10 Unconventional Tips For Attending International Conferences.

The 10 Other Things No One Tells You

I’ve been to my fair share of marketing conferences and ones located in the US are the best. Google Analytics, Moz, DMA and Social Media Week have all had a payoff that outweighs the travel and costs coming from New Zealand. However with the substantial investment, you’re going to want your money’s worth. This guide tells you how I do that and how you can too.

Arriving early for a conference is always a smart thing to do. It’s not about removing jet-lag from the equation although that is important when you’re exposed to a consistent stream of new ideas starting in 30 minute increments. It’s not about ticking off all the tourist spots, although that is fun. It’s about giving yourself enough time to integrate into a routine and feel like you belong.

Research shows that the first night slept in any new environment is bound to be one of interrupted sleep. This is for good reason, because way, way earlier in our evolution as humans on this planet, new environments were full of unknown danger, so our minds adapted to ensure we slept light not deep. By arriving early, you avoid that power combo of jet-lag + interrupted sleep. You also buy yourself the time to feel like there’s no rush. Now… do the opposite and go and use it.

1. The First Cafe

Trip Advisor instantly returned 9,387 New York Restaurants within my vicinity, some with a highly credible offering and the reviews to back it up. I only needed one to be my first cafe.

That’s the first cafe that would feed me almost every day while in New York and serve up the Americano in a porcelain mug to bring my neurons a little closer together and make the plasticity of my brain just that little more maleable.

Rustic Table was that and more, providing all you’d expect from the name in an altogether hard surfaced, steel forged, open kitchen dining bar area only 2 avenues across from Times Square.

More importantly, it was located 300 metres from where I’d wake up every day for the next ten days.

2. Be 30 Minutes Early

The biggest drawback of the hotel I selected was sheer guest capacity. It was going to be busy at reception, the elevators and the gym… unless I got there first. So each day I’d get up at the otherwise completely unnecessary time of between 6 and 7am to exit before that drawback took effect. That made all the benefits of it’s location shine.

3. Digital Connectivity > Square feet

Daily video digests of the conference required uploads of 1Gb+ which I planned on either running overnight on hotel wifi or through the AT&T 8Gb of data I bought. Both were potential lifelines. It turned out the hotel won in terms of speed, as long as I was uploading once everyone went to bed. Contrarian wins again, even if the bed was the equivalent of a fold out, with a fancy extension button to mask the fact.

4. Views are a long term luxury

Arriving 4 days early meant I got the pick of the rooms and the floors. Being away from the overnight’ers and weekend’ers is important when you’re on business. Views are generally a bonus set aside for guests who stay longer, although in this case, most rooms would have had a view even if they weren’t on the 27th floor.

Those are four things that are central to the rest of a successful travel experience upon arriving at your destination. I could go on with how to do the same with airport taxi’s, security queues and setting yourself up on a plane but that’s for either another article or another author. The remaining six things rely on serendipity that YOU must initiate and this is a lesson that came to me far too late in life for someone who has done as much travelling as I have.

5. Go First.

Go First simply means initiate the conversation. Start the chat. It doesn’t have to big, it can be as light touch as a brief smile or a look of acknowledgement, and if the opportunity allows you can go from there. While a mobile phone is a great source of social comfort, there’s nothing my phone was going to serve me up as rich, vast or colourful as my surroundings in New York City. The difference with the city, was I couldn’t wait for the ‘scroll refresh’, I was going to have to go first.

Back to the cafe. If you select deliberately, you’re going to run in to people like yourself or at least people who share some of the same values as you and if you’re lucky, the cafe will be setup for moments of serendipity like a shared bar area or tables. I sat at the bar next to a guy, who ordered the same as me with avo smash, accompanied with a different side. He went for the pulled pork, after I’d headed for the shredded chicken. He was new there and listened to my lead I’m guessing, even though I was just as green to the Rustic Table options. I complemented him on his selection and he acknowledged, but once his laptop came out the opportunity for serendipity now had a ‘keep off the grass sign’ in front of it.

When a women in from D.C was sat on my left, also facing the frenetic pace of the kitchen, she didn’t revert to her phone and I hadn’t either. The door was still open, so I went first picking up on how one of the servers welcomed her ‘you’re back!’. So I asked what was good on the menu, and from there the chat continued and funnelled across from why we were in New York, what we did for a living, where we came from initially and then on to deeper topics in between snack bites on avo smash with shredded chicken. All because I kept my the ubiquitous ‘out of order’ mobile phone sign hidden from view. If you’re reading this thinking there’s nothing new here, I’m guessing you’re in the your 40’s or older and have become well accustomed to small talk, customary manners and the warmth of strangers. The 20 somethings at the conference are not used to going first, yet delighted in the opportunity to share some of themselves with me when asked. All I had to do was Go First. All you have to do is Go First. Even in a city like New York, which all stereotypes would have you think is one of a desolate pace, you will find in almost every person a starvation of the warmth of strangers so Go First and go from there.

6. Different route, same routine

I’m a creature of routine that doesn’t vary that much no matter where I am. Coffee and running are the bookends to meetings, media and probably more than a healthy amount of time thinking about what the possibility of the future. New York doesn’t have a Marine Parade but it does have a Central Park so that’s where I ran. I go for a long run on most Sundays, so I ran 10km around Central Park on the first Sunday after I arrived and the day before the conference began. Double win. I should’ve gone earlier but walking around the city was enough to reset the jetlag that usually a run would evaporate. Walking 20 quarter mile blocks to get to Central Park was fine, except for the cold. Well the cold wasn’t too bad, it was bringing my summer running gear that made it a little harder. It heartened me to see some New York’ans also running around in shorters in sub zero temperatures, like we were the real long distance type.

Nevertheless, after 3 mile I was warm enough to stop and stare at the building that featured a massive marshmallow man clambering over in the 1980 feature film Ghostbusters. I can’t recall which ghostbuster thought the marshmallow man into reality, but that part of the plot couldn’t have been improved on!

7. Walk everywhere

23,317 steps in one day was probably further than I should’ve walked, but New York really is a city best experienced at ground level out in the bracing air, peering into windows of shops and passers by. Unlike on previous visits, this time I made a point of matching the B to an A so I had A to B planned out with time for meandering in between. If there conference wasn’t part of the script, I’d focus on meandering alone.

8. Pre-sales Pre-trip

There is no sense in arriving and then trying to setup meetings cold on the hoof. That’s not to say you can’t confirm time and place once you arrive, but put in the groundwork before you get there. I was clear I wanted to interview a few international kiwi business owners while there, and they served as my waypoint destinations to explore the city.

Interviewing David Howell today? Explore 1 World Trade Centre and have some lunch at the base of the Flat Iron building.

Heading upstate New York, fit in some footage of the Manhattan skyline on sunset. Uber’ing to Brooklyn?

Enjoy a flat white and coffee at the place where it all began for Gareth Hughes. This way of exploring New York wasn’t too dis-similar to how I bounced around Europe delivering corporate training and adding on a weekend of exploring. Context isn’t explained by buildings, but by the people who live and work in them.

9. One Magic Moment

“Wouldn’t it be great if….”. Expectations of a magic moment makes it more likely to happen.

Wouldn’t it be great if….

I met Gary Vaynerchuck at his Hudson Yard offices.
I met someone at the conference that turned into a life long friend.
An opportunity presented itself with the power to transform my life.
I got to ask Seth Godin’s advice about the 100 CEO Project.

These aren’t the moments that I could simply work my way through by attending seminars, writing notes or being a passenger to this experience. Of course I was going to learn something, but I wasn’t planning on being a note-taker at this conference. I made small talk with everyone I sat next to, or held a place in a queue next to at the conference and outside of it. It’s a great way to orientate yourself to the environment around you, something that that’s beneficial as each conversation can helps uncover a little more of the culture and place you’re in.

The magic moment came when the time and place was confirmed by Seth to meet with him on the Friday before the conference started. We had discussed a potential catchup, but no specifics had been discussed which allows a comfortable amount of wiggle room. That magic moment provided insight into where I go next from someone who has been at the crossroads before and made a decision and it’s turned out great. Now I can make the decision with confidence.

I got a haircut where Gary Vee gets his cut but no opportunity presented itself and I didn’t need to push it. Sometimes all you need is the shared moment when looking back.

For example, the conference organiser Toby Daniels used to live in England and I’d met him back in 2006 for a enterprise social media project. Remember this was when MySpace was the entire consumer social media play and the enterprise has nothing. A four day conference is long enough to bump into everyone you want to, so I knew we’d end up the same vicinity at some point and when we did, we made the connection.

That helped when kindly asked whether a kiwi could get on the guest list for the Nasdaq closing bell drinks, which in turn led to a deep discussion with one of the speakers and his assistant who could help change the political outcome on the turn of a dime.

That couldn’t have happened if I’d been staring at my phone.

10. Bring home the knowledge

I go to a conference most years to be inspired, to learn something new, to connect with people I admire and to generally expand my worldview in a way that New Zealand doesn’t deliver on purely through it’s position and population density.

That usually involves plenty of laptop time during the conference and plenty more summarising on the plane on the way home. This time, I decided to start bringing home the knowledge EVERY DAY of the conference through instant bites and video story digest.

The instant bites are social media posts focussed on a single tactic or salient points that can also lead a motivated viewer to more content by that author.

As a by-product, a presenter gets a point distributed on Twitter for them that they usually retweet after their presentation, thereby connecting my account to their fans.

The video story digest is a 5–10 minute video combines the energy of the city with key themes at the conference around machine learning, publishing and AI all wrapped up in a curated view of my own key takeaways. When I interviewed a kiwi CEO, that was thrown into the tapestry.

Did it help? I don’t know but my founding belief is that by publishing more than you consume, you create influence in a world where audiences are fast to shift and where the frictional cost of shifting is zero.

It’s too early to say as this plane is somewhere over the mid west of America, which is fitting at such an interesting moment in America as political and media are up ended.

Watch one of the five daily videos from the conference and subscribe to my channel here.

Summary

* Spend an hour researching the cafe that is most likely to attract people you want to meet. Then go there almost every day.
* Be out of synch with the masses and move unencumbered from them.
* Publishers, prioritise digital connectivity over physical space.
* Find a view that feeds your inspiration.
* Go First.
* Overlay your routine in your new environment.
* Walk everywhere to feel better and create more visceral memories.
* Organise your meetings in advance then be open to opportunities.
* Think about the One Magic Moment you’d like to happen.
* Bring home the knowledge while you’re there.