The conference i went to for work this week is finally over! I’m so happy to be home and have this behind me. It went really well.
After 3 days of playing in Disney World with Kerry, i moved over to the conference hotel on Sunday. They got me into the hotel early, and i was able to practice my presentations some in the afternoon. Sunday evening, the demo floor was open and about a dozen of us from my division manned our booth. The demo floor was huge! This conference had 3400 attendees, with 300 of them being employees.
After a few hours on the demo floor, the opening session happened. Blah blah blah. At the end, there was “entertainment.” A group came out banging on garbage cans. Yes, garbage cans. No accompanying music, and i couldn’t really tell if there was a catchy beat from my spot in the back of the auditorium. Then they did some strange clogging/stepping thing. Then they came out with their garbage cans dressed up in some odd light machines, but this time they were accompanying really loud music, and you couldn’t hear the garbage cans being beat upon. It was odd. (I learned later that they are very similar to Stomp!, whom a lot of people actually like. But i thought it was very strange at the time.) But the night’s entertainment was salvaged when Peabo Bryson came out and sang two of his grammy-winning songs from Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
Monday was a long day in the demo booth. At the end of the day, i had my first “super demo” where i put on a microphone and did a demo about one way to use our software. The example i chose ended up not being a good choice as a single demo – it worked much better in the context of my larger presentation. The most unfortunate thing about that was that the big boss chose that presentation of mine to watch. I don’t think i was particularly impressive. And i was nervous. But it broke the ice.
For dinner that night, our whole group went out to eat, and i ended up seated across from the big boss and his wife. He terrifies me still and i had never met her, but i was trying my best. I decided to try to make fun of the garbage pail drummers from the night before, so i asked her “How did you like the garbage pail drummers?”
“Oh, i thought they were wonderful! They reminded me a lot of groups i have worked with in Africa.”
Without missing a beat, i said, “Oh yes, i thought they were very interesting. I had never seen anything like that before.” And now i am hoping fervently that she doesn’t know what the garbage pail kids are or have noticed that i have just changed course. I’m so fake. I never really recovered from that but dinner was tasty.
Tuesday i put in some time in the morning at the demo booth, then spent mid-day collecting myself for the hour-long presentation. I arrived an hour early, as required, and sat through the presentation before mine, which had about a dozen attendees. So i was pleasantly surprised to have 30-35 people waiting for me when i started, with another dozen or so trickling in after i began.
It went very well. I started off a bit boring with my three power point slides, but when i got into my examples, things livened up. I got them laughing a bit in my example dealing with the NC State Fair when i talked about deep-fried butter. My second example wasn’t funny, but was at least relevant to today’s current events as it was about US unemployment rates. My third example was where people really got engaged, as it was about baseball and whether fans in some cities are more loyal than others. Lots of audience participation in that one, as i asked for people to shout out their favorite teams and we would look at their data. After i wrapped up, i fielded about a dozen questions. And after i left the stage, i had six people come up to me at the front of the room and ask more specific questions. One guy followed me back down to the booth for a more detailed demo, and one of my attendees came by the booth 20 minutes later to follow up and ask another question.
All in all, i think it was great. I think the questions showed that people were engaged, and i was glad to elicit some laughs too. I think an hour long presentation should be at least somewhat entertaining when that’s all they are going to get from you.
Wednesday morning the booth was closed and i finally got to go to a few sessions and be a listener, and learned a few cool things.
Throughout the conference, i tweeted on behalf of the company twitter account, and wrote a blog post about questions i fielded at the booth.
It was a great experience as my first conference as a speaker. I learned a lot about how to take open-ended questions from customers at the booth and turn it into a story. I don’t think i’ll be volunteering for this again next year, but maybe in another 2-3 years.
Today, October 20, is the first annual 