With the shift toward more collaborative and participatory experiences and the rise of social media in events, audience-generated content (which can range from actual program material to event reviews) has assumed greater value. In effect, events have started to become more audience-driven, and organizers have relinquished some of their control over their planning. The application of audience- generated content has been particularly evident at "unconferences."
Changing consumer attitudes—including a strong desire to control the marketing messages they receive and pull content that meets their needs—are helping drive audience-generated content, maintains Jeff Hurt, director of engagement and education at Velvet Chainsaw Consulting. In this environment, new forms of audience-generated event content are emerging, including peer-to-peer roundtables, where hot-topic discussions begin in social media forums and continue at physical events, he observes. Audiences have become more involved in developing topics for events, through such formats as open source forums, bringing their own knowledge to such events.
Audience-generated content injects a freshness, vitality, and spontaneity into conferences and helps broaden their scope by offering more diverse perspectives. It makes events more meaningful and memorable for attendees, because audiences become part of the event experience, according to Kenny Lauer, executive director of digital experience for the George P. Johnson Co. Audiences can help promote events by driving traffic from their friends to events for which they create content, he notes.
Dennis Shiao, vice president of product marketing for InXpo, maintains that audience-generated content has become a more integral part of the show experience, as events shift toward empowering attendees and allowing them to create show material themselves. A perfect example of the trend is unconferences, which have no predetermined structure, and which are created and determined by attendees on the spot, he says. Event audiences clearly want to be empowered, and they are participating as "publishers" of event material on such user-generated platforms as blogs and YouTube.
One of the best examples of "audience influence" on events was the viral spread of audience-generated content at a conference at the 2008 South by Southwest (popularly known as SXSW), an annual music, film, and technology festival in Austin, TX. At that event, Sarah Lacey interviewed Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. The event took off largely based on Twitter feeds from attendees, which spread virally and generated great attention for the event, Shiao contends.
John Jainschigg, director of Internet and community at Ziff Davis Enterprise, believes audience-generated content of any kind enables richer and more powerful collaborational and networking experiences for attendees, by expanding the real-time and asynchronous online conversation around events, and generating additional valuable knowledge that becomes part of the Web-based archival history of those events.
But audience-generated content must be properly applied and filtered to work effectively in events. Lauer maintains that a well-defined strategy is necessary to exploit audience-generated content. Event organizers must afford their audiences the option of determining the kind of content they'd like to develop for their events. In addition, audience-generated content must be a deliberate and strategic part of events in order to be effective, he emphasizes. Joshua Rush, account executive and exhibit marketing strategist at Echelon Design Inc., emphasizes that audience-generated content must be interesting and entertaining to have a real impact, and that relatively few people are adept at developing such content. Ultimately, that kind of content must offer added value to succeed, he stresses.
Audience-generated content is expected to grow significantly in events. Rush expects that there will be much greater use of it in events, especially as attendees become more proficient at creating event-related content. He predicts that there will be a much greater number of opportunities for audience-generated content to reach broad audiences, fueled by the growth of such devices as smartphones.
Sam Smith, an event technology consultant and editor of the Interactive Meeting Technology blog, sees audience-generated content, including critiques and reviews of shows, growing in importance. He believes much more people will want to create event-related content and possess the right tools to publish that content. As an increasing number of people become familiar with publishing tools for user-generated content, they'll use those tools more often to create event-related material, he predicts.
In summary, audience-generated content will play a significant role in the transformation of events into more vibrant, open-ended, multidimensional, and richer experiences.
Excerpted from "Social Media in the New Event World" by Michael Mascioni
Michael Mascioni is a conference planner and freelance writer on digital media. He also conducts market research work in digital media. He can be reached at [email protected].
Originally published Sept. 1, 2010