Fork In The Road Blog

Events: Technology. Design. Strategy.

Cloud Computing and Crowdsourcing from MTO Summit

The MTO Summit, October 21-22 in San Francisco was the hub for discussions on event industry technology. Much of the discussion focused on social media and social networking applications and integration. Two interesting technology providers, Fantail Consulting and The Social Collective were on hand to offer new perspectives and solutions for social media pains.

Michael J. Hatch, president, Fantail Consulting (formerly with A2Z, Inc.) discusses the cloud computing consultancy services that his new company is offering. This technology holds promise for event organizers looking to provide remote applications and networking capabilities to its community of stakeholders such as attendees, (both face-to-face and virtual), exhibitors, sponsors and others that could overload a conventional Web server. In the above video, Hatch talks about lowering costs and increasing operational efficiency using cloud computing resources.

Clinton Bonner of The Social Collective discusses the capabilities of his company’s crowdsourcing application called Crowd Campaign. All you need is a good contest idea, a few hundred dollars, at least six weeks lead time and 500 or more Twitter followers. Event organizers benefit in three ways–the tweets generate a viral effect (i.e. information about your event is passed along as contest prizes stimulate participation), users contribute valuable content (opinions, case studies, YouTube videos, etc.) in exchange for a chance to win and revenue streams emerge (as sponsors hitch their logos to the Web landing page).

Why National Speakers Association Chose Facebook Over Private Social Networking Platform for 2009 Convention

When the National Speakers Association (NSA) considered social networking platforms to enhance their 2009 Convention, they compared private and public options. Platform features, cost and attendee preferences were among the top considerations.

The main goal for NSA was to build community. “Community is a huge part of our organization. We look for ways to learn from each other and connect. [A social network] was a way for our attendees to learn who was coming to the conference in advance and get to know people ahead of time,” says Cara Tracy, director of professional development for the Tempe, AZ-based organization.

The private platform that NSA reviewed was full-featured but relatively expensive (fees were based on the number of anticipated users). Because the organization had never used a social networking platform for a meeting before, it was difficult to predict usage.

The NSA compared the features and costs of the private platform under consideration to Facebook, a public platform with fewer event-centric features but free to use for the association, its members and conference attendees.

Facebook carried with it the added advantage that many NSA members and conference attendees were already on Facebook and would likely continue to use the platform long after the conference concluded (unlike the private platform that would eventually expire).

NSA’s IT department set up a Facebook group called “National Speakers Association 2009 Convention Attendees” several months in advance of the convention. 387 people joined the group. The convention was held in Phoenix from July 18-21. The most recent post on Facebook was August 22, 2009.

“People were using the Facebook group for things we hadn’t anticipated like calling for volunteers or searching for room mates,” Tracy says. Although NSA didn’t establish any goals for usage in advance, they were pleased with the outcome and plan to establish a group for the 2010 convention as well.

NSA also set up an “event” in LinkedIn asking attendees to RSVP for the convention even though formal registration was still required. “We used LinkedIn to get an idea of how many people were planning to attend the conference. It also gave us a way to communicate with those that responded on LinkedIn but didn’t actually attend. We think our members sometimes tune out email. This is another way to reach them,” Tracy explains.

For more immediate communication with attendees, NSA set up a Twitter hash tag as a way to communicate updates and reminders before, during and after the conference (for example, “the early bird registration deadline is coming up,” book your hotel rooms now,” “wear your name tags to the opening reception,” “the bus is leaving from the ballroom foyer” and “don’t forget to complete your evaluations”).

The Takeaway: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other public platforms are ways for associations and other non-profit groups to become acquainted with social networking at low cost (the manpower for setting up and monitoring the groups should be considered as a cost) and relatively low risk. Although private platforms provide many more benefits, for some associations such as NSA, the value proposition isn’t as solid as private platform providers would like it to be. It may be that once sponsorship opportunities proliferate on private social networking platforms and become low cost revenue streams for event organizers, that the return on investment of private platforms will become obvious and the adoption rate for more budget-conscious associations will accelerate.

How the Social Media Revolution Is Shortening Our Lives (In A Good Way)

I’ve been seeing a pattern for a while and some recent tidbits that I’ve stumbled across confirm my suspicions. Social media has changed the way we WANT to consume product/company/event information–from long diatribes about a company’s product to short and sweet bursts of flavorful info that spark an idea.

Twitter is the prime example. Natch! But there’s more and more coming from the face-to-face meeting world that points in the same direction. Here’s what I’m talking about…

Look at the TED Conference. Some of the most brilliant minds in the universe gather to deliver ideas that they are passionate about to an audience that has paid $2,000 to $6,000 to attend in person (less if you want to attend virtually). Speakers are allowed only 18 minutes each to present an idea that they believe will change the world.

Then you have Pecha Kucha Nights. Local groups all over the world that get together to listen to local artists, professionals and “ordinary” citizens give a PowerPoint presentation for 6 minutes and 40 seconds (20 slides x 20 seconds each) on topics they are passionate about. In Christchurch, New Zealand folks talked about guerilla gardening, the brain of a kiwi and “Hamster Squaredance” (not sure I want to go there).

Last year I attended the Global Events Partners Global Summit, a private event held by the company for it’s sales executives and clients. One day they presented a Destination Showcase involving 20-some of their partners/offices. Speakers from destinations that GEP represents walked onto a stage for 3 minutes each while a PowerPoint flashed a couple of slides behind them. There were no pauses between the speakers or the slides and as one presenter walked off, the next person in line walked on in this continuous flow of talk, jokes and even songs.

As I was checking out the run down for our monthly Salt Lake Social Media Club meeting, I noticed that it will be a joint meeting with group called Ignite Salt Lake. It sounds like a Pecha Kucha meets TED opportunity for local folks with ideas of all kinds to talk about their passions.

I realized how valuable the contribution of people’s seemingly disparate ideas are to my own thought processes at a session titled “An Industry in Transition” during the MPI World Education Conference a few weeks ago. Presenters Fiona Pelham of Organise This and Elizabeth Henderson of MPI presented a framework for problem-solving around the subject of creating a more sustainable meetings and exhibitions industry.

Toward the end of the session, Pelham posed the question to the group of 30 or so attendees, “What kinds of skills can you exchange with someone else to accelerate the learning process?” Audience members quickly threw out a number of skills including writing in British English, riding a motorcycle, becoming a locavore (slow cooking), canning (for consumption of food during the meeting) graphic design, participating in the CMP (Certified Meeting Professional) program, calculating a renewable energy mix, and wine making. I walked away thinking about how to cram all of these “skills” into the mind box I created for myself called “how do these ideas help to make meetings more sustainable?” I also wanted to figure out how to re-connect with Fiona and Elizabeth.

So not only do we like to talk in short, truncated sentences on Twitter or the Facebook wall, we like to consume information in the same way. We don’t really like to be sold to (hence the popularity of the DVR and Tivo) but we love new ideas and would likely buy from someone that has a good un-related (to their product or service) idea just because we find him or her interesting.

Here’s the takeaway:  Social media is teaching us the value of short, rich and succulent ideas. In the context of conference content, besides being brief, the content has to be thought-provoking and perhaps only somewhat related to the industry or the product of the presenters.  Most definitely, overt product pitches are so 2006. But since, as TED espouses, all knowledge is related, there is some value in exploring ways to present great ideas about a wide variety of subjects and leave it to the audience to connect the dots about how it can apply to them, their companies, their jobs and their lives.

Attendee Perceptions of Private Event Social Networking Platforms: Let’s Get This Party Started!

A posting by David Berkowitz on the Social Media Insider blog caught my attention. It contains some interesting suggestions and observations from a conference attendee and meetings industry outsider. I especially like his suggestions about putting speakers’ twitter handles on the screen while they present and treating bloggers like press (selfish I know). However, I was a little curious about one particular comment. Berkowitz advises conference organizers against creating private social networks just for their attendees. “With rare exceptions, they’re a waste of time, and participants would be better served with groups on existing networks like Facebook and LinkedIn,” he says.

I contacted David Berkowitz for clarification. He elaborated in an email exchange that, “I’ve signed up for a lot of these specialized networks, and most fail because they don’t get enough members using them, and they don’t provide enough value for the members who do. There are occasions where it works, like for SXSW where there’s a large number of attendees, a very complicated schedule, and days of spontaneous networking. Most of the time, however, the people really using the custom event networks for networking purposes (as opposed to just registering to create a schedule) are the obsessive networkers who you try to avoid in the halls as they thrust their business card in your face.”

Having followed the development of these private, event-centric networks like Zerista, Pathable, CrowdVine and EventVue for some time now, I know that they offer far more functionality than the public networks such as Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo and others. According to John Kanarowski of Zerista, some of the main features of his and other platforms include:

1.     Meeting scheduler to enable advance scheduling of 1:1 meetings

2.     Schedule builder to create and then export your own personal schedule of keynotes, sessions, workshops, etc.

3.     Share personal schedule with other attendees

4.     Highlight event-specific interests within your profile

5.     Match attendees with other attendees, exhibitors and sessions

6.     Exhibitor tools like virtual booths and at booth meeting scheduler

7.     Embedded webcasting of keynotes, sessions, and workshops

8.     Aggregated feed of event-related social media from multiple places on the web (twitter, YouTube, flickr, etc.)

9.     Aggregate attendee profiles from other social networks in one place

10. Integrated online registration and payment engine to sell premium online services and content access

11. Ability to charge virtual attendees the same price as in-person attendees for attending the event

12. Interactive maps of the trade show floor, venue and local area

13. Custom privacy settings to enable different access rights for paid attendees, exhibitors, speakers, and visitors

With such robust (cliché marketing term, sorry) tools available, why would apparently seasoned conference goers like David Berkowitz find them ineffective? For one thing, private networking platforms are developed with the needs of the event organizer in mind—understandable since the platforms are generally paid for by the event organizers and are free of charge to users (putting conference registration fees aside). “We’ve found that by focusing on solving the problems of event managers, we can enable them to improve their events in a measurable way. We measure the impact of our software using quantifiable metrics – like the number of 1:1 meetings scheduled in advance, percentage of attendees and exhibitors that use the tools, percentage increase in event networking, percentage increase in event productivity, number of additional leads for exhibitors, and other similar metrics,” says Kanarowksi.

There are other issues to consider. Some attendees don’t take the time to learn how to navigate the networking tools that event organizers provide. Often the tools are too complex for novice social networkers. They don’t know the platforms exist or what they do. Facebook and Twitter are no-brainers and may provide enough functionality for attendees without the bells and whistles offered by customized networking platforms.

It’s true that event-specific platforms separate the wheat from the chaff. They get down to business and allow users to only connect with people that are attending the conference and have access to the same tools, information and mindset that they have. It’s also true, however, that there is value to general networking tools like Facebook and the rest, and in the absence of more evolved platforms (i.e. event organizers can’t afford or don’t understand the potential of private networks), they allow the diligent worker bees and self-organizing social networking aficionados to seek each other out without Big Brother’s help. So, how do we close the gap between what some attendees want or need and what some organizers and solution developers want and offer?

 The Takeaways:

·      Event organizers need to take the user experience into consideration when choosing between platforms.

·      Solution developers need to do everything possible to promote and enhance adoption rates.

·      Attendees need to take responsibility for learning how to harness the power of customized event social networks.

 ·     Let the David Berkowitzs out there be heard!

 

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