Photo taken by Mike Haw
Tech industry events pride themselves on showcasing the future, but how can an event claim to be evidence for technological advancement when the event’s information is solely distributed in print?
The majority of tech conference and event goers will bring some form of smart phone or tablet with them. I know that I don’t always remember to bring my reusable bag to the grocery store, but my smart phone is an essential tool to my daily life which I struggle without. Why should event organizers spend unnecessary money on printed material when all of that information can be accessed through smart phones?
Print certainly still holds value, but everything that can be printed on a piece of paper can be shown on a high resolution screen (and be distrusted cheaper and more efficiently). Why not take a page out of the Consumer Electronic Show’s book?
The past two years, CES has offered an alternative to their printed material through a smart phone application called “Follow Me”. CES still provides printed material, but attendees at least have the option to go paperless.
Event specific applications, like “Follow Me”, provide attendees with all of the normally distributed material within the application along with digital material such as presentations. Providing your audience with an application also gives you the ability to revise information in real time. Reprinting 2,000 documents can become very costly and time consuming, but, in the essence of maintaining a professional appearance, that is sometimes the case. Venture Beat has a great article on how much paper is wasted at events and conferences.
Going mobile isn’t just simply being green. With an event application like Unsocial, your audience is provided a truly comprehensive experience. No longer do attendees need to carry around a backpack weighted down with print. Unsocial allows attendees to access the printed material, participate in polls, find out who else is attending through GPS, contact other attendees, distribute digital business cards, and follow the social media threads all from the comfort of their phone.
Paper still has its place for now, but the experience is simply less cumbersome for an attendee to have everything they want to know about the event contained conveniently in their pocket.
