SF authors have a lot to answer for. While they are popularly assumed to predict the future, most will be quick to disclaim any Nostradamus tendencies. Instead, they are trying to tell a story, and the setting is only a part of that effort. The problems arise when people read the story, fall in love with the setting — and decide to enact it in real life.

I’m as guilty as any other nerd, with my unmarked keyboard meant to evoke Case’s deck in Neuromancer that always got him into trouble at customs. I also have an Ono-Sendai sticker on my MacBook, just to complete the look. That sort of thing is mostly harmless. What about the people who read Snow Crash¹ and decided to build the Metaverse, though? They read passages like this and think to themselves: "whoa, cool, I gotta build that":

He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.

And so they went and built those things. This is literally the origin story for a lot of the tech we have today, from the iPhone as Star Trek communicator on down. When it comes to VR, you might expect that now of all times, with nobody able to go to the office, VR would be having its moment. But it isn’t, at all.

Sure, there are hopefuls like Spatial, sometimes described breathlessly as "the Zoom of VR" — but it relies on the Oculus Quest hardware, which is hardly universal, or Magic Leap, which may never be seen at all. I tried it on the web and it’s buggy right in the signup experience, definitely not something I would introduce to colleagues, let alone clients.

Maybe when Apple brings out its AR headset we’ll have a platform worthy of the name, but right now VR just isn’t there. I’m a techie, an early adopter, and if you can’t sell me on VR when a) I can’t leave the house and b) there’s a new Halflife game which requires VR, I think it’s safe to say it’s a small niche and going to stay that way.

I’ve been fully remote for a long time, but most people, even among those who had the choice, preferred to go into offices. Now we are all forced into the WFH life, but it’s awkward. Too many Zooms, too few, how much communication is needed or wanted, what needs to be synchronous and what can go async via Slack — and how do we manage all of that when many of us are also juggling other responsibilities? The home schooling, oh God the home schooling. Give teachers raises yesterday, they earned them.

Part of the stress of WFH is communication, and the pitch of meeting in VR is to approximate the experience of a real meeting better than just a grid of people’s heads on screen. It turns out, though, that experience is sufficient for most purposes. People are using Zoom for karaoke, cocktails (quarantini, anyone?), weddings, graduations, and just about anything else.

So Where Did VR Get Lost?

Even with the head start of everyone stuck at home and hating it, VR still has not taken off. The reason is the sort of impact that always means that the future will not look like the past or even a linear extrapolation. It’s easy to think of remote working and see that it requires good bandwidth, that people with good written skills and ability to manage their own time might thrive, and so on. Not many futurists had considered the impact on a family with both parents trying to work from home while juggling child care and home schooling, for instance.

This is one reason why even in lockdown VR hasn’t taken off (that and it’s still too expensive, but that’s a chicken & egg problem). I’ve taken tons of conference calls — yes, even on video — with a baby in my arms², or keeping one eye on the maths homework going on next to me, or simply with one ear cocked for mischief being perpetrated somewhere else. VR, if it works properly, excludes all of that.

Some of the reluctance to embrace new tech is also the fear of obsolescence. If we can all go back to the office as soon as possible, the old habits and rules that enabled people to be successful in the past can be reimposed and those people can go on being successful without having to learn something new or change their behaviour in any way.

This reluctance also applies to tech platforms themselves. Remote events — and all events are of course remote for the rest of 2020 at least — default to the tried and true format of fast-scrolling comments beside live streamed events. This format was already tired ten years ago, but nobody has come up with anything much better. Partly there wasn’t a need, because it was easier just to rent out space in Vegas or Orlando and run the conference there, and partly there wasn’t a platform to build on. That last issue is of course another iteration of the chicken-and-egg problem: nobody has been able to build a platform because the users weren’t there, because nobody had built it, and repeat.

That consideration leads us back to Apple potentially jump-starting the whole VR-AR market by pulling their usual trick of holding back, looking carefully at what’s out there, thinking really hard about the use case, and then bringing out something that defines the market such that soon afterwards it is seen as inevitable and everybody else simply has variations on Apple’s theme.

Until that happens, though, the Zoom+Slack combo is the best we have, and we had better get used to it.

We discussed the topic of remote working on Episode Two of Roll For Enterprise, a new podcast I co-host. Listen to the episode, and subscribe if you like what you hear!

🖼️ Photo by Hammer & Tusk on Unsplash

Conference season has started up again with a vengeance after the summer break. If you’ve ever staffed or attended a conference, you know that there is always a room (or a hallway, or an out-of-the-way closet) where sponsors can set up more or less elaborate booths and talk to attendees about their offerings.

Staffing a booth is a particular discipline, with significant variations depending on the intersection of which company you represent and which event you are at. Let’s go through some of the factors that go into deciding what goes in a booth – or not.

What is the goal of the sponsorship?

Depending on the company and the event, the goal of an event sponsorship can vary widely. Sometimes you might be there to scan literally every attendee’s badge and get their contact details so that you can follow up later. In this case, you want the flashy giveaway, the must-play game, and in general the fun, look-at-me booth. You also want to make sure that you can process people through pretty quickly; it’s a numbers game.

In other situations – different event audience, or different product and pitch on your part – that is exactly the opposite of what you want. You are aiming for a smaller number of longer and deeper conversations. The sorts of attendees you want will be turned off by queues or flashy displays, and may prefer a sit-down conversation to standing at a demo pod.

Make sure that both sales and marketing agree on the goals! I have personally been involved in events that Marketing considered a great success – "look at how many leads we generated!" – but Sales ignored as a waste of time – "those leads don’t convert". Have that conversation up front, because afterwards it’s too late.

Outside help

At many events, at least some of the booth staffers will be outside contractors, not employees of the company sponsoring the booth. A few years ago "contractor" would have been a euphemism for "booth babe", someone significantly younger than the average conference attendee, generally of the opposite sex to most of the attendees, and wearing significantly less clothing. This kind of contractor is there mainly as eye candy to attract passing traffic.

At least at the sort of conference I go to, the straight-up "booth babe" sort of thing has more or less completely died out – and good riddance to it. Even so, there are still a lot of contractors about, especially at larger events such as Mobile World Congress. They are there to give a pre-rehearsed short pitch and hand out collateral and swag, no more.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using outside help in this way, but it does influence what the typical attendee experience of your booth will be – and therefore what type of leads you will get.

Be in the room

If you’re working a booth, again, know what your goal is. If you want all the leads you can get, go stand out in the hallway with an armful of T-shirts or beer coozies or whatever your giveaway is, and scan everybody in sight. If you’re after more in-depth conversations, stay in your booth perimeter and wait for people to come to you.

Either way, don’t just hang out in the booth, playing with your phone or talking to your colleagues – and definitely don’t get out the laptop and try to work in the booth. You’re there to be available to attendees! If you need to do something urgently, step out of the booth, find a café or whatever, and work from there. There may be a sponsor lounge, or if you’re a speaker there is almost always some sort of green room with WiFi and coffee – and with any luck, a somewhat ergonomic table to work at.

Booth design matters

The booth design is also a factor, and it will change based on your company’s market profile, the event, and once again, your goal for the event. If your company is well-known enough that people will stop by just to see what you’re up to or grab the latest swag, your booth needs to be all about whatever is the newest thing you want to get out there. If you are a startup or a new entrant, you need something eye-catching that explains what your core value proposition is. Either way, keep it simple: nobody reads more than a handful of words on a booth, and they need to be able to do that from a distance, on the move, with a crush of people between them and you.

Different events may also need different designs. If you’re at, say, a Gartner event where most of the attendees are dressed formally, you need to be a bit more grown up too, both in wording and in presentation. Focus on business value and outcomes rather than tech buzzwords. On the other hand, if you’re at a tech-centric event where most people are wearing black T-shirts, you want that checklist, and your benefits need to be couched in technical terms too. This is literally a feeds & speeds crowd, and you should cater to that.

Collateral and handouts

Collateral is a hard one. I have long advocated doing away with take-home collateral entirely, and instead offering to email people about topics they care about – which is an excuse to have a conversation and uncover those topics! You might also consider a row of QR codes on a wall that people can scan to request particular items. This is both more ecological and more practical, since most printed collateral is never read.

However, in certain industries and regions people do actually want something to take away with them, so be aware of those preferences and make sure you cater to them.

The one piece of printed collateral I do like to have in a booth is an architecture diagram, because you can pick that up and use it as a visual aid in conversations with people, even if they never take it with them. In smaller situations I’ve also done this with a diagram printed on the wall or even a whiteboard in the booth, but when there are multiple people who might need to use the visual tool, it can get messy. Better to have one each!

I wrote down some more in-depth advice about conference collateral here.

Further reading

Those are my thoughts, but here are some more from Cote. There is some excellent advice here – do read it! You can sign up for his newsletter here – and if you like this sort of thing, his podcast is pretty good too.

🖼️ Photos by Jezael Melgoza and Cami Talpone on Unsplash