The Conference Case

Martin Thurnquist, Director of the Conference by Media Evolution So what we do is that we really use the video archive to stay in touch with our community throughout the year. We do an annual event, so our iteration time is very, very slow. But the video archive allows us to gain trust in the community on a day-to-day basis. My name is Martin Thurnquist, I'm the director of the conference by Media Evolution. We help our audience explore complexity in the digital world. And we do that by looking at three main topics that are human behaviors, new technology, and how to make things happen. What are the main purposes of the conference? One of the big purposes of the conference is that we want to share the knowledge that is gained in our context. And so only a thousand people are able to attend. So our way of growing that audience is to record, live stream, and put this content into a video archive. We try to recontextualize the content. And we do that by putting it up on Facebook and Twitter, like kind of one by one, or in combining them together into new themes. When you give something for free, you're able to actually build the trust with your community that is otherwise really, really hard to do. Just today, actually, we were contacted by a group of people, we were contacted by Al Jazeera, the American version of Al Jazeera, that had seen a woman called Nonny de la Pena in our video archive and asked if they could use the material. So once again, I just think it shows how the kind of sharing is caring model works and how that kind of gets our name out in the world just by giving away what we already have. When one of our videos is shared in another context, it just makes the audience so much bigger. So what I really, really like about the product is that you can use it for the live event, to stream it to the public, then right away publish that content onto the video archive, and then start using kind of the nifty tools of actions and interactions to actually sell the coming event. So what we do is that right after the conference, we make people sign up to our newsletter, and then as the event approaches, we use actions, so when people pass, for example, you get this thing, you want to buy a ticket to the conference next year. This just makes it really, really great for us to integrate the trust-making content with a sales opportunity. One thing that kind of surprises me over and over again is how people keep referring to the talks that we have, both in terms of, you know, tweeting about them, but also when we do workshops or when I talk to people that have been at the conference, I see how they kind of refer to the video archive. And also I've heard lots of stories of companies that only can afford to send like one employee to the conference, and then when they come back, they do like internal seminars using the content that we have at the conference. I just think that's a wonderful way of doing it.