Mike Maney

But it’s not just me. The NextWeb’s Brad McCarty gets paid to be skeptical. He gets paid to attend and cover tech conferences (okay, maybe I’m oversimplifying what Brad does and maybe — okay, definitely — attending a bunch of other conferences that are focused on sponsors and vendors is not all that glamorous). But Brad hits on something I’ve felt at every Gluecon since I started attending: I go there to get smart, but, damn if I don’t feel really dumb by about halfway through the opening keynote. The content and people are that good. In the words of Gluecon’s founder and organizer, Eric Norlin: “If I can understand it, it doesn’t go on the agenda.”

The tech conference market is evolving. The ROI has shifted. It’s no longer about the leads generated (we have the web for that) or about who has the bigger booth (and don’t get me started on booth babes). It’s shifted to a recognition that the community matters more than the conference. Smart marketers get it and are adapting. Some insights from my own experience with Gluecon:

(1) Stop marketing. Become part of the conference rather than someone guarding a costly booth full of printed collateral. If you stopped by the Alcatel-Lucent lounge at Gluecon, you may or may not find us there. There’s a better chance you’d find us mingling and speaking to attendees instead of pitching them approved corporate marketing bullet points.

(2) Buy a round instead of collateral. Nobody wants paper at a conference. Nobody. Take the money you would have spent on a glossy brochure and buy a round at the hotel bar. That’s how we funded the post-CloudCamp get-together.

(3) Kill the vendor pitch and have some fun. A speaker’s job is threefold: Inform, entertain…and finish early. Drop the corporate pitch and talk like the expert you are. Don’t be afraid to let your hair down (says the bald guy). Laura spoke about beer. Beaker spoke about “Sh*t His Cloud Evangelist Says.” James Governor spoke about…well, we’re still trying to figure it out but it had something to do with the similarities between the paleo food chain and developers. Each, like every other keynote, was filled with smart information that challenged you to think beyond what you expected to think about at the conference and was delivered in a creative, non-stuffy manner.

(4) Speaking of Beaker… You’ll remember earlier in this post that I mentioned Alcatel-Lucent is the lead underwriter of the conference. Now, in a traditional conference, that would mean we’d probably ask (and get) all kinds of concessions from the organizer about who and what was on stage. That’s not the way we or Eric play it at Gluecon. Christopher Hoff — the aforementioned Beaker — is a former big shot at Cisco. He’s currently a big swinging kahuna at Juniper. No shock to know that Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Juniper are sworn mortal enemies ready to slice each other’s throats to win in the marketplace. Beaker was the day one opening keynote. And I’d have had it no other way, underwriter or not. The right person for the right job. Plus, he knows a bunch of jiujitsu-like stuff, so it’s not like Eric or I were going to tell him no. This is all a way of saying that if you’re really part of a community, it’s okay (no, required) to let down your competitive dukes and work together to educate.

(5) Rethink your ROI. The metrics for traditional conferences usually revolve around leads and customer meetings. Gluecon is not one of those conferences, at least from a traditional sense. For us, it’s about supporting the community we work in, doing what we can to make it stronger and smarter. Sure, we walked away with quite a few business development and partnership opportunities, but they happened because of conversations we had away from the booth or because people realized we were one of them and not just there to sell.