that is different is that the connections ARE PERSISTENT. What I mean with this, is that once you have connected with someone, and exchanged information, the network remembers that path and it can be traveled again by others. It is like a telephone system that grows branches according to your calls. This concept is also very well illustrated by a speech by Sebastian Seung on TED, "I am my connectome".

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.