Pink Elephant Blog
Registrations For the 14th Annual Conference Are Exceeding My Expectations!
I would have thought that the difficult financial situation for many organizations would result in reduced - or at least very late - registrations for the world's biggest ITSM conference. But no! The total registrations we have right now for Pink's 14th Annual ITSM Conference & Exhibition is ahead of the same date last year. They have just been piling in during the last week or so as the final early bird offer rapidly expired. So far we're at almost 900 confirmed registrations, and experience tells us that about half of the total registrations come in after January 1st. So, if history can be trusted, we're expecting a bumper attendance in 2010. There's two schools of thought within Pink for why we're seeing such an encouraging response from our customers: 1. The incredible special offer on hotel rates we've managed to negotiate at the Bellagio. In fact, if you booked early enough your room would have been free! (Can't get lower than that, folks!) Even if you book today the rate is lower than ever. Although don't wait too long, Bellagio rates are just going to go higher as we get nearer to the event. That's because we're close to filling the hotel on the dates we'll be there - and so there's no incentive for them to keep dropping room rates any lower. 2. The quality of the Conference program. Our Conference team have done a great job - yet again. I believe that every year our customers have come to expect that the Pink event will be great - so that gives them the confidence to take advantage of the early bird offers. They just know they'll be coming anyway, so why not get the best deal? On a side note, I've noticed over the years that other entities who produce IT conferences can get quite carried away with describing their attendance levels. The numbers they talk about often bear no resemblance to the actuals! I can understand that they want to talk-up their event and project a positive image, but at the end of the day we can all see how many chairs they set-up in the main meeting room! In fact, just last week one organization proudly declared that they'd had "1100 attendees over 2 days". Really? So 1100 badges were printed? Er, no, around 500 badges were printed and the same person attending the whole 2-day event was counted as a day 1 attendee PLUS a day 2 attendee. Ah - so that's how 500 people can get rounded up to 1100! Anyway, I find this all a bit humourous and don't get too excited about our competitors using "creative counting" techniques - that's their business. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting regular updates on Twitter regarding the registration trend for #PINK10 (#PINK10 being the Twitter hashtag for Pink's 14th Annual ITSM Conference & Exhibition). And, for the record, I'll be using the "Pink counting" method - 1 person = 1 person!
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