Re: is there no IBM Technical Conf this year?

On 16-Jan-08, at 10:28 AM, midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Typically the venue's other than COMMON or IBM tech conferences pick their
location with amenities in mind. I suppose in an effort to get enrollment
fees from those who want an all expense paid vacation and who may never
attend the conference.

ALL national conferences pick their location with amenities in mind Rob. IBM are typically in Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, San Fran. COMMON's recent conferences have been in Miami, Orlando and Anaheim and the upcoming event is at Opryland. Our upcoming event is in Orlando, but the last one was in Minneapolis - a real vacation city!

Given a choice of going to (say) Las Vegas or Seattle (to use West coast examples) the vast majority of people are more likely to ask their manager to send them to a Vegas event than to one in Seattle. That is a simple fact.

Years ago, a large percentage of people signed up well in advance of the conference - usually far enough in advance to allow you to adjust room blocks and other financial commitments if registration numbers were below expectation. In recent years that is just not the case. In fact for most events these days you are past your cancel dates etc. before you even get even a tiny fraction of the registrations. Most people sign up (relatively) at the last minute and so to minimize the chances of taking a financial bath you have no choice but to pick locations based on the draw of the venue.

Frankly, in my experience, your manager is _completely_ wrong about the behavior of attendees at altenate events. If the conference is sufficiently engrossing and is providing what the audience wants, they stay in their seats regardless of where you locate the event. We keep very careful records of "bums in seats" throughout our events and in fact the number of local attendees who leave early to avoid traffic has been shown to be a far greater factor than "vacation" locations.



Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com