Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Saturday, February 12, 2011

RootsTech -- Where should we go from here?

With such a fabulous experience it may be hard to see where RootsTech could go in the future. But I will take a stab at some ideas. My first thought is that RootsTech could become the place to announce new products, new acquisitions, mergers, anything newsworthy. Think of the exposure to a new product at this venue. It could also serve as a way to broaden the interest in genealogy by tying in advertising to the existing out sources. For example, what if there had been short ads for RootsTech on the Who Do You Think You Are? shows? How about some vendor cooperative advertising? What if RootsMagic (only an example) had a tag line for RootsTech on some of its media ads?

With a Conference that had so much content, it is hard to suggest anything, but what about having "tracks," that is a structured series of classes that the participants could do online or in the program that would guide them to which classes might be interesting for their level of interest and expertise.

It seemed to me that the hands-on classes were the most attended since there were some where I couldn't get a seat. How about running those classes as scheduled repeats and ask people to specifically sign up for a time?

I really liked the idea of having an interview booth at the show with the video of the interview. It might be helpful for the vendors and other speakers who would make themselves available for interviews to be put on a list and given to the Bloggers in advance so we could do some research on the companies and decided if we wanted to do an interview. If this was done this year, I somehow missed it.

One of things that was interesting was the fact that FamilySearch invited a few non-genealogy Bloggers. It was nice to share a different perspective with people who wrote about other subjects rather than genealogy all the time. This might be expanded to some technology Bloggers or other categories.

I might come up some more ideas later. I think this Blogger needs to slow down for a while.

2 comments:

  1. You've done an excellent job of bringing RootsTech to those of us who didn't attend. Thank you so much, James. I'm anxious to read what else you have to share---but take your time and take care of yourself!

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  2. I agree with Ms. Jamison. I've read most of your Rootstech postings in full as I think you've done a good job of covering the things you experienced for those of us not able to be there. Thanks!

    What I've seen from the bloggers that were there is that this was a very unusual genealogy conference, with upbeat music intros and other things not usually seen at genealogy conferences. What I would say is this sounded like a pretty typical technology conference, tuned to present genealogy-related topics. Get used to more of this in the future, it's time to get genealogy livened up!

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