90 days in… and it’s time to report on the Conference Connect platform.
In this edition of Worth It or Walk Away, I wanted to see if this platform could actually help me connect with new event organizers and maybe even find some new gigs.
As a quick recap, Conference Connect promised to:
- Give personalized event recommendations,
- Send alerts when my favorite other speakers were speaking,
- Help me get discovered by event organizers,
- Let me stay ahead of industry trends,
- And beef up my referral and collaboration network.
I was actually the most excited about the alerts that were supposed to come when other speakers were speaking. So, I created my free profile, set up my alerts, subscribed to the digest emails, and sat back to see what would happen…
… for a nice, fair 90-day test.
Profile Set-Up: Quick, Easy… and Pointless?
When you first set up your profile on Conference Connect, you’ll need to add things like your profile picture, bio, speech topic, and area of expertise. They also wanted me to input Amazon links for my books and any other speakers I wanted to list as favorites.
The entire set up process only took 15-20 minutes. And it was free to use.
I decided to list three of the speakers in my closest referral ring who I knew for a fact would be speaking over the course of the next three months. I also asked for some suggestions of other speakers to follow in my niche and tried to set up some of my favorite events.
But none of my favorite events showed up as options on the platform. Okay, no problem. Moving on…
I then tracked every email I received from Conference Connect over the next few weeks. You have the option to sign up for a daily or weekly digest. I signed up for the weekly version.
When emails came in, I categorized them according to whether they were relevant to the types of events I was targeting and if they were actionable.
The Big Letdown
So, I’ll just tell you what happened. It’s not rocket science.
