This year at LeWeb, we enjoyed again an honest, direct and colorful presentation of Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee who also presented his vision of the future of conferences. When Loic Le Maur, the founder of Le Web commented: “LeWeb is not a conference, its a community”, Gary exploded: “If this is a f… community, why aren’t we doing Q&A?”

I met Gary backstage who is very approachable, helpful and friendly, and recorded this little video asking to share his vision on the future of events.

The message he presented is that content now no longer a commodity of the conference, when more and more often it is shared on video and streamed online. People will not pay just to come and hear the content they can see online. Interaction with a speaker is becoming more valuable in the form of extended Q&A sessions.

As the consequence of that, networking becoming more and more valuable and important aspects of the events. I am totally agree with this statement. Networking is what gives ROI from attending conference for me. Lets look at Le Web. Everyone had an opportunity to follow presentation at Le Web from monitors of their computers, what I got from this event, is interaction with delegates and speakers. The contact I made there will bring me more business, content I will read online, and will see online afterwords. This is what Loic Le Maur communicated, that some delegates have never visit the main stage to listen presentation, they enjoy the networking opportunities and smaller sessions, this is where is the business made.

Another advice of Gary is: Speakers at events should commit to stay in the audience to interact with participants, instead of taking a limousine back immediately after the presentation.

For all of you who are interested to hear more about the vision of Gary, I highly recommend to read his new book: Crush it! In this book you can learn how to build and maintain an online community around your passion and brand, strategies for turning attention into money and much more