Why?

Because it sounds unhealthy, irresistible and something that you should try at least once! I imagine it just like the photo below.

Fried Snickers Bar on a Stick. Photo credit: linksmanjd

Why should you try Nacho Mamas?

Good question. Has anyone ever said this about a virtual event that you have organized?

At 6:00 pm when the camera stopped rolling and the event closed down, I realized for the first time I was alone in my office.  I looked around and wondered where the 174 people had gone.

Or what about this:

It blew me away. For the first time ever, this was officially a hybrid event that works.  It was the whole package. I got way more than I expected. If I had to pay for it – I would have.

If you aren’t getting that kind of feedback, then maybe this recipe is the kick start that you need. It is tasty, irresistible and keeps people coming back for more.

Here is the recipe, so you can go out and create your own Deep Fried Hybrid Event on A Stick. See the finished product.

Ingredients

Team Roles

1 Virtual Event Design Consultant / Project Manager

1 Virtual Emcee: The Host of the Remote Broadcast

1 Tech Director: Calls the show, video camera shots and switches

1 Twitter Moderator: Captures questions, comments and ideas from the audience

1 Soundbyte Tweeter: Tweets Out Speaker highlights under the event’s Twitter ID

1 Main Session Cameraman

1 Studio Cameraman

1 Mediasite Tech: Manages video, audio and VGA feeds going into Mediasite system

1 A/V Tech: Manages the House signals

1 A/V Tech: Manges the Video and Audio Switches for Remote Audience

Equipment and Technology

2 Cameras: One for the main room and a second for the studio

2 Camera Tripods

1 Riser – to make the tripod sit over everyone’s head

2 Studio Microphones (These are linked to webcast – but not house sound.)

3 House Sound Microphones

1 Media Site Player (this is the webcasting gear)

1 Video Switcher

1 Interview Studio (Table, Chairs Backdrop, Professional Lighting)

1 Twitter Hashtag

1 Event Twitter Account

1 Webcast Player (Mediasite provides this – but can be configured)

1 Intefy System (Virtual Front Door that shows video, schedule plus twitter streams

1 Hosting Server for Storing and Hosting Streaming Video

3 Laptops for Virtual Emcee, Twitter Moderator and Fact Based Tweeter (if not the same person)

Various and sundry cables to connect and power everything

Directions

Create A Virtual Agenda

Take your event agenda and mix in a virtual introduction, virtual shows and planned interviews. With your rolling pin, neatly roll out the virtual conference agenda until it integrates nicely with your regular event agenda. Be sure that most of the breaks and meals are filled with lively content for the virtual audience.

Next, chop the agenda up into a run schedule and add in different points for group time. Take those chopped up elements and sprinkle in various people (virtual emcee, twitter moderator) and places (Studio, main room and man on the street).

Put the programming in the refrigerator to gel for a few days.

Design the Virtual Experience

Next, sketch out the virtual experience. Sketch out the sights, sounds and mouse clicks that people will experience while moving from your Virtual Front Door into your Event’s Virtual Living Room. There may be several steps and screens – understand them all. Be sure to look at experience, performance, usability and intuitive interface when choosing vendors.

Plan & Equip Your Physical Spaces

Now, you need to assemble the elements that will go into your studio, main room, etc – the tech, decor and people. Be sure that you compare these pieces to your agenda to make sure that you have not forgot anything — you want the flavors to gel together when you deep fry it. If they don’t match you could be in trouble. Then, go find your vendors to execute.

Assemble and Deep Fry

Wrap your virtual emcee, virtual experience pieces and physical on-site elements together in your programming. Insert a stick to make sure that your solution is fully portable (that you can embed it on other websites).

Now, Deep Fry that Bad boy for 60 seconds. Let it sit for 20 seconds (the webcast delay), then serve with a big smile and a group of social sharing buttons.

This recipe serves 550.

If you are making a double batch, consider adding two different twitter moderators. The first is a twitter moderator that responds to comments. The second is a twitter moderator that only tweets out speaker highlights from the main event into retweetable soundbytes.

Bottom Line

There were many people, processes and technologies that went into creating and implementing the Event Camp Twin Cities virtual experience. It was the combination of all of these elements – along with compelling content – that got people to engage in the event.

If your hybrid or virtual event or technology or process had a cool food name, what would it be? and why?

The post Nacho Mamas Deep Fried Hybrid Event on A Stick appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.

In the past, we might have given an event a local or regional name. This name helped the event connect and identify with the city, state, or region where the event took place. If the event was a big one we might add the descriptor “National” or “International” to the name.

What about in the digital world? Do these naming standards apply?

Let’s look at Event Camp Twin Cities as an example. We called the event – Event Camp Twin Cities – because it took place in the twin cities of Minneapolis-St.Paul. The Twin Cities is the name for Minneapolis-St.Paul around here. We expected to draw most people from the area. So, the name seemed logical at the time.

What happened in reality is that we created something much bigger. We had 75 people participating in Minneapolis. Most people were from Minnesota, Canada (a northern suburb) and Wisconsin with a few East and West Coasters sprinkled in there for good measure.  Then, we had two remote sites that had about 20 people in them – one in Dallas, Texas and another in Basel, Switzerland. Finally, we had over 550 people participating live online from all over the world. These people came from all over the place.

Using digital technology, we took a regional event and created a global one. I think that we are going to see more events doing things like this. Calling these events “National” or “Regional”events – just doesn’t seem appropriate.

So what should we be calling these events? The Big One?

The post Naming Events in a Digital World appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.

In my first 365 days, I wrote 2,743 tweets – which is about 110 pages worth of tweeting. I have to admit that I was shocked that I had written so many pages of tweets. (For the math people this assumes that each tweet takes up 1 line in a page and there are 25 lines per page.) It made stop for a few minutes and reflect on what I had learned over the past year from using this new tool.

Below are some things that I have learned. Have a look and then let me know if you think all of this tweeting was really worth it? or was it a massive waste of time? Of course, if you have things to add from your own experiences – please do so. The more the merrier!

20 Things I Learned in My First Year of Tweeting

1. Twitter is a super-simple way to publish messages. How hard is it to write one sentence and hit send? Not hard.
2. When you have 1,000 followers it is impossible to listen to what everyone is saying with equal attention.
3. Tools like TweetDeck and Hootsuite help me organize my Twitter “ears” and listen to the people and conversations that are most important to me.
4. I choose the conversations to follow and dip my toe into other conversations of interest throughout the day.
5. In some twitter groups – members find and share articles that would be impossible for 1 person to find on his own and in a timely manner.
6. Twitter is a great way to spread content to like-minded individuals.
7. Twitter isn’t for all people.
8. Twitter is public – so it won’t work for any private or confidential corporate events.
9. Many-to-Many conversations on Twitter are fast-moving, action packed and fully archived. Watch what you say!
10. Conversations on Twitter can be archived at wthashtag.com. This is a great resource to go back and review what was said.
11. I once summarized a full conversation of tweets with 1 tweet. Is that good or bad?
12. I started this blog because of Twitter. I know 10 others that did the same.
13. Twitter is a super-simple way to connect remote and virtual attendees.
14. While the movers were packing boxes at my home, I participated in a conference via Twitter 4000 miles and nine time zones away.
15. Luckily, not everyone is on Twitter.
16. I never had any interest in following Shaq, Britney Oprah or Aston Kucher.
17. The #eventprofs community on Twitter is awesome.
18. I attended a conference in February because of the people that I met on Twitter. I had an awesome time! Some people think I was crazy.
19. I attended a conference in March because someone tweeted that they were attending. Does that make me a stalker?
20. Twitter introduced me to thousands of interesting people in the past year. If it weren’t for them – I would have left this technology long ago.

Bottom Line

While Twitter is a simple technology – it is a powerful communication tool. After 110 pages of tweets, I am very thankful for the people that I met on Twitter this past year. Without them – I probably would have abandoned the technology very quickly. Thank you Twitter friends!

image credit: @cdharrison

The post After 110 Pages of Tweets is Twitter Worth It? appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.

[wpvideo 7YeVtUoW]

Background

This video was created using Apple Keynote (Apple’s version of PowerPoint). It is really a combination of ideas and statistics from these blog posts:

> 10 Ways Social Media Will Transform Events in 2010

>  Are Your Events Haunted By The Blackberry Prayer?

>  Do You Allocate Enough Time For Interaction?

The Transformation Begins

Right now the digital world and face-to-face worlds are colliding. I think this collision will create new opportunities for events. As attendees become more comfortable with these two way experiences in their own lives – they are going to start demanding similar experiences from you. Maybe they already are?

If you have experienced any interesting applications of Social Media or Event Technology during an event – please share your stories. I would love to hear what you think is working or not working in your events.

The post Social Media in Events Video from Event Camp appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.

Friday Dinner At Event Camp

Here are some lessons from Event Camp on engaging attendees that I hope will help you.

Pre-Event Community

Event Camp created an event community around the event with the Omnipress Conference 2.0 solution. This turned out to be helpful for many attendees. I noticed that many would received the daily digest and then add their ideas or comments. Three things came out of the community: (1) High Awareness in the Hybrid Events Session and Fishbowl Sessions, because these sessions were discussed on the conference community. (2) Informal Dinners and Social Gatherings were arranged by the attendees. (3) Several attendees were invited to share and shared their reasons for attending with the larger audience.

[Read Jenise Fryatt’s post on How Social Media Creates a Need For Attendees To Meet Face2Face for another excellent perspective.]

Big Blue Buffalo Hats

The Social Collective has an interesting solution called CrowdCampaign that was used by the attendees to choose some swag that the event staff had to wear. Fortunately, the organizers were very gracious in purchasing and wearing the Big Blue Buffalo Hats. However, there is a second use of CrowdCampaign happening right now. The attendees are trying to decide on their number one takeaway. The list is starting to get really interesting. [crowd campaign list of takeaways]

Reinforcing Messages with Multiple Channels

The backchannel was projected on screens throughout the venue – but most people had one eye on the laptop or iphone and another eye on the speaker. Personally, I found it really helpful to be able to scroll through the backchannel messages on my new iphone. Being able to see these same messages delivered in a second medium helped reinforce some key points for me. (Not to mention that there is a transcript of tweets that I have used to go back and review the event.) While, I recognized that this helped reinforce the messages to me – it was Ray Hansen of IML that actually pointed this out. Thanks Ray.

Including More People

Thanks to Mike McAllen of Grass Shack Events & Media and the team at Core Staging this event had a hybrid component. The main plenary hall of the conference was being broadcast on Livestream and secondary sessions were recorded. As an attendee, I found it really engaging to get input, ideas and questions from these virtual attendees. Equally important, we made sure to wave once or twice to our friends at home too. I think this was a nice touch.

[Read Emilie Barta’s post – Live and Virtual Events Compliment Each Other, Not COMPETE with Each Other for more]

Bridging the Virtual And Face-to-Face Audience

This community was active on the twitter backchannel, making comments asking questions, etc. Mike McCurry was an excellent conduit between the face-to-face audience and the virtual attendees. He made sure that any questions the virtual audience had were integrated into the face-to-face discussion. This is a key role to making sure that their voices were heard, too. [Read Christina Stalling’s post on some of her backchannel learnings]

Engaging Virtual Attendees During Breaks

Breaks can be quite boring for virtual attendees that are watching the room be reset or attendees getting coffee.  So, it was very cool to see Emilie Barta (a professional tradeshow presenter) interviewing speakers and attendees during the break. I think this is a low effort – high return way to enhance the virtual attendee’s experience.

Let’s Jump into the Fishbowl

My session was a collaborative session that used the fishbowl format. In this session, I turned the attendees into the experts and took the “guide on the side” role. This allowed us to do more learning from each other – rather than have me go through 6400 slides in 40 minutes. Since, I am the host of the Interactive Meeting Technology Blog – I would have let all of you readers down if my session didn’t have an interactive component.

[Read Lara McCulloch-Carter’s post – Fishbowl session through the eyes of the virtual attendee for some discussion and feedback on my session]

User-Generated Content

Event Camp was loaded with User-Generated content. There was a “bloggers row” type space that was designed to make life easy for people using computers during the sessions. So far – there are atleast 10 blog posts on learnings and ideas created from the event. There will probably be several more. Also, there were dozens of photos taken from the attendees. Thanks to Social Media guru – David Berkowitz – the iphone application Cat Paint became the big hit of Event Camp. Cat Paint allows you to drop cats onto iphone photos before sending them out over twitter. Some attendees made sure that we all got a good laugh out this. Here is a picture of me with a cat on my shoulder. (Personally, I think the applications of this tool in terms of a sponsorable item would be amazing. take out the cat and insert – your event logo or product name.)

Bottom Line

Event Camp evolved out of an online community of individuals that has a passion for Social Media in Events. From the speakers to the attendees to the sessions this event was one of the most comprehensive and complete learning laboratories on Social Media in Events.

Ok – Event Campers – what else would you add?

(PS: Eventprofs recently celebrated its first anniversary on 9 February 2010 )

The post Lessons in Engaging Attendees from Event Camp NYC 2010 appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.