From the Conference Director

By Christopher Noyes
July 24, 2018

Ensuring the SubOptic 2019 Experience Creates Connections and Encourages Engagement

In the new digital era conference attendee engagement is one of the key themes and is equally important as any other conference element to the conference management and planning industries.

The human attention span is notoriously short, and if meeting planning does not account for this, we can quickly fall into information overload. As we are designing the SubOptic 2019 Conference, we are looking at all areas of the conference and evaluating the experience a typical attendee. We want to ensure that your experience at SubOptic 2019 is one where we create connections and encourage engagement in New Orleans. SubOptic 2019 will be about engagement and creating experiences to promote learning.

Remember when the coolest thing at a trade show was the bingo game or scavenger hunt?  You know, go to certain booths, get a stamp or get a new clue to another booth, and complete the game you collect a prize. The excitement and the BUZZ that that created?  Could you imagine doing that today?

Gamification and attendee engagement is nothing new. You may wonder will SubOptic 2019 or my company need to create something to become more engaging on the on the exhibit floor. The short answer is yes!  Adding features which create more attendee engagement can lead to buzz, excitement, and an additional traffic to a booth.   You may have an excellent location on the exhibit floor, but it may not be enough to create the buzz. But why does gamification succeed where content and high value may not?

All of us naturally have the desire to compete and succeed.  Gamification taps into that desire. Gamification is used to increase participation and improve retention, and used by many other industries such as retailers, employers and teachers. There are defining characteristics of a game: Goal (specific outcome); rules (limitations); feedback system and voluntary participation.

To continue reading the rest of this article, please read it in Issue 101 of the SubTel Forum magazine here on page 60.