Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

I usually bypass liveblogging posts from online marketing conferences since most of that info gets covered by day-to-day reads in my RSS reader. I typically go to the conferences for the networking opportunities (or free drinks) unless I come across a really interesting session.

But what about all those other readers that can’t make it to the conferences but know they can benefit from the sessions? Since they can’t make it to the conference, there is really no better alternative but to follow the sessions through livebloggers like Lisa Barone and Lee Oden. The readers count on these livebloggers to provide them with the most updates to almost every session in the conference.

My question is this: How many livebloggers pass the readership metrics back to the conference organizers? Or, let’s rephrase that question: How many conference organizers [politely] ask the livebloggers for this info? Considering that most companies that don’t consider online marketing as a 1st priority, they may not want to shell out almost $1,000 a /day plus air travel to have their employees attend the conference. That means that most attendees may actually be “virtually” attendending these conferences.

I’m sure that conference organizers like Kevin Ryan (although a bit off-the-wall at times) find attendance metrics very useful and determine future sessions based on this data. So why not get the full picture instead of just understanding the paid attendees physically attending?