This is one industry segment that, to me, is heaven-made for social media. After all, what are conferences and exhibitions about but bringing community around content (be it knowledge, products or services) and facilitating the sharing and transacting of?

But it’s an industry that has been relatively slow to catch on to this new phenomenon of communication and sharing by a new generation; yet it realizes it has to embrace it if it is to remain relevant in a new business world as well as nurture a generation of customers who will actually come to attend live events, but want a different way of interaction and engagement.

Essentially, I spoke about how social media can be used to prolong a physical event experience by continuous engagement with the same customer and thus offering customers extended value beyond the physical event.

I also argued that it is no longer possible to operate within silos – this is us and this is them – with the way walls were collapsing around industries, and new models needed to emerge.

When I was working with trade publishing companies like Miller Freeman and Reed Elsevier (which run huge exhibitions), publishing and exhibitions were kept separate, even though we were essentially serving the same customer.

At the evening cocktails at the poolside garden of the Centara Grand, a few delegates came up to talk to me about my presentation.

Two Indian gentlemen who run very big exhibitions in India said social media wouldn’t work for their events because their delegates were government officials “and they don’t use social media”.

“Women are also better at social media and our customers are mostly men,” one of them said.

A Dutch man who works for a big conference and exhibition organizer (they are all big in Netherlands) said, “This whole thing is very bad for us.”

I asked him why. “Because customers can now share their bad experiences with each other while they are at the exhibition; we will lose control and power.”

I asked if it wasn’t better for him to know if a customer was unhappy while he was at the exhibition and so he could correct the problem immediately.

He shook his head, saying, “We are losing power.”

This, I think, is the shift exhibition and conference organisers have to make in their heads – it’s not about power, it’s about empowerment.

There is, I think, also a generational shift happening in our industry. In the audience were a handful of Gen Yers – they were mostly too shy to speak up at the seminar although they were very vocal, one-on-one, at the cocktails.

One question I got during the presentation was how could young people introduce new ideas, such as social media and mobile, into the conferences and exhibitions industry when it was run largely by an older generation who’ve grown up with the traditional model of “we build it, they come and buy and sell” or “we organise it, they come and listen”.

Industry conferences such as this, and others I have attended, are still mainly attended by the older generation who don’t pay for their younger staff to attend. This is true particularly in Asia where a lot of businesses in this sector are family-run.

To prepare for the presentation, I did an informal poll on WIT’s Facebook page on “What do Gen Y want from conferences?”

These were some of the answers:
• An open atmosphere, one that welcomes newcomers, less serious suits
• Infrastructure and planning to facilitate social media; solid wifi, onstage answers to Twitter stream, pre-planned official hashtags. “We will do the rest as long as it’s there.”
• “The whole ‘we’re the speakers and we’ll sit up here and you’ll just be good and sit down there and listen to us’ spiel doesn’t quite work.”
• Managers should be encouraging their young staff to attend conferences and help introduce them so they expand their networks. After all, it’s the Gen Ys (and younger) who will be running the industry down the line.
• When our companies pay for it, they send “senior” people who tend to not be Gen Y-ers.
• If managers are not sending their staff to events, then event organisers need to think about the pricing that events are set at.

All food for thought for the business events industry as social media becomes mainstream, smartphones are everywhere and a generational shift occurs in Asia.

Pictured: Preecha Chen who looks after Reed Exhibitions in China talked about how the industry needed to prepare for the impact of China.