You Ask, I Answer: What Makes for Compelling Events?

In today's episode, the question is, what compels you to attend a webinar or online event? I gotta be honest, not a whole lot does. Not for me. Um if it's a topic or subject that I'm interested in, I will uh attend. If I'm speaking at it, I kind of have to attend.

Right? That's that one's pretty obvious. But for the most part, there isn't a lot to online events and to webinars other than it being something that I where I know I'm going to learn something that compels me to attend. And so a lot of the time I will attend events and things outside of my area of expertise. Right?

I don't attend much in the way of marketing and especially marketing analytics content because there isn't a whole lot new under the sun right there. I get a ton of useful insights and experience when I attend, say, like a medical analytics uh event or uh a hardcore coding event, uh like the R Conference um or uh a tableau conference, something where I can see different perspectives, where I can see the same tools that I use, but see them used in different ways. The analogy I would give there is imagine you're a French chef, right? How much benefit are you gonna get out of going to online events uh about French food? If you're a really good French chef, the answer is probably not a whole lot.

You might pick up a little you know insight or uh a new thing here or there, but for the most part, if you're a good French chef, you probably are not going to pick up a whole lot of new things, right? But if you attend an Italian food event or a Japanese food event, totally different way of doing things, even though it's the same general topic, cooking, you're going to see very different perspectives, new ideas that you can then bring back into your practice. Some things will not make sense. Other things, um, you can pick up some really cool stuff. For example, in that in that example, maybe umbe you see how the Japanese method of making a tempura works.

And you're like, wow, I'm gonna try that because that looks really different and could lend some neat new flavors to my food. When we think about analytics and marketing and stuff, looking at the same stuff that everyone else is looking at guarantees that you're gonna be doing the same things everybody else is doing. When you should be looking at what works best in other domains of expertise, right? What works best in bioinformatics, what works best in stock analysis. Half of the interesting things that I've done, my own coding and my own analytics come from other disciplines, particularly finance, right?

People have spent decades trying to build financial models to predict a stock or an equity or a bond or something else. Now cryptocurrencies, right? And those techniques they developed kind of sort of work in finance, but particularly with things like the stock market, it's really, really difficult because there's so many hidden factors. Those same techniques, they work brilliantly in marketing because we have far fewer inputs. When you have a stock market and you have a stock, you have a lot of what I call shadow inputs.

And things that are out of your control, maybe out of your vision. There are institutional funds, hedge funds, you know, all sorts of high-frequency trading, um, off-market transactions that can impact a stock price. And it's very, very difficult to see those. It's very, very difficult to forecast those and to account for them in a financial model. There is no such thing as a shadow website that's secretly sending you traffic, right?

You may have unattributed traffic, but for the most part, there is no parallel parallel marketplace, uh, no parallel web where there's there's all these secret things that are silently influencing your analytics. It doesn't happen. Your web analytics is reasonably self-contained. Now, but you know, there obviously are things that would impact your company, but from a data perspective, you don't have those problems. And so a technique that works okay in finance works really well in marketing because there are more guardrails, right?

There's there's fewer chances for random, weird outside interference. When you look at a technique that works in medicine, it's a statistical technique that works in medicine. A lot of these techniques have to be bulletproof, right? Because lives are literally on the line. If you get the statistical analysis wrong, people die.

When you're researching a drug and you conduct an A-B test. In marketing, we conduct an A-B test, and okay, you know, nobody likes test B, cool. Right. In medicine, if if B goes really wrongly, you kill somebody. And so the rigor and the discipline and the governance and all the best practices that are used in medicine and in pharmaceutical research.

Again, these are things that we can port into marketing, improve our marketing, improve our analytics skills in an environment where lives are not on the line. It's a topic of discussion that my business partner and friend Katie Robert and I talk about all the time. She uh cut her teeth in in the medical industry, in the pharma industry, in dealing with substances and situations that if you got it wrong, people died. To step into marketing is like a breath of fresh air because even if you're completely wrong in marketing, probably nobody's going to die. You might get fired, but you know, you're not going to have somebody coding out on the table because of a bad decision you made.

So when we think about what compels me to attend an event, it's because I want to learn something from a perspective I haven't seen yet, or from a perspective that's going to be so wildly divergent from what I'm currently used to that I can come away with not one or two, but a dozen or two dozen new ideas, new things, new uh points of view. The last two years have been a buffet of these things because again, with the pandemic, so many events and things went online, and the recordings are up on YouTube for free. You don't have to have to register. There's no shortage of really good sources for new ideas. The challenge that we all have to face is making sure that we're not attending events and trainings and online things that are inside of our comfort zone, that are inside of our knowledge zone, but instead stepping outside, sometimes far outside, for a totally different look.

How an industry solves a problem that isn't our industry could lend some unique insights, some innovative insights that we could use for our stuff that could shortcut months or maybe even years of work on our part when someone else has found a working solution for that in a different industry. So that's what compels me to attend events. Be curious to hear what you have to say to this question. If you want to let me know, go over to Free Slack Group, go to trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers. I asked this question recently there.

I would love to hear what compels you to attend an online event. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.