DISCLAIMER: No, I don’t believe I’m the universe’s gift to DevRel. I don’t have all the answers, all the skills, or even all the Pokemon. What I have is my experiences, collected over the 11 years I’ve been doing this work. That – my experiences and observations – are what I’m sharing in this series.
Before this blog gets de-listed for potentially purile content, let me explain up-front what “un-natural act” I’m referring to:
Getting conference attendees to try your software during the conference
Yeah, THAT un-natural act. Like… you’re at a conference, enjoying the talks, meeting new people, and having a great time. You decide to take a swing through the vendor space, mostly to see what combination of socks, t-shirts, pens, and charging cables you can snag for free.
Stopping at a booth, you’re chatted up by one of the staff, and they say… something clearly compelling. It might even border on mind-control. Your response is to pull out your laptop, head to the vendor’s website, start a free trial, and play around with their software.
This, my friends, is an absolute fever dream. I’m sorry, but I’m not giving up my time (to say nothing of my anonymity) for “a chance to win this Lego Millennium Falcon”. Anyone who thinks this would work has not hung around humans – and specifically humans working in the tech sector – enough. Short of something like “and you’ll immediately get a Lamborghini” (or 1 million dollars, or a lifetime supply of delicious chocolate cake), there’s nothing I can imagine a vendor saying to me that would get anyone to ACTUALLY do the deed.
Opening scroll
Or can you? It turns out, I’ve found a way to do just that. In fact, this technique – tested over 3 years at ~20 different events – consistently delivered a sign-up rate of 10% of the overall attendees. So if the event has 300 people, this technique got me ~30 sign-ups. But at a 3,000 person event, we saw 300 sign ups. Because you probably work in tech and love data, I will admit that there’s an upper-bound at around 5,000 people. Going to re:Invent (about 60,000 people) did NOT garner 6,000 sign ups. However I attribute that to the fact that all 60,000 people didn’t swing by the booth.
But the point stands – this technique gets a non-zero number of folks to take a moment, RIGHT NOW, and sign up. If you’ve been working the booth at conferences for any amount of time, you know that’s worth a lot of $5-a-pair branded aviator glasses.
Level 1: Make it a game
The first thing I did was take my company’s software (remember, I work in monitoring and observability) and incorporated into a game. I found a existing 90’s style side-scroller
and instrumented it with additional monitoring that collected everything from CPU, RAM, and network stats to the number of gems collected, the top level achieved, the speed of movement, etc.
Level 2: Make the back-end visible
Then I took all those stats and built a dashboard around it.
Level 3: Let attendees play AND see!
I built a portable display that allowed someone to play the game AND ALSO see the dashboard in my company’s portal that showed all the monitoring statistics.
CUT SCENE – in-booth discussions
Once this is up and running in the conference booth, people will naturally gravitated to it. A game display is just too enticing NOT to stop and check out. It allowed me to not only invite people to play (and even compete against each other) but I also used the game as a springboard for conversations – describing HOW each of the game elements was instrumented, collected, and displayed, which naturally led to discussing real-world use cases that were closer to home for the attendee.
The best part was that, because the example I used was a game, folks didn’t get hung up on “that’s not like my business” but also it got past the “what are you trying to sell me” resistance that everyone (myself included) feels when passing by a vendor booth at a conference.
But it gets much better than that.
Level 4: Pack it up
Packaging everything up to use in the booth is one thing. But what if you made it so the users THEMSELVES could download the game, pre-instrumented, and load up the dashboard in your portal?
That’s exactly what I did. First I made everything as simple as possible – bundling the game AND monitoring agent into a single downloadable bundle.
Level 4: Provide a walk-through
Next, I wrote up step-by-step instructions that talked folks through:
- creating a free account in my company’s portal
- downloading the game-and-monitoring bundle
- making any configuration changes to connect the game bundle to the free account
The goal wasn’t to make any of this a guessing game or a quiz. If sample configs were needed, I gave them. If there were special add-ons needed for a specific operating system, I provided links. I wanted players to have the easiest, smoothest, fastest set-up experience possible.
Level 5: Offer the Quest.
After seeing the game in the booth, I would offer attendees the opportunity to download it for themselves and set up the exact same dashboard. That way they could enjoy the game AND see the real software (mine) in action.
But this, in fact, is the heart of the blog. THIS is the “most un-natural act”. Why on earth would they DO that??
Level 6: Collect Those Gems!
If you’ve played any game ever, you know that hard work needs to be rewarded. I offered a prize to anyone who came back to the booth and showed me the installed game with the dashboard up and running. The prize was significant. Not “here’s a PS5” significant, but compelling. Over the years, I’ve handed out everything from Ember mugs to Raspberry Pis to light-up LED D&D dice.
What I found is that the thing that compelled attendees to download and try the software wasn’t the expensiveness of the give-away, but the “cool” factor along with the guarantee that they’d get it. Nobody’s going to jump through hoops at a busy tech conference for a raffle ticket.
And that’s where the “10% of attendees” part fits in. That’s how many people, on average, were willing to take time (usually doing it while they were listening to one of the conference talks) and download the game bundle, set up the free account, and do the (minor, easy) configuration to connect the two things.
Bonus Level: Beat the BFG
We also had a big give away (yes, sometimes if actually was a PS5 or XBox), but I’m not a big fan of raffles. So we made it part of the entire engagement strategy.
IF the attendee downloaded the game bundle and set up the dashboard…
AND IF they showed us the dashboard (and got the cool prize).
AND IF if they actually played the game during the event, and had the highest score at the end,
THEN They’d win the prize.
How would we know? Their score in the dashboard, of course.
Hidden Level: The Kobiashi Maru
What I discovered the very first time I did this activity was that I needed TWO big prizes.
One for the person who played by the rules, who got the high score fair and square.
And one for the inevitable group of folks who found a way to tweak and change something to create an impossibly high score. Maybe they adjusted the math on the dashboard display. Maybe they added a multiplier in the data collection process. Maybe both.
Why? Why would I reward a cheater?
Let me reframe that for you:
What would you have to give someone at a conference to download a program, set up your software and a dashboard, and then EDIT AND MODIFY that setup to do something different? What’s the likelihood that ANYONE you asked for that kind of investment of time would do anything except walk away (possibly after laughing in your face)?
But here, someone did all of that without you even asking. In marketing and sales terms, this makes them the most qualified of leads.
The End Credits
The core of this idea is that I made a relatively boring, work-intensive piece of software more fun and engaging by associating it with something that was already fun and engaging, and then structuring the handouts and give-aways in such a way that rewarded the behaviors that helped me.
It’s not exactly an epic action that can only be done when you’ve collected 1,000 mana points. But, based on the fact that I’ve seen precious few other vendors do anything like this, it’s still one of those little known power moves that anyone could capitalize on without being seen as derivative.