Should your industry analyst conferences be combined with other company events? [AR Practitioner Question]

Question: As AR managers look forward to 2009, many are thinking about scheduling an analyst conference. A common question SageCircle receives on this topic is whether to co-located the analyst event with other events.

Are you holding an IT or telecom industry analyst conference in the next few months?  If so, planning should be well under way.  One of the questions we have received several times over the year concerns the possibility of combining your analyst event with some other company function.  This other event might include customer or user group meetings, partner events, financial analyst events, or PR or marketing meetings.  The logic seems to be that you have gathered all the key executives together and can leverage their time and travel.

We think this is a really bad idea. 

The needs of the Industry Analysts are

SimpleSeating – online tool for creating seating charts for analyst summits

Jonathan Eunice (bio, Twitter, blog), principal analyst at Illuminata, sent along a tip about Simple Seating. A quick scan reveals that it might be a really useful tool for those in charge of planning an analyst event. We think it is a best practice to leave nothing to chance when it comes to who sits with who at an analyst summit or analyst conference. However, creating a seating chart can be a major time sink and a massive pain. Maybe this online tool can make it easier.

Tip o’ the hat to Jonathan for the tip.

Nifty idea for raising awareness of vendor staff at an analyst summit

One of the quandaries I’ve had at analyst summits is how to introduce the analysts to on-site staff so they know who to go to for assistance and with questions. Seth Godin in his post Saying thanks in a conference presentation has a simple technique that can be applied to this purpose. It does not require the AR manager to use time during the opening “welcome” presentation and frankly is much more effective than simply verbally listing the names of AR team members and other support staff. Here is an extract from Seth’s post:

“The solution is pretty simple, thanks to Powerpoint and digital cameras.

Prepare for the talk by taking pictures of each person. If they’re shy, you can even do photographs in groups of two or three. Good photos, clever photos, funny photos… photos that are interesting are best.

Then, create a new presentation. Put each photo on its own slide, preferably with a well designed ID below it (it should be on