Looking Back At Digital Sport Summit: 5 Key Learnings

I was part of a team of three who hosted the Digital Sport Summit on July 7 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. We had a great turn out of 160 people; we have since received some pretty amazing feedback and have already had people ask about how to be involved next year.

For that success I have to thank this blog, to be honest. Without this blog, Digital Sport Summit probably would never have happened. It started for me when in February I did a blog post ranking the Twitter use of  AFL clubs and I highlighted that post to a few people I thought might be interested in it. From that post I was able to make some great contacts in the sports industry here in Melbourne, they were the ones who were willing to share their experience and knowledge with me, and I called upon them as speakers and luckily for us they agreed to be involved very early on in the piece. You don’t hold an event like that, and not learn a few things:

You have to take a risk

As a group, we’d never run our own businesses, especially a conference, which takes a lot of logistical planning. We all put up our own money for a deposit on the venue, and took the gamble that the event would succeed. Not only that, but our professional reputations at stake. If we succeeded, of course it would be great, but if we were to fail and put on an event for the industry that wasn’t well received it would have been professional suicide.

You have to get lucky

I say you have to get lucky because you need people to have a little bit of faith in you. By having the first few speakers on board, we were then  able to leverage their reputation, which made it easier for us to then approach other speakers and say  “X and Y on board as speakers, are you interested?” and that was important to us early on. We certainly rode their coat tails and to those speakers I am greatful, but it wasn’t all plain sailing. As we were an unproven entity, in the early planning phases without a reputation, website and only two speakers on board, we definitely had problems getting in contact with potential speakers, so we got very lucky that some people had faith in us.

You must get yourself noticed

I’m a social media guy, that’s my thing, and you have to get noticed online of course, which we were fairly comfortable with, but getting offline recognition from your peers is the real key to success of getting noticed. It only made it harder that we were trying to get noticed in two industries, tech as well as sports.

I wish I’d kept all the petrol receipts and public transport tickets for my tax return, because there were plenty of kilometres covered along this journey to meet speakers, sponsors and people that might have been interested in the event. I was the mouth piece for this event, and I tried to make myself heard…sorry if I was too loud

I had a motto for those 6 months, “I’ll meet anyone, anywhere”. It was that simple.

Not only did I hit the road I also tried to make the event be known online, putting a banner on SportSpiel as a way to drive traffic to the Digital Sport Summit website, and in the early days that banner drove nearly 40% of all traffic to our conference website.

That's me taking the stage. Make yourself noticed, even if public speaking isn't your thing

We were also very lucky to have a fantastic MC who is well connected within the sports industry, and he had enough faith in me to put me on his radio show, so to Ed Wyatt I must say a big thank you.

You need a drawcard

Like any sports team you need a star, you need something that draws people in. We knew Collingwood defender Harry O’Brien would be a fantastic speaker, he is a personable, funny guy who we believed would be able to cap the day off really well – and he didn’t disappoint! There is no doubt also that once we had Jeramie McPeek from the Phoenix Suns on board as our keynote speaker, that the interest in our event certainly took off. We had selected a diverse range of speakers from a variety of Australian sports and media, as well as blogging/twitter superstar Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse.

You have to want it

I can’t stress this enough, you have to really want it. I don’t want to imagine the amount of hours that we as a group put into this event, and then to just have it fly by on the day because we were so busy, it almost felt unfair. As a group we lost any sense of a social life for three months due to hours of website building, meeting speakers and stakeholders, writing content and holding agenda meetings. But we all really wanted it to succeed, and we put in the hours accordingly.

If you really want it, you can achieve it, and I’ve never believed that more.

So as we finish now with #dss10 I want to say a big thank you to everyone who came along, the success couldn’t have happened without you.

Especially our speakers

• Jeramie McPeek
• Harry O’Brien
• Jonathon Simpson
• Anthony Harrison
• Peter Jankuolvski
• Finn Bradshaw
• Alana Fisher
• Nick Marvin
• Darren Rowse

If you have any further questions, comments or queries please shoot me an email anthony@sportspiel.com.au or to the team info@digitalsport.com.au

We’ll see you for #dss11

Do you want to sponsor #dss11? Do you want to speak at #dss11? Do you want to just connect with me? Add me on LinkedIn http://au.linkedin.com/in/anthonyalsop