Understanding Events - Karen Snowden Yee - Speaking of Events - Episode # 036

Today’s guest has spent more than 25 years navigating in Global C-Suite experiential keynote presentations. She has produced global event productions in China, Spain, Taiwan, among other places. Welcome to Speaking of Events Karen Yee! Karen is the former Director of Global Conferences at Gartner. She joins the host Kerri Garbis to share some of her insight into the professional event industry.   Takeaways When a client thinks about an event, they might not understand the differences between certain terms and confuse certain things. To help clarify, an event is not an experience and it is not a conference or a tradeshow, they are all different.  An event is where you go somewhere to hear someone speak on a certain topic, experience should be something that is immersive and a conference is a week long and could span multiple blocks of a city. The challenge that event producers face is trying to work speaker training into the budget ahead of time. If you don’t have speaker training, then your event won’t go as smooth as you are hoping it will.  Having time to rehearse your event is a key component for making sure that it is well organized. Otherwise there is a gap that is created between those working backstage and then the event will seem unorganized and chaotic.  When it comes to speakers, you want to make sure you don’t disrespect them but you also don’t treat them as loftier or better than any other part of the event process. At the end of the day, they are people too. Coming out of the pandemic, events had to be redefined in a sense because much everything had changed due to different guidelines.  Karen’s favorite part of the event process is when it is finally taken to stage and it goes live.    Quote of the Show 3:51 “Events are not experiences and not conferences.”    Links Twitter: https://twitter.com/7ftinside LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-snowden-yee-/ Website: https://www.gartner.com/en Digital Blue: https://www.digitalblue.co/   Ways to Tune In: Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a158d222-4beb-4c72-9569-0916e79a80f4/speaking-of-events Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speaking-of-events/id1611059542 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/699re9JSEnwNXnrNLGLUkz Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc3BlYWtpbmdvZmV2ZW50cy5jb20vZmVlZC54bWw?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiI6PWe2o73AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&hl=en YouTube - https://youtu.be/TcKMuJnvk7g   Speaking of Events is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/