Mediocrity Can Be The Standard For Conferences

Your conference is all about the attendees’ experience.

So that’s where successful and innovative conference ideas are born and raised. At the intersection of meetings logistics, programming and the attendees’ experience.

Distributing cutting-edge and new information is no longer the winning formula for a successful conference experience. Today access to just-in-time-internet-information only makes the competition for experience more important.

Put The Focus On The Attendees’ Experience

Your conference should focus on the attendees’ experience!

It’s about your attendees’ experience with the content. With each other. With exhibitors and sponsors. With the conference host organization. With the venue. With the local city.

As long as you continue to focus just on the meetings logistics, you’ll continue to produce mediocre conference experiences. You have to shift from focusing on just logistics, to creating experiences.

The savvy conference organizer has an instinctive ability to know what the attendees will want and enjoy, even before the attendees know it. They also have an unconditional belief and persistence to push their team to create an experience that “no one has ever done before!”

Why? They know that a mediocre experience is the obvious conference killer!

Rules For The Crappy Conference Experience

Here are 15 platitudes on mediocrity that planners should avoid!

1. Plateaued conference revenue is on the plateau of irrelevance and edge of decline.
2. Attendees love mediocrity. It turns them on! Who doesn’t want to pay for average experiences with average exhibitors at average venues by average speakers underwritten by average sponsors with average food? Attendees love lukewarm!
3. Mediocrity is the new excellence! It’s better than sliced bread.
4. Shoot for mediocrity. After all it’s still above failing. Unfortunately, it is on the road to obscurity.
5. When the conference bar is set low enough, all conferences are exceptional.
6. Your conference stakeholders, especially sponsors and exhibitors, want and reward mediocrity.
7. A steady safe conference experience without any hairball raising ideas or innovations is an invitation to mediocrity.
8. Conference organizers enjoy planning the weakest link.
9. To relieve stress, conference organizers should settle for mediocrity.
10. Embracing mediocrity means never having to worry about living up to the hype.
11. Mediocrity is a slow decay; a decay into nothingness.
12. Mediocrity empowers everyone involved.
13. Mediocrity can lead to the Hall Of Shame or the Golden Conference Razzie. (Hey, at least it’s an award for something.)
14. Mediocrity punishes nonbelievers of the average experience.
15. Not every conference organizer can achieve everything. If they did, the value of everything would be nothing. So at least settle for mediocrity.

What other conference platitudes on mediocrity would you add to the list? When are you or your boss willing to pay for your average conference experience?