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You Want Answers?

I’ll resist the rest of the quotes from A Few Good Men and instead go with these:

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” -Sun-tzu

“It’s not personal, it’s business.” -Anthony Soprano

Tales of corporate espionage abound these days. Fake Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages are the latest rage, each designed to engage people in conversations to extract information that can be used to gain an advantage, even if the advantage is minimal. For example, I can set up a fan page, allow the public to become a fan, and then my competitors can participate in conversations on my wall. If I am not careful, then I could give away some valued information without realizing it. In fact, that is the way most espionage works these days, through social engineering, which makes Twitter and Facebook quite attractive for such espionage.

Imagine if you knew some information about the people that attend a conference, say WPPI (where my wife happens to be this week). You know how far people travel, if they like traveling that far, if they would rather stay closer to home, if they like having a large presence from Canon, if they find value in the exhibit hall, and a host of other things about a random attendee. Now, if you were in the market to start up your own photography conference, you would have a lot of valuable information to get started with, right? And you are probably going to succeed in siphoning off attendees from WPPI as a result. And let’s not forget the vendors. You may be able to approach vendors and get them to decided to attend your conference and not WPPI, disrupting their event even further.

Now, think about all of that and compare it to the PASS survey results. While we would love to release the results, in full details, our marketing team has advised us to err on the side of caution. It’s not that we don’t want to release the information to the community, in fact we thought it would be great to let everyone try to slice and dice the data for themselves. The simple fact is that we are not sure if the data could put us at a disadvantage or not. And yes, believe it or not, we are in competition with other conferences and events, including some by Microsoft! Every event is clamoring for attendees these days, and for people that can only chose one conference to attend we would really like for them to choose PASS.

Right now it would seem to me that the biggest issue here is that the community is clamoring for access to the data, and those that currently have the data (PASS HQ) have not necessarily made it a priority to find a way to get it to you. There is nothing evil at play here, just a slight communication problem. And one we can fix. The board is meeting in two weeks and I am certain we will find a resolution to the disconnect at that time. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions as to how the data can be presented so that it will not put us at a disadvantage in any way, just let us know. Believe me, we would love to get the results to you, just help us to make it happen.

As for the swing and a miss, well…we’re still at bat, right?

[This blog post are my thoughts, and my thoughts alone, please do not consider this an official response from PASS, thanks.]

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Asides

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