360Conferences

Tom sent me this video, It's long, but worth every minute. It's about youtube, but the community aspects really resonate with us, on a 360|Flex level.



This one, I came across and sent to Tom. It speaks (through Gary's voice) to why we do it at all. My favorite quote, which really rang true in the tech conference space, was "Listening to your users, great, but giving a shit about them, that's huge!" That's not verbatum, but close. And I agree. Lots of conferences and conference organizers, claim to "be community" and say they "Listen" but in my experience, that's totally bogus. They may ask questions, but don't seem to act on the answers, and "being community" is more about having a lot of people in attendance, but not really caring that they enjoy themselves, or that they get something out of the event.



Tom and I run 360Conferences at night, because we have to. We didn't look at the job and think, "Well we've got jobs, so we can't start this business". We just started it, in the time we have. Sure we don't want to keep it as a side job, we hope to pay ourselves to do what we enjoy, if not love, but in the mean time, we do what we have to do, to serve our customers and community.

Take a look at these, when you have time, the Gary V. one is only a few minutes long, so watch it now :)

What do you think?

I was watching this video by Michael Wesch (Thanks Steve for the link)  It got me to thinking about business and community.  For John and I, the two are linked for two reasons:

1. Our business is serving the community.  With no community, we have no business.
2. We participate in the communities we serve.  We're real people, not faceless business owners.

Michael makes the case for cultural inversion in his video:


The concept is people express one thing but really value another thing.  Here's how I see those 3 inversions manifest themselves in the Flex community and our business.

Individualism vs Community

A majority of our attendees and nearly all our speakers blog.  It's normally a personal blog, though a few are grouped (Adobe Blogs, InsideRIA).  This is where their individualism shines through.  These same people though also are the biggest advocates for our show.  They use their individual blog to invite their community (readers) to meet up with and hang out with them at our show.  Thus our community is actually comprised of many smaller communities agreeing to meet at one specific time and place.

The company (360Conferences) itself is two individuals: John Wilker and me (Tom Ortega).  We have no office.  John lives and works in Colorado, while I live and work in California.  We both have personal blogs aside from the business blog.  On our own blogs, we post on very different topics:  John's are usually techy with hip and wit tossed in, while mine are mushy with tech thrown in.  Our styles are different: His are quick and stream-of-conscience, while mine are lenghty and (re)edited for days before posting.  Yet, he and I together help form and create the 360|Flex community.  A community that would exist in parts had we not created our biz, but a community that we proudly claim as our own.

Independence vs Relationships

Everyone screams of being independent: Doug McCune with his 'hawk and frank speech, Jesse Warden on being your own boss, and every developer who wishes they could pick and choose which projects to work on.  Independence and relationships, however, live in a strange, self-feeding, yin-yang circle.

By being independent in our thoughts and in our actions, we attract like minded people.  This attraction leads to discussions, which in turn leads to relationships.  These relationships at times become business opportunities (consulting jobs on code, teaching, etc).  The money from those biz opps then turn right back around and allow the independence to continue and move to a higher level.

We're independent from Adobe.  That is single handedly the hardest concept hotels and vendors have with us.  Here's the typical conversation:

Them: "What's the show about?"
Us:"A product from Adobe called Flex."
Them: "Oh, you work for Adobe?"
Us: "No, we just put on a show about their product."
Them: "Oh so they hire you to do this?"
 Us: "Well, they sponsor the show, but no they don't hire us to do this."
Them: "Oh, so you work for a big company that does trade shows?"
Us: "No, we are the entire company.  We'll be negotiating the deal with you and signing the checks."
Them: "Oh, okay.  I see."

They really don't see, but that's okay.  John and I often think about our relationship with Adobe and  other big companies.  I always thought it would be dreamy to maybe cozy up with them more, but I recently read this.  I now see that to not lose focus on our customers, we'd have to stay independent.  (Let the record show, John was never so much on the partner kick as I was.  See, toldja he's the smart one.)

Commercialization vs Authenticity

lonelygirl15, which Michael mentions, best illustrates this point.  She was a lonely teen that people fell in love with via her vlog on YouTube.  Then it came to light that lonelygirl was a fake and not so lonely.  There was a mad uproar as the community fought back for being duped. What's odd is that businesses which serve customers (and thus by default, communities) are at times at odds with community.  I'm thinking of Paramount attacking Star Trek fansites in the early days.  Or Coke copyrighting their shade of red and banning it's usage.  Or even more recently, the iPhone and the ban against discussing it's SDK (The ban is now gone, I know but I'm making a point here).  There are many businesses that supposedly care about you, but make it so hard to let you show how much you care.

We want to grow the Flex community with 360|Flex.  Therefore, since that's our goal, we need to try to do that as best we can.  The best way to do that is to do it cheaply and easily.  With 360|Flex, we try to keep the cost low.  We do have to charge for attending our show because the meeting space, food, speaker rooms, etc aren't given to us for free. Thus, we're commercial in our business because we have to be. But we generate a lot of content, over 40 sessions per show.  We have so many sessions that even as an attendee, you can't see them all.  Surely, we could do something with them, right?  We needed to stick to that authenticity aspect of our goal.

We tried selling videos of the presenters.  That didn't work out so hot though, even though we kept the price cheap.  Our distribution reach was way too small to make that successful.  Adobe came to us with an interesting offer before our last 360|Flex though.  "Let us record all your sessions and rebroadcast them for free."  At first, the business side of me was hesitant.  "Don't do it! Why will people pay to come to your show, when they can watch it for free later?"  I quickly came to my senses and said, "For the same reason they come now, to meet with and interact with the community."  I think Ryan's post best exemplifies what I mean by that.  People come to our shows not only to learn FROM one other, but to also learn OF one another and become a tighter community.

John and I try to be authentic as well in all our dealings with customers (we greet you all at the reg desk) to our vendors (we chat with them in the same manner as you).  One of the most interesting aspects for me is seeing how people react to our authenticity. Many hotel coordinators tell us the same thing, "We want you back.  Not because of your money, but because you guys are not like everyone else."  Aside from wearing flip flops (me) and being funny (John), I guess we're just not pretentious or distant like other conference planners are.  It's odd to me to hear that, but nice to be that breath of fresh air for them.

It's also funny to hear the shock in people's voice when they call the "company number" and they get me.  "Like, Tom the guy running the show?"  LOL  If only my friends, wife and kids held me with that kind of awe.  Life would be much easier at times.

Business is an odd beast for sure.  Like I told John, the road seems long and lonely at times, but then we get to a show and life is grand.  There's nothing like meeting a customer face to face and making that connection.  Yes, Michael's post is about YouTube and connecting virtually while our "product" is about connecting physically.  However, I don't doubt that soon enough, we'll be seeing YouTube conferences popping up.  Hmmmm....now that's an idea.  Who's up for a YouTube conference?

In a previous post , an anonymous commenter recently asked John this question: "Why is this post specific to CFUnited when there are so many other conferences that charge the same, if not more (i.e. Max)?"

It was actually my post, not John's. Therefore, I'll answer the question as to why CFU since John covered the why not MAX part.

If you glance back at the post, you'll see this as the opener: "Based on some info on this post by Sean Corfield, the ticket sales from the last CFUnited event equals the total cost of all 5 360|Flex shows and all 3 CF.Objective() shows."

This post was continuing the conversation on a topic chosen by Sean Corfield on his blog. I didn't "single out" CFUnited (CFU), but rather picked up on a point presented by Sean. If you read the "Final Math" section of Sean's post, you'll see that Sean was simply stating that he didn't see the value of CFU and felt that CF.Objective (CFO) was a better show for the money in 2008. That got me to thinking about how many CFO shows could be produced with roughly the same sales figures from CFU. So I asked Jared for his rough numbers, in chatting with him I gave him our rough numbers (though our numbers are wide open, I didn't expect Jared to know them off the top of his head). At that point, we realized that all of our shows were covered by roughly the sales figure from the latest CFU. Like John says, we're in the conference business so we can make a good guess based on numbers, costs, etc. Yes, we believe in transparency and believe everyone else in business should too. (I think not being transparent is sad, scary, and destructive i.e. look at the recent $700B bailout for financial businesses not being transparent and therefore, sadly, not honest.)

I am NOT insinuating that Liz and company are dishonest in any way by not being transparent. Liz sounds like a great person and Michael was a very nice guy last time I hung out with him at MAX. I can only assume their lack of openness is because they feel their numbers are an integral part of their business (a competitive edge) OR they're afraid of how their customers would react to seeing the numbers without knowing the facts behind them. I'll assume it's the former since many businesses do hold that belief and thus I can't blame them for holding such a belief. John and I don't agree with that mode of thinking though, because to us the magic in a service oriented business is not in costs as those are primarily fixed. Sure, you might be able to pay $3 for a soda vs $3.25 but really, it's still expensive as heck. Rather, to us, the secret sauce is customer service and attitudes towards what is important. I.e. Flash on the Beach (FOTB) thinks lunch is unnecessary and spends the money that would've gone on food to cover speaker costs. We think lunch is important as a network opp, which prevents us from getting some speakers who only speak if all costs are covered. Is FOTB right and us wrong? Or vice-versa? I can't say, only customers can. However, because some speakers decline to speak at our show due to us not paying all expenses, that means we have to homegrow speakers and seek out newcomers to the "speaking circuit". I think everyone benefits from this. The popular speakers travel less and more speakers move into the spotlight. These new speakers then become available to all shows (i.e. look at Doug McCune. I had to convince him to present at 360|Flex Seattle despite his "What would I present on?" attitude and last month he spoke at FOTB. I'm not saying I "made" Doug into the great programmer and speaker he is, but I did help nudge and bring him into the speaking scene.)

There are many topics (and shows) we talk about internally, but didn't pertain to the topic that Sean brought up. If you read our blog, you'll see we talk about many shows in their own respective posts. I was merely going to post a comment on Sean's post, but instead it turned out much too wordy for a comment and thus I wrote the post. (Much like this was going to be a comment to the Anonymous comment, but again I got all wordy.) If you look at Sean's comments, I'm second to last. The last one being Sean who was very interested in my insider's perspective on an issue he brought up. An insider's perspective that Liz could've commented on and cleared the air about at that time.

Fast forward to October 10th and you see the announcement from CFU about the formation of Stellr. Fast forward to the 15th and you see Sean being glad CFU listened and CFU being glad that Sean noticed they listened. Now, is the whole Stellr thing due in part to the discussion had by Sean and I? Or was Stellr in the works for years and it just coincidentally launched after a "poor" show in 2008? Is Stellr going to gear CFU to target some of CFOs attendees in an attempt to win back market share? Will Stellr borrow concepts from the lower cost shows in an attempt to win back the hearts of it's detractors?

I don't know, but I applaud their efforts. I'm eager to see what Stellr has to offer and, if need be, competing with them for customers. Any time a company begins to listen to it's customers, only good things can follow. Competition, good competition, makes for a better product for customers. Is that something you agree with Anonymous? (Also, why comment anonymously? Really, do you think we're gonna track you down and start spamming you with hate email or something? LOL)