evaluating events and conferences

I’ve written previously about evaluating events and conferences, and in a recent evaluation I undertook for the LIFT09 conference, apart from measurements of attitudes and reactions to the conference, we also looked at what online visibility the conference generated. We found three interesting results based on qualitative and quantiative analysis of blogs and tweets:

- 22% of the blog posts analysed had embedded videos of conference presentations (or liked to them). This is an indication of the importance of the videos in promoting the conference and its themes.

- 32% of the people blogging on the conference were not actually attending the conference – indicating the “reach” of the conference outside of the direct participants.

- The number of tweets on the conference peaked sharply during the three days of the conference (on the second day notably) while blog posts, in smaller numbers, continued to be written about the conference weeks later. The graph below illustrates this point:

Graph data was generated by www.technorati.com and www.hashtags.org.

The full conference evaluation report can be viewed here (pdf)>>