nowEurope

Yesterday, I was a speaker at the Digital Cities conference hosted by the city government of Schwechat, a town located just outside of Vienna next to the airport. The topic was “Is the digital city prepared for the impact of new technologies?” (That was my rough translation from the German.) I was asked to give a talk entitled Social networks: how social is a blog?

On the train back from Vienna I got to thinking about conferences. I’ve attended many. Over the years I’ve developed a good strategy for getting the most out of any conference. I follow three rules …

My first rule of conferences is to go for the speaking opportunities. I’ve been going to conferences for years, and now I rarely attend a conference unless I’m asked to speak or moderate a panel. One good way to get invited is simply to ask. Conference organizers usually value good content, but if they don’t know you, you need to get proactive and contact them.

Any speaking opportunity is an chance to plug your latest project. However, there is one Golden Rule. Your purpose as a speaker is first and foremost to inform and (possibly even) entertain your audience. That’s why an overt sales pitch doesn’t work. The best way is to inform your audience about your particular area of expertise, which naturally includes whatever products or services you represent.

In this case, since I was supposed to talk about social networking and blogging I described what we do here with nowEurope and invited the audience to visit and take part. It doesn’t hurt that many of the audience are involved in these topics and might very well find our discussions worth reading.

Rule number two is that the best content is always in the hallways. I was glad to meet Helmut Paugger, who hosted the conference around the eSchwechat initiative organized by his company, Innovation Consultancy. I was also pleased to meet Helmut’s assistant, Camilla Clebna, who organized the event and kept me company as I waited my turn to speak.

Rule number three is not to leave before lunch, because some of the best conversations take place over food. I ate lunch with Robert Krimmer, director of e-voting.cc and Dr. Peter Parycek from the Donau-Universitaet Krems. We had an enjoyable conversation about the grammatical chaos of using English terms such as e-voting, e-government and e-democracy in the German language. (And the food was excellent.)

Those are my three rules of conference going. Are there any others?