So you had a great conference. The attendees were rewarded with great presentations and interesting speakers. So that attendees can refer to the talks after the show, you might provide a bunch of paper handouts. However, this approach produces a tremendous waste of paper, most of which is lost or even tossed before the plane trip home.
So how can you use the Internet to keep your presentations alive after the conference? Here are a couple of ideas.
- You should have a series of web pages that show information about the program schedule, presentations, and speakers. Users should be able to click through the links to find out the details of each presentation with information like abstracts and presenter bios.
- Power point files and related handouts should be available online, tied to your speaker pages. This will save a ton of paper! Make sure attendees know that this information is available online and that the important handouts can be downloaded.
- If you film your presentations you should consider posting to YouTube. This can become a great form of viral marketing for your conference. Use keywords to direct people to your site. Make sure to make it clear that it is from your conference. You may even want to link to the online pages mentioned earlier.
- Slideshare is a very popular clearing house for Power Point presentations. Ask your speakers to upload their presentation to this site. Make sure to use keywords and references to your conference.
If you use good speaker management software for your call for papers and build your program, it should be easy to make this information available online.
