Open up your panel !
Sunday, February 26, 2006 at 9:14AM 
A recent post by Jeff Clavier rang a bell.
It said that he (Jeff) had tried to open the conversations during a conference session, letting the audience participate as well as the invited panelists.
Jeff ended up with the conclusion that :
“Even with this, the event was deemed successful, and my panelists (who have had their fair share of participating or moderating panels) provided positive feedback. But there was still a bit of frustration in me about the fact that we did not cover as much as I wanted, especially on enterprise transaction and integration processes.”
He tried it again in another conf, and this time asked beforehand the audience to provide a to-do list of subjects they wanted to cover.
The result was such that :
“I heard equal positive feedback for the content and the interactivity, and this time, had a feeling that all topics and key questions of the audience had been covered.
Un-panels are so much more interesting that it is worth trying, especially with this upfront inventory of ideas that provides just enough of control on the content and the flow.”
Feed for thought, indeed.
Why did it ring a bell ?
A few weeks ago, I went to a conf session : it was about the strange relationship between brands and blogging. At the start of the session, the moderator asked the audience how many people were bloggers ? About 60% hold their hands up. One hour later, a woman from the marketing department of a big car company asked the panel where she could find a study on the sociology of bloggers...Well she was surrounded by bloggers, but she actually never talked to one of us.
The panelists tried to give an answer, but it was actually someone from the audience that gave the best information.
I have always found that panels were missing one thing : the unbelievable experience of people part of the audience. Even if panelists are brilliant chaps, the audience certainly has even more valuable input on the subject, simply because they are more folks down there !
Panels with live audience chats that we are starting to see, are the first step towards a true collaborative sharing of experience that most sessions could benefit of.
What kind of information do you get from a panel ? What kind of information do you get from an audience ? How are they different ? Well I’m not a sociologist nor a stat engineer, but common sense tells that the first gives qualitative data, and the second some kind of quantitative data, as well as more qualitative data.
So it seems obvious to say that opening the panel to the audience brings more data input. So why are all marketing studies, political polls and the like based on traditionnal panels ? Why are buzz marketing agencies only relying on influencers (ie class-A bloggers) to spread the word ?
It looks like all these methods are using the old panel way, which is to select some people that someone decided were the best people to get information from. Is that the only way ? Well it is definitively not Web2.0 a way if you want my word on it.
Think of another way : no-one gets invited, only those willing to participate can; everyone in the audience is asked to share information; someone moderates and counts all what the crowd is saying; the crowd itself is asked to group behing common viewpoints. Would that be a dream or a nightmare ?
Some people may think : this is chaos and disorder. Everybody would speak and it would end up in a big mess.
Then the question is : would there be uninteresting people monopolizing talk time ? People like activists, always unhappy guys, ironic youngsters ? Well, the simple fact that the audience actually came willingly to the conference session seems a sufficient firewall to insure proper behaviour.
Some people may think : but the gathered data would be impossible to analyse, we wouldn’t get true information from it. Well, I say to these guys : do you know every single person in your audience (customers, citizens, ...) ? Or would you like to only deal with a panel ?
The people that buy products or vote are the same kind of folks that come to a conference session. You don’t know who they are, why the end up there, what they did before and what they will do after. You won’t learn anything from them, if you only listen to panelists.
Open up your panels Consumers, customers and citizen insight is at your fingertips.
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