I get asked this question a lot, and it’s difficult to answer because of the sales cycle of the event industry: events are often planned a year in advance, services are lined up soon thereafter, attendees start buying tickets and booking flights months in advance, so there’s no solid data yet on how the economic maelstrom is going to effect the conference industry.

Will conference attendees start tightening their belts and attend fewer conferences? Will soaring gas prices and corresponding airline ticket prices curtail travel? If so, will this lead to fewer conferences, more poorly attended conferences or conferences with fewer frills?

Anecdotal data has started to come in. Lorraine Mariella of Celebration Events, for example, says that

Over the past few weeks, many of our events have had a less than expected attendance. These are repeat events that have always had a strong following – so we are attributing the weak attendence to the current economic uncertainty.

So what’s an event organizer to do?

First, understand why your attendees are coming to your event. If you’re running a conference in, say, Hawaii, they’re coming for the location as much as for the content of the event. But if your event is somewhere more mundane, it’s likely that attendees are coming to network, to meet their colleagues in person. They want to meet partners, colleagues, vendors, customers, and just friends.

In this day of webcasts and DVD’s, attendees can usually get most of the content at talks and seminars through other means. The reason they’re going to take time away from business, pay for a plane ticket and a hotel, is because they see value in being in the same room as other attendees and the speakers, because they want to network.

If you can help them network, if you can demonstrate to them in advance that they will have a successful networking experience, they will be more likely to attend your event. If you don’t, if they worry that others are canceling, if they worry that they’ll be stuck in a room of people they don’t know with bland badges and nothing but a drink ticket to help them talk, you run the risk that they will back out or not register in the first place.

Events that offer strong social and business networking support to their attendees will fare better in an economic downturn than those that don’t for the simple reason that when there is less discretionary travel expense at hand, the competition for attendees heats up. There will be a Darwinian culling in the conference space, and the weak events won’t survive.

And that, in a nutshell, is why we at Pathable believe that in troubled economic times, on-line community tools are exactly what conference organizers and event hosts need to hold on to their attendees. They provide a visible social network and interpersonal assistance so that attendees are more likely to come to events in the first place and more likely to walk away satisfied that they’ve gotten what they wanted to out of the event at the end.

Attendees can see who is attending before they register and see what the attendees are talking about. They can read the speaker’s profiles and even begin conversations with the speakers.

And it doesn’t stop there. Doug Geist, VP of National Sales for the Expo Group notes that the quality of the remaining attendees can make up for low quantity:

Attendance is not the only measure of success. Years ago when I worked for a boat show we we forced to shift our dates to be open on New Year’s Day. The exhibitors were dreading the day. However, the big surprise was the number of qualified buyers that day and the amount of actual sales that were completed. Two factors came into play. One, the attendees that did come were very interested in boats. Two, the exhibitors had more time to spend with those attendees.

Large attendance does not always mean great results. Exhibitors should focus on the quality of their interaction with attendees. If attendance is down then exhibitors have more time to spend developing new relationships.

And again, this is where community tools like Pathable come into play: by providing tools for sponsors to reach attendees and creating more engagement with attendees, sponsors can get more value out of them (and thus are more likely to be satisfied with their value they’ve received for their sponsorship dollars).

Drop us a line if you’d like to learn more.

Update: There’s some good data from the Meeting Professionals International Business Barometer confirming the impact.

Our customers (meeting planners and event organizers) have been telling us how much they love the way Pathable makes it easy for their attendees to get to know each other. What they haven’t liked is the idea of two separate registration processes, one where attendees buy their tickets and another to join the Pathable community.

We’re proud to announce our partnership with EventBrite, a fantastic self-service event planning solution that allows event hosts to begin selling tickets in minutes, increase attendance, collect credit card payments online, track sales, and more. EventBrite is exceptionally easy to set up and to use, so they make a perfect partner for our end-to-end attendee management solution.

Our development team leveraged EventBrite’s public API to create a simple work flow:

• Attendee buys a ticket on EventBrite
• Pathable automatically creates an attendee profile and sends an invitation to join the event community

It’s that simple, no extra work for the event host to manage or combine two separate lists.

Interested in trying it out? Drop us a line and we’ll get you started!

Have you ever been to an “unconference”, one of those events where the actual schedule events is created by the attendees at the event itself? Usually, there will be a huge white board or rolls of butcher paper with a grid of time slots and room numbers. Below left is a sample from O’Reilly Media’s Foo Camp (photo thanks to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch). It’s cool, but honestly, it’s a bit of a mess.

That’s one of the reasons we’re so happy to announce that Pathable now has integrated wiki support (below right). A wiki is a web site or page that visitors can edit and collaborate on in-place, without any special software or anything, That means a conference organizer can post a blank schedule, and attendees can fill in their session schedules in advance, deleting, moving, re-arranging as they like, with just a few clicks of the mouse and keyboard.

Of course, wiki’s aren’t just for unconference scheduling. You can use them for pretty much anything you want people to collaborate on writing: session notes, ride share lists, location attraction recommendations, volunteer sign-up sheets, Birds of Feather (BoF) session scheduling, etc.

If you’re a conference organizer, just go to your host tools and click “Enable wiki” under Event Basics to get a wiki on your site.

Huge thanks to WetPaint for making this so easy!