Orchestrating the (IT) Experience

October 15, 2008

Orchestrating the (IT) Experience
By Mark Tidwell

Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine you are in charge of events for a major technology brand. You’re about to welcome over 10,000 customers and prospects to your company’s business-critical annual customer event. Months, perhaps more than a year have gone into planning the experience. Sales, marketing, product teams—everyone is ready. The details have been endless. The menu has been viewed and reviewed down to the smallest coffee break. The registration process has been planned to the minute. The exhibition show floor is flawless. But there’s one thing you may have given very little thought to: as part of the experience, each and every one of those 10,000 attendees expects to be able to connect to the internet on-site, at your event, with the ease of logging on in the office or at Starbucks. Simple, right? Every venue has internet access these days.

Well, actually, not so simple. Your attendees all carry a BlackBerry or iPhone or both, so they’re not going to use the internet just to check email: they’re going to watch videos of the keynote and download multimedia files; their internet needs require big bandwidth. They are used to living in a Web 2.0 world and they expect you to keep them connected when they come to your event. Delivering anything short of this expectation will create a negative experience for them and will make your company seem “old school” (what could be worse than that?).

If you haven’t planned for this moment, your options are not great. You can throw money at the problem and hire an IT vendor to light up the entire event space with free Wi-Fi—which, for such a large event, could cost in the high six figures. Assuming this not an option, you could try to avoid the massive expense by providing isolated Wi-Fi or lesser bandwidth—but then you have to pray that 10,000 attendees don’t all try to get online at once. If they can’t get the bandwidth they need, they will go right to twitter and spread bad buzz about the quality of what you’re providing at your event.

There’s another way to approach this issue—and that is to make sure that you or your event agency has a designated director of event technology and infrastructure on board who can plan, integrate and oversee implementation of technology on-site and throughout your event touchpoints. The director of event technology and infrastructure’s job is to serve as a link between the creative marketing and production people in charge of orchestrating the experience and the technology people responsible for building the network infrastructure to support it. Optimally, he or she is a technologist first and foremost, but also one who understands experiential design and has a long tenure in the world of events. A good technology director ensures the highest quality technical experience but knows how to save on technology costs.

So how does a director of event technology and infrastructure do it? Well, speaking as one who helps Jack Morton Worldwide’s clients with large-scale customer and user conferences, we focus on three key areas:

Orchestrate Event IT to Improve Attendee Experience: If poorly planned you can waste a lot of money bringing Wi-Fi to an event with little added benefit to the attendee experience. We get involved in the early planning stages to design Wi-Fi into intentional, highly targeted zones within the experience. We focus on the user experience and ensure that Wi-Fi is where we want the user to be, not the other way around. This not only saves cost but also adds strategic value to our clients and the attendees. For example, at a recent customer conference, we knew there were going to be lines outside of the breakout rooms while attendees waited for their training session to begin. We situated Wi-Fi in these select zones so that we could transform a nuisance (waiting in line) into a benefit (no wasted time). Signage clearly marked the areas so that all attendees knew what to expect and where to expect it.
Plan Event IT to Generate Revenue: If Wi-Fi and other technology touchpoints are left to the last stages of planning, you may miss opportunities to generate additional sponsor revenue. For one of our clients, we laid the infrastructure groundwork early enough to ensure that splash pages for Wi-Fi and event kiosks could be offered as part of the sponsorship package. This increased our sponsorship revenue and further improved ROI. We also have elevated the experience design by coordinating sponsorship of specific IT touchpoints with other elements of the event space, such as specific areas on the show floor where we want to drive traffic on behalf of our clients and their sponsors.
Ensure That Technology Touchpoints Are Fully Integrated: Large-scale technology events not only require connectivity for the attendee but also often feature highly complex demonstrations of hardware, software and technology applications. It is important for someone to coordinate all of the technology infrastructure needs so that the network is capable of servicing each requirement without a reduction in bandwidth or additional expense. Recently, we were able to reduce costs by leveraging the Wi-Fi being brought into the venue for demonstrations that were taking place on the show floor.

In the end, the opportunities and potential pitfalls of building and managing a proper IT infrastructure at an event are as critical as ensuring that the content is valuable, the venue is comfortable, the food is good and the wait times are kept to a minimum. And yet the amount of time that most event planners commit to dealing with the technology infrastructure is usually minimal.

We all know that when an experience is negative, the word gets out immediately through twitter and other blogs. We also know that when all elements go well, the attendee’s view of the brand is so positive that they become a passion advocate helping to market the brand throughout their sphere of influence. You can’t afford to leave anything to chance.

By designating a director of event technology and infrastructure at your next event, you’ll be able to rest assured that a critical element of the attendee experience is being managed aggressively and appropriately and that your attendees will be informed and connected across every important technology touchpoint.

Mark Tidwell is an IT Specialist and director of event technology and infrastructure at Jack Morton.