To get to the bottom of these questions, CrowdCompass teamed up with Edelman Intelligence and surveyed 1,000 recent event attendees. We asked about what their event expectations were, what dazzled or disappointed them and what they actually took away from their favorite events. And you know what we found? There's a lot going on in their minds.

Here, a sampling of random (heavily paraphrased) thought bubbles from the minds of some event attendees: