We are only 7 days away from the sixth edition of The Next Web Conference. On our TNW Editors backchannel I just mentioned that and Courtney Boyd Myers replied with “Woohoo!”. Woohoo indeed, but to us here in the Amsterdam office it feels more like “OMG, Panic!!!”.

Organizing a conference is completely the opposite of building a webservice or maintaining a blog. On the web, you are infinitely iterating. Everything is always evolving and never done. You launch something, fix some errors, change some things, learn, repeat, improve.

A conference is the opposite; you plan for months, try to think of everything that could go right, and wrong, and try to be prepared for everything. Then, at the last moment, about 50% of what you planned turns out differently, and there is nothing you can do about it.

After 5 editions we have learned that at least one speaker will miss his or her flight, get sick or just disappear. So we have back-up speakers. We also know a number of attendees will show up at the last moment, without a ticket, hoping to still get in. Videos and presentations will suddenly not work. Laptops crash. Remotes become unresponsive. We improvise, fix and make small changes and the audience usually doesn’t notice.

Last year was different though. The ash cloud happened.

The Ash Cloud

Remember that little incident? It almost meant the end of TNW as a company. For the first time since that happened I’m going to talk about how terrifying that all was and how it affected our conference planning.

You can imagine that as an international conference we are quite dependent on international speakers and attendees. We had exactly two dutch speakers in the past 5 years and one of those lived in the US for more than 20 years so he hardly qualifies as Dutch. The rest, all not local. So when we heard that all planes were grounded we took another good look at our speaker list and realized that, well, we had no speaker list.

When you organize a conference, have committed to hundreds of thousands of euros and are expecting 1000+ attendees within a week and you suddenly realize you have NO speakers your first reaction is to panic. It is just the natural thing to do. Canceling the conference a week in advance would have meant would’ve been a financial disaster.

Don’t panic!!!

Of course, panicking doesn’t really help anyone so Patrick and I took a deep breath, decided not to panic and just work with what we had. We decided to NOT cancel the conference, whatever happened, and started working with speakers on alternatives. We looked at the attendee list and called everybody who seemed interesting and asked them if they were already in Europe. A few were and we asked hem to become back-up speakers. Then we recorded Skype Video interviews with some of the speakers and scheduled live Skype video interviews with others. We booked three different flights for every speaker, via different routes and airliners to make sure that if flights resumed they would be on one.

We ended up with a ‘shadow’ planning if none of the speaker would make it to Europe. It was one of the most stressful times we ever experienced as we had no idea who would show up, who wouldn’t and if the conference would end up the worst experience ever or better than before.

Two days before the conference we still didn’t know if people would be able to catch flights. Our speakers kept texting and DMing us of their progress “Waiting in line at the check-in counter”, “Just checked in, no idea if we will actually leave”, “In the plane! This looks good!”. One by one they started arriving in Amsterdam.

A sigh of relief…

We ended up with a great conference and for the first time ever not one speaker cancelled or didn’t show up. We proceeded as planned and didn’t have to revert to our shadow planning at all. The ash-cloud did cost us € 40,000 in extra airline tickets and missed revenue.

I don’t think anybody had an idea of how terrified we were and how close to financial meltdown we came in those last days.

And that is how we like it. In fact, maybe next year I will write a similar story like this, about everything that almost went wrong in 2011. ;-)

If you haven’t reserved your ticketyet do it today and experience the tension too at TNW2011…

Last year we experimented with a new way of interacting with our audience at The Next Web Conference. We invited 6 of our attendees on stage for a Pecha Kucha style presentation and people loved it.

Over the last four years we’ve experimented with several ways to create more ways for the audience to participate. The obvious way, a Q&A session, isn’t completely satisfying. The Q&A period is either too short or too boring. Many people have trouble with getting up in front of a large audience and others ask a question that is very interesting to them but not to the rest of the room. It is very hard to ask intelligent questions that are of interest to the majority of the audience.

Our solution to this particular problem is to keep the Q&A’s very short, get an expert panel to ask questions and ask our speakers to stay around to answer questions of attendees in person during the rest of the day. The vibe at The Next Web Conference allows people to walk up to anybody and start a conversation or ask a question, speakers included.

Join 1000+ Internet professionals and many great speakers for the 5th edition of The Next Web Conference. A must attend!
Grab your discounted ticket now!

Of course there are digital back channels, which is a great way to create more audience participation. But it is also disturbing, often abused for commercial purposes and can be awkward for speakers if the back channel is behind him/her and someone makes a joke. We decided to have a back channel, but to show it only when it is appropriate during a discussion and not in the middle of a well prepared presentation.

So that is why we want our attendees to be prepared, to come up with inspiring (and well prepared) stories. We are aware of the fact that our audience is smart, successful and willing to share great ideas and stories.

People come to the conference to meet other people, do business, to share best practices, stories and contacts with one another and we stimulate them to do just that. That is where the real value is for the attendees.

There are many cool thoughts and inspiring ideas amongst our attendees, therefore we’re opening up the stage again and this time with even more slots. We have eight Pecha Kucha slots to fill with content of attendees. A Pecha Kucha presentation is a pre-formatted presentation with 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide.

The presentations are restricted to certain rules. Its purpose is to inspire other attendees and therefore you’re not allowed to talk about your company or commercial content. In short the rules are as follows:

- No company pitches (not even on your slides)
- It has to be a generic topic about the future of the web or mobile
- The goal is to inspire people and to generate food for thought
- You have to have a ticket for The Next Web Conference
- We want to see your presentation before the conference
- We hand pick which 8 people will give a Pecha Kucha presentation

4 days before the conference we’ll announce the Pecha Kucha speakers.

Are you up for it…? Add your idea for a presentation (make sure you already are registered for the conference)

At The Next Web Conference we always try to get speakers who can change your perspective on things. Writers seem to do a very good job at that. In the past we’ve had Kevin Kelly and Jeff Jarvis as notable examples.

This year we are proud to present Mark Earls. Before I explain who Mark is check these quotes first:

“Most marketing efforts fail to make a dent and most mergers and acquisitions activity actually reduces shareholder value.”

“Human beings are NOT individuals and don’t make decisions on their own. Human beings are herd animals. We do what we do because of other people.”

As you can see this is not someone who is afraid to go against the grain and question those ideas that we take for granted.

Social networking is empowering the individual?
Anybody can express their individuality online?
Maybe not.

Join 1200 Internet professionals and Mark Earls for the 5th edition of The Next Web Conference. A must attend!
Grab your discounted ticket now!

His latest book, “HERD” (buy at Amazon), has won much applause, being described as “Malcolm Gladwell on Speed” (the Guardian), “an essential guide to the new media landscape” (The Spectator), “one of the 5 sexiest ideas in politics today” (The Times).

Mark has previously won Best New Thinking at MRS 2003 & Best Overall Paper at the 2007 ESOMAR Congress in Berlin. Prior to HERD Mark held senior positions at Ogilvy Group Worldwide and the radical creative co-operative St Luke’s.

Mark’s blog is in the top 20 UK marketing list and is on the Adage Power 150 and the global planning top 20. Here is a video (from 2007) in which Mark talks about Herd:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqCHe355p4]

In 2008 Patrick and I were invited to speak at Greek Blogger Camp. It was difficult to resist an invitation to attend a meeting at a dream island together with 30 Greek bloggers, Matt Mullenweg and Timothy Ferriss included.  We ended up having a great time and were treated as VIPs.

Halfway during Timothy’s talk both Patrick and I had an epiphany.
At the same time. Really.

Timothy was talking about how most people ‘say’ they want to be rich but all they really want is to do the things that rich people do: travel to beautiful places, go big mountain skying or drive expensive cars. He went on to explain how he had chosen to take the short path to reaching those goals by writing his book, getting sponsored by a big car brand to test-drive their expensive models and how his lifestyle enabled him to go big mountains skiing whenever he wanted to. He didn’t have to be rich to live the rich man’s life.

At that exact moment Patrick and I looked at each other, smiled and we both knew that we had come to the same conclusion: we were there, on a beautiful island, being treated like VIPs, mingling with the stars (okay, our stars: Timothy Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg). We were living our dream and we knew we didn’t have to wait until we were 65 to start doing what we loved.

Ever since that long weekend we kept in touch with Timothy and agreed that we would ask him to speak at The Next Web Conference one day.

Now you might think that inviting Timothy is easy. It isn’t. Here is a guy who once became the National Chinese Kickboxing Champion by shoving opponents out of the ring (he didn’t fight them, he just pushed them, and won) and holds the Guinness Book of World Records’ record for the most consecutive tango-spins in one minute. He wrote a bestseller (The 4-Hour Workweek), sold his company and is an early investor in Twitter, Posterous, DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee), Reputation Defender, Foodzie, Badongo, Rescue Time, and SimpleGeo.

In other words: Timothy Ferriss is not someone you simply book. This is a guy that needs to find a reason to come. Since we don’t have big mountains to ski here in The Netherlands or access to expensive cars we had to come up with something else that piqued his interest.

Join 1200 Internet professionals and Tim Ferriss for the 5th edition of The Next Web Conference. A must attend!
Grab your discounted ticket now!

We think we have one of the most interesting conferences in the world because we focus a lot on what our speakers will talk about. We don’t have big brand CEOs on stage who can only talk about how great their past quarters were. We try to get people on stage who can talk about the future, without worrying what their PR departments or stockholders will say. That means we have the strategy makers, book writers and independent entrepreneurs on stage who can really look forward.

We’ve noticed that the audience seems to appreciate this. They are more inspired, learn more and are more often surprised with the keynotes than at any other conference. At least, that is what we are told. We explained this to Timothy and challenged him to challenge the ideas of our audience and really blow their socks off. That seemed to have helped in his decision to join us on stage this year.

Okay, to tell you the truth I guess it also helped that we end the conference with the biggest yearly party in The Netherlands: Queensday.

During Queensday we celebrate our queens birthday and about a million people descend on Amsterdam, dressed in orange only, to celebrate ALL day. In fact, the party starts on Thursday evening, goes on all night, lasts through Friday and ends Saturday morning.

Either way we are very excited to announce Timothy Ferriss is one of our keynote speakers during The Next Web Conference 2010! If you haven’t booked your ticket yet do it now before it’s sold out!