ownership Archives : Conferences That Work

Friends don’t let friends give away their content

Monday, January 9th, 2017 by Adrian Segar

Friends don’t let friends give away their original content to third-party platforms
I’ve been saying this for years, but do people listen? No, they don’t. Don’t give away control of your content.

Let me be clear. By all means share your content for free on any of the gazillion social media platforms available. And if you can get paid appropriately for creating content for others, good for you. Otherwise, make sure that your content remains under your control. Don’t give away control of your content.

Why? Well, here are a few reminders:

Geocities was once the third most visited site on the internet. 38 million user-built pages! Nothing but a distant memory now, unless you live in Japan.
Remember when your friends saw everything you posted on Facebook? Not anymore, unless you pay up.
Ah, those glorious days when you posted something in a LinkedIn group and a significant number of people would read it! Long gone.

Now the blog host site Medium has announced a layoff of a third of its staff. There are millions of posts on the site. Will Evan Williams pull the plug? Will social journalism survive? Who knows?

Get the picture? Posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Don’t do it!

Instead, invest in your own website

There are plenty of great platforms available, and lots of fine web hosting services to run them on. For example, this site uses WordPress on a Dreamhost VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Though this route involves more work and/or money than posting on a third-party platform, you:

Control your own content. You can add, edit, delete, and control comments on it at any time.
Determine how your content is presented. Want to insert an offer for your services or products in the middle of a blog post? No problem.
Retain full rights to your content. (One example: the rights to anything you post to Huffington Post belongs to them. And they don’t even pay you for the privilege of writing for them!)
Build your own brand, authority, and SEO, not that of a third-party site.
Maintain access to your content. If your web hosting service goes bankrupt or is unsatisfactory, you can transfer your content to a new host. As long as the internet is up and you pay for your hosting service, your content will be available.

16 years ago, I started the Conferences That Work website you’re reading. As expected, hardly anyone visited initially. As I steadily added content (at least once per week), viewership grew. Today, this site is the world’s most popular website on meeting design and related issues.

As a result, my website is now the largest source of client inquiries for my consulting and facilitating services — something I would never have predicted when it went live in 2009. The ever-growing body of articles on this blog and the inbound links to them continue to build my brand, authority, and SEO.

This has been a PSA from Adrian Segar.

Tags: blogging, content, control, FaceBook, Geocities, Huffington Post, LinkedIn, medium, ownership, PSA, social media, web hosting| Posted in Social media | 2 Comments »

Who owns your event?

Monday, June 20th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Who owns an event?

Who owns an event? The usual answer to this question is “the event’s sponsors”. They are the people and organizations that decide to hold the event and contribute the resources needed for the event to occur. Sponsors typically define the context, format, scope, and desired outcomes of an event, so they are clearly owners.

But I think there are other plausible answers to this question.

Increasingly we are moving to event models that make participants generators of event value. Conferences that leverage all the expertise in the room, rather than the contributions of a few experts. Meetings that become what the participants want and need them to be, autofocusing on the topics and questions that are of genuine relevance, rather than sessions predefined six months in advance.

Yes, sponsors define an event’s boundaries and make it happen (for which we should all be grateful). But at participant-driven and participation-rich meetings, the shaping and contributions that participants provide are crucial for the event’s success. Without this input, such events are worth very little, so isn’t it fair to say that, under these circumstances, the participants are owners of the event as well?

Another way to think about event ownership

There’s another way to think of event ownership. As facilitator Dan Newman points out:

“…participants enter an event owning practically nothing, but they come out the other end owning a powerful experience constructed of things they’ve seen, heard or heard themselves say.”
—Dan Newman, From the Front of the Room: Notes on Facilitation for Experienced Practitioners

If we think of an event as the thing that happened between the moments when the first attendee arrived and the last person left, we are ignoring the changes in the knowledge, viewpoints, and connections, and the subsequent outcomes that the event created. The participants not only own their event experience but also the consequences of their participation. The changes that result loop back on the event’s sponsors, influencing their future choices. Thus, participants are event owners because, to some extent, they control what happens next.

Conclusion

So, who owns an event? I like the idea that both sponsors and participants are the owners of events. By consciously bringing participants into the realm of ownership, we widen the community that makes the event what it is, and this benefits all the players.

Tags: Dan Newman, event ownership, owners, ownership, participants, sponsors| Posted in Event design | No Comments »