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The Station goes to a lot of user and company conferences; it’s required by the job. Usually, they are well worth the time, effort and money it takes to travel to and cover them, because they are a great opportunity to meet in person with both vendors and users of those particular IT products and services and find out how all this stuff is working in the real world.
Now and then we journalists and analysts get asked in our own postmortems about conferences. We just filled out another questionnaire earlier today and thought it might be fun to share it with you.
Those of you who were actually at the EMC World show at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas can compare your notes with The Station’s and see if we’re all on the same virtual page.
Here are the actual questions the PR person asked, with our answers immediately thereafter:
1. Was your time at EMC World 2008 well spent? Overall, yes.
2. What did you like? Catching up with colleagues on both sides of the fence; good availability of EMC execs.
3. What didn’t you like? Not a lot of news; Las Vegas itself (yeccch).
4. Were the facilities adequate for your needs? (Internet cafe, hotel, media briefing room, AV, etc.?) What would you change? Press room was fine. I would have made cabled Internet available; wireless often can be janky.
5. How did you feel about the amount of content/news/activity in the press program? I thought news from the company was pretty minimal this year. Having [CEO and Chairman] Joe Tucci come in for an hour to talk to us was good.
6. Did you feel you had enough free time at EMC World 2008 to explore the conference, speak with attendees and write stories? Yes.
7. Do you feel that EMC PR prepared you well for the event? (with interview schedules, travel/hotel logistics, etc)? Yes.
8. What do you suggest EMC PR incorporate into the press program for next year? Beer.
Note: We actually filled out this survey just so we could answer the last question.