Halfway There: Looking at the Reality of Event Trends

At the halfway point through the year, we thought it was time to look back at the predictions we made at the beginning of 2015 regarding what events would look like. Here's a quick status report on our predictions: [Tweet "A look back at the predictions we made at the beginning of 2015. #GovEventsBlog"]

• Virtual Events - webinar and virtual events listed on our site seem to be holding steady when compared to 2014 numbers.

• Smaller Events - we have hundreds of luncheon, breakfast and table top events listed on GovEvents. Many of these are positioned as opportunities for networking within a smaller set of attendees. Some even tout the availability of the speaker for one-on-one discussions.

• Big Data - so far in 2015 there have been 105 big data events, with another 30+ posted for the remainder of year - a number that will certainly grow as event organizer post their fall and winter events late this summer.

• Attracting Millennials - we have noticed more event-specific hashtags being publicized and have also seen a push from organizers to engage their audience and encourage social media mentions during the event itself.  A good example is Brocade's recent Federal Forum that had 1,139 Twitter mentions on the day of the event compared to 606 last year. [Tweet "Organizers push to engage their audience and encourage social media mentions for events. #GovEventsBlog"]

Beyond our predictions, we've seen a couple articles highlighting event trends in 2015. Some interesting ones that apply to the government market jumped out at us.

• Unplanning and attendee control - this trend list highlighted how more and more events are not sticking to a rigid schedule and letting attendees drive the content both through close coordination with social media sentiment and general event flexibility. We're seeing this in the growing importance placed on Q&As and interaction with speakers at government events.

• Proven technology - music to the risk-adverse government audience, event planners are shying away from deploying tech tools at their event that are brand new or unproven. Attendees are not swayed by the latest "shiny new" technology, they want it to work, not just be a fun concept to play with.

• The TED factor - many events are challenging their speakers to present in the style of TED Talks - short presentations focused on a single driving topic. Government IT and policy is a complex topic. Speakers need to distill down the challenges into a single, focused topic. These are the speakers who will drive attendance at events.

What trends are you seeing in the event space? What trends do you think will catch on in the government market? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.