Episode
Wi-Fi Disaster That Broke The Event Strategy
- Published
- Aug 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2024
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Summary
Picture this: a dozen rooms, 200 attendees, a paid hands-on training session everyone showed up specifically for, and the Wi-Fi just... dies. Not for five minutes. For hours. Turns out the culprit wasn't the venue's internet at all, it was a stranger walking the floor with a pocket microwave sucking up bandwidth. This week's guest lived it, owned it in front of her entire leadership team, and turned it into one of the biggest lessons of her career. Stephanie Wells has spent 20+ years building the content strategy behind some of the biggest tech conferences on the planet, Microsoft, Salesforce, Tableau, Workday, to name a few. She's a founding member of the Event Content Council, just wrapped two years embedded inside the world of hands-on training, and this fall she's launching her own firm, Gold Heart Events. She's also the person you call when your event has sessions but no strategy, and this conversation is exactly why. What You'll Learn: Why an event content strategy needs to exist before the venue contract gets signed, not after The real story behind a hands-on training Wi-Fi outage that took down a paid conference session, and what it taught an entire leadership team about contingency planning Why AI-written session titles are quietly making every conference sound the same, and what that's costing attendee loyalty The "Scope or Nope" test for deciding what actually belongs in your event content plan How to build a content repurposing strategy before the agenda is even finalized This episode covers the real mechanics of event content strategy: what belongs in scope, what gets cut, and why event ROI depends on decisions made months before anyone signs a venue contract. Stephanie makes the case that content should be first out the gate and last to leave, a…