Last month, at the suggestion of Siew Hoon, I attended ICCA in Leipzig, Germany with a presentation entitled“Building a distinctive event-brand with a unique, irreverent personality”.
There are no prizes on offer for guessing correctly who that ‘personality’ is.
For those of you who don’t know, ICCA is the International Congress and Convention Association, and I suppose you could call its annual event the ‘Conference of Conferences’.
For those of you who know WIT and share in the fun that it represents, you will not be surprised to hear that building my presentation and delivering it in an as enthusiastic way as possible was not difficult. Indeed, several people were kind enough to comment on the passion that came across during my 25 minutes in front of them.
What was particularly interesting and quite comforting too, given that my presentation was on the last morning, was the recurrence of certain themes running through much of the conference content.
WIT, of course, is about many things but would be very different if it wasn’t for the fact that it is very experience based, very collaborative, positively participative and on top of the trends of the day.
And whilst WIT has, to a large extent, embraced these aspects, grown up with them and been prepared to experiment and innovate, it was a little surprising to me to understand that the broader conference world is still, in some sense and in many cases, still coming to terms with these trends and looking at ways to embrace them.
As I mentioned, it was comforting to see these conference-trend topics emerge on the days before my presentation and know that I could speak from the heart and with passion about WIT knowing that they form a large part of what makes WIT both special and unique.
We even had a whole presentation (quite a good one it should be noted) on experience marketing and creating experiential engagements between customers and their brands. Some of you may be raising your eyebrows reading this – “we’ve been hearing about this for a while now, haven’t we?” Yes – we have – you have. But there are plenty of people who apparently haven’t and, even if they have, don’t know how to implement.
I’m used to being an early adopter and the reactions that that can invoke – checking in of Foursquare everywhere I go, for example, and having people wonder what the heck I am doing and why. But I’ve thought over the last six months or a year or so that people are surely coming to grips with the more mainstream Social Media things like Facebook and Twitter, right?
Wrong. There are still a lot of people out there for whom even the most mainstream aspects of Social Media (if that phrase makes sense) like Twitter and Facebook are still veiled in mystery and cloaked with the unknown.
Not a theme in the same way but more of a broader trend was the formal acknowledgment of Gen Y. (Something that WIT more than makes a nod towards with WITNext and all that surrounds those efforts). There was at least one formal session where understanding and communicating with these young folks formed the core subject matter. Again, this was a subject where there was plenty of potential for education amongst the, shall we say, older demographics.
I always get a little nervous during the days before a presentation and then that nervousness turns to more positive excitement as the actual hour approaches.
In Leipzig my excitement was re-doubled when I realized that we really are doing something very right with WIT – a brand and a conference that does way more than understand the trends of the day.
WIT, as you know (and if you don’t, you should probably find out) jumps right in and invites everyone to be participative and collaborative and acknowledges that the experiential thing is growing and evolving from year to year and, like all great innovators, isn’t afraid to make mistakes.
