Friday was an amazing day.
The conference gathered hundred people from all over europe and we even had a visitor from Canada. The organization went well, the catering was great and both speakers and attendees seemed to be very happy at the end of the day : it was a real success for a firts venue.
How all this happened
Back in july, trapped between Adrian’enthousiasm back from the WWDC and my perception of the marketing potential of the iPhone and the frustration to see no planned event around the iPhone, we decided to create ours. Most companies are lagging behind in understanding and using new media.
They missed the train for the web and shall now not miss that of mobile. You might think mobiles are there forever and that the iPhone is only just another device. In fact it opens up an entirely new perspective, of exactly the same kind as the web 2.0 wave. So 3 months ago we decided to create a conference about the iPhone and our approach was to discuss first with decision makers because this is how you can move things.
We wanted to concentrate on the marketing potential. Taking the decision to organize such an event is not easy I guess but it appeared to us as a pure necessity : we had to do it.
The organization
Then the organization took us 3 months out of which 2 were intensively devoted to communicating, finding speakers, inviting people and looking for sponsors. I think we can be proud of what we did since we managed to get 100 invitees, great presentations and a smoothly running organization. Things went as expected and we got some interesting presentations.
Of course, as a first venue, we can consider improving things. But to be honest, we had a lot of good feedback (which we will check with the survey) and some great contacts.
The sponsors
We hardly break even financially due to the total lack of implication of paying sponsors (don’t get us wrong we had wonderful sponsors helping us for visibility, see below). I must say that I am not happy with this sponsoring part, namely with the telecom industry and the communication agencies. Is it the crisis effect ? Too early ? To new ? The first venue ? Probably a mix of all this…
Instead of complaining that nothing happens and that creative people are not around, they should support such projects as it clearly breaks barriers and leverages ideas…
So here is my call, we need support to do more and better.
Please help us !
However, some really important sponsors help us and namely for the visibility. And we owe them a lot for their support without which we would not have had this success.
Bilan immediately supported us and I am really impressed with how they helped us whether with the advertising or the speaker. Thierry Weber and Klewel had an amazing implication, namely filing the event and helping us to get our content shared.
Considering the time & money it involves, I think we can only be really thankful to them for that. I take the opportunity to advertise their service as keeping a trace of your event REALLY is key to your visibility. So whatever event you plan to organize, make sure you get a budget for that and contact Klewel & Thierry.
All our other sponsors helped us so much on promoting the event that I really want to thank them, namely the SAWI, 20minutes, emailvision or the swissmarketing club.
Participants
We managed to gather some really different speakers but our success comes mainly from our participants. 30% of them were technical which means that most of the participant were either decisions makers or marketing / sales related.
What is next?
We already have a lot of ideas for next year but were not expecting so many people to be asking us when our next event was going to be planned. So the feedback is really positive and gives us some very good reasons to keep up in this direction. Stay tuned to follow our ideas 😀
