Back in the day, while I was working remotely for an ebook company, I was asked to go to a conference that was happening locally. Yay, I said, I love conferences!
“And go to the receptions and talk up the company. Tell them they really should be doing business with us, hand out cards. Give ’em the sell, you know?” With an over-familiar wink.
I felt so bad about that bald injunction that I didn’t go. And frankly, if I had gone, I wouldn’t have made a lick of difference, even if I had followed instructions to the letter.
I present you a paradox: The way to sell your company’s stuff at conferences, outside the exhibit hall, is not to sell your company’s stuff.
Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC and Paul Miller of Talis clearly know this. They showed off their companies’ stuff, yes. After framing and discussing at some length a problem of general interest to the conference audience without so much as mentioning their companies’ names. (In Lorcan’s case, he didn’t have to—but Talis is much younger and less ubiquitous than OCLC, yet Mr. Miller observed the same basic courtesy.)
Two other presenters, part of a thoroughly dismal panel (except for the last speaker, who tried his level best to make up for his predecessors’ wretched showing, and to his credit nearly succeeded) about digitization issues, took the more usual vendor conference-presenter route. Hi, I’m me, here’s my company, here’s some info about my company, here’s what my company does, here’s why my company’s cool, and oh yeah, here’s a tidbit or two about digitization.
Except by that time I bloody well wasn’t listening, because I know a commercial when I hear it. I don’t listen to commercials masquerading as conference sessions, nor do I leave with warm and fuzzy feelings about the perpetrators. Commercials on TV are bad enough, but necessary. Commercials in a conference session are insulting. I do not pay buckus maximus for a conference in order to listen to vendors inflate their chests.
Conferences are where a tribe gathers for its members to talk amongst themselves. If you paint yourself in a conference session as a vendor, you are setting yourself apart from the tribe. Explicitly. So don’t do it. The point of presenting at a conference if you are a vendor is to establish yourself as one of the tribe. I know a fair few librarians who are consistently peeved by OCLC, but I don’t know one who doesn’t respect Lorcan Dempsey. He’s one of the librarian tribe, and his presentation at Computers in Libraries only reaffirmed his membership. Does that help OCLC? You bet it does.
Take a baby step, vendors. You know that “About The Company” slide you put in all your conference presentations? Kill it. Shoot it, drown it, stomp it flat, ritually disembowel (or -vowel) it, whatever it takes. You are talking to a roomful of librarians. We’re good at finding stuff out. If you intrigue us, we will find out whatever you put on that slide. If you waste our time, we will loathe and avoid you, not to mention writing snide things about you on our blogs.
Conference organizers? Outlaw the above slide when you accept a vendor’s conference proposal. Let the vendor scream, but don’t give in. You’re only helping the vendor, even if the vendor is too bloody stupid to realize it.
I will say for Bill Kasdorf that he understood all this right down to his bone-marrow. In my opinion, which no one else is required to respect, Bill lost his company because he consistently made deeply stupid and counterproductive decisions that alienated many of his best people into leaving. But he knew how to sell at conferences, and he did it by not selling anything but his own enthusiasm. (Well, and by passing off his employees’ expertise as his own; see above about deeply stupid and alienating decisions.) I suspect Bill gave me as much rope as he did because he saw—not that I understood this, because I didn’t, but that in my naivete I behaved quite naturally in this fashion.
I leave you with a cautionary tale. At the first big ebook conference I went to, a major player in the industry scheduled a session about conversion techniques. Oh, cool, conversion-peasant talk! I was there with bells on—only to find a canned-narration twenty-minute PowerPoint, solid commercial-talk from one end to the other, instead of a real person talking about text artisanry!
The vendor in question was the first to go down in flames.