Moving the Smith's to the US

What is really strange is that I still feel connected to five different conferences that are happening around me in other parts of the world:

> MeetDifferent, Cancun: This event just finished and had a virtual access pass. On Sunday, I played Midori Connolly’s The Hybrid Meeting Dissected in the background while I was making some final arrangements before the movers arrived on Monday morning. Midori and Glenn Thayer did an excellent job of engaging the virtual audience in the presentations and discussion. If you are an MPI member you should watch the presentation and pay close attention to Glenn and how he bridges the virtual and face-to-face audience. Also, I liked the Meet Different iphone application. This free application did a nice job of giving me information on the schedule, speakers, twitter stream, etc. for the conferences.

> Confex, London: Confex is the most important show for the UK meetings and events industry.  Some big news from this event was the launch of the IML Connector. This new blackberry-like-device transforms into a voting keypad, “private” backchannel, simultaneous translation device, audio player and a microphone during events. I think the software behind the device is the most interesting. It seems simple enough that a junior A/V tech,  IT staff member or even a speaker could operate the system. If that is true, this solution could open doors for using interactive technology at many smaller corporate events.

> Virtual Edge 2010, California: This virtual conference had about 200 people onsite and many in the virtual audience. The conference allowed attendees to try 5 different virtual events platforms. I thought this was a great way to give attendees get an apples-to-apples comparison of the different platforms. Sadly, I was only connected to the conference through the twitter backchannel (hashtag: #ve10) on my iphone. I guess you would call it being in the virtual third world. But – I learned alot even from this format. I will be sharing insights from the virtual third world in an upcoming post.

> LikeMinds, Exter UK: This social media conference (starting on Friday) is supposed to be one of the first events where Social Media experts actually bring the many-to-many feature of Social Media into Face-to-Face events. I am eager to see how they do it. If you want to follow the event, you can watch the livestream on the Twitterface. Twitterface is a web based solution that allows you to include twitter streams and webcasting into the same user interface. It looks like a cool way to engage virtual attendees.

> MPI European Meetings & Events Conference, Spain: This conference starts on Sunday and I will be there speaking about event technology at two sessions. One session is on Virtual Events 101 and the other is called building a Digital Gameplan for Events. You can follow the backchannel for this event at #EMEC10. I will try to recruit some MPI Europe members to join me on the backchannel. Here is a video about my two sessions:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zflHYPJ264g]

Bottom Line

Even though, I have been packing boxes and going through the moving process – I have found it remarkably easy to stay connected with several different events this week. Consider “opening a window” into your next event, so remote or virtual attendees can participate in one way or another. Who knows – maybe they will attend in person the following year.

So, what do you do while packing boxes?

The post Staying Connected to 5 Conferences While Packing Boxes appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.

In the discussions, we pushed and pulled on the future of event technology in meetings and events. We talked about technology adoption, the future of face to face, the role of Social Media, the backchannel madness, increasing social network adoption, fears with virtual events and much more.

Here are some of the things that captured my attention from these conversations:

1. Should you seriously consider a paperless event? The average age of people that prefer digital materials over paper based materials is now 50. It makes me wonder how long it will take before we start to see a major push to paperless events. Any ideas?
2. Generational communication. An event organizer from Augsburg College told me that the college was sending event invitations to students through Facebook, because students are not using email. How are you communicating with the different generations attending your events?
3. Many events are not using the Audience Response System (ARS) tools effectively. ARS is a powerful communication and engagement tool. However, I continue to hear that event organizers are not maximizing the potential of this powerful tool. I think that we need more people to share their ARS success stories. What do you think?
4. There is still a strong fear about virtual events. Despite efforts to make event organizers feel comfortable that virtual events are complimentary to face-to-face events, many event organizers are either afraid of virtual events or think that it is a temporary thing.  It seems like there is still a lot of work to do here.
5. Corporate events need your help to be more innovative.  Many corporate events are cookie cutter because marketers and corporate staff count on us to help them understand what’s new and possible.  We need to challenge ourselves to make sure that we are helping marketers see what is new and possible.
6. Interactive Hybrid Meetings. By allowing virtual and face-to-face attendees to vote, ask questions or submit ideas regardless of their location, IML has a new service that helps event organizers build bridges between the virtual audience and the face-to-face audience in hybrid events (or regional telepresence events).  I think we are going to see more event tech solutions like this emerge on the marketplace – if they are not here already.
7. Tradeshow lead capture still needs innovation. It has been awhile since I have been to a US tradeshow. The last time I attended one, I thought the lead capture process was out-of-date and in need of innovation.  The team at Living TradeShow have created a super-simple FOB that simplifies lead exchange, puts the power to exchange leads into the hand of the attendee, gives exhibitors better data and makes the whole process paperless.

Bottom Line

The world around us is creating new ways for us to communicate and collaborate. But it’s messy. There is a lot of trial and error. Best practices are still emerging.  When you solve one problem – two new problems can emerge.  For people that are used to control this can be scary stuff.

What do you make of these observations? Is there anything interesting that jumps out at you?

Note: This Blog Post was written and uploaded in draft form while I was on an airplane. Though the Wifi was terrible and I had to finish it after I landed.

Photo Credit: scelis

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How are you managing communication and engagement with the four generations that are attending your events? How do you invite the spirit of co-creation? How do you get  adults with a 20 minute attention span to listen to a 60 minute presentation?

Those are a few of the questions that were tackled in the Tips to Maximize Audience Engagement Webinar organized by Best Events Magazine and IML Interactive. This interactive webinar brought together three different perspectives on audience engagement: Business Leader/Agency perspective, the technology perspective and the speaker perspective. Here were the speakers:

• Fay Beauchine, President, Events & Engagement, Carlson Marketing Group
• Ray Hansen, Director, IML Worldwide
• Dan Rose, President, Omakase Group

I thought this webinar was packed with valuable content. Below you will find a summary of the Four Drivers of Audience Engagement and some other invaluable tips that I thought you could start implementing immediately.

Driver of Engagement #1: Encourage a Great Experience

When it comes to creating experiences, events are experiential.  Fay recommends that you touch all 5 senses. Her company focuses a lot of its thinking on the emotions. She suggests that you do the same.

Equally important, Fay suggests that you make the experiences immersive AND don’t go halfway. As an example, Fay described an event where a technology company that wanted to encourage Eco-Responsibility and Global Citizenship. To make the experience complete, they distributed 2000 mobile phones that contained the agendas, conference guide, and messaging capabilities. This solution reduced the printed material by 75%. Attendees sent over 20,000 messages to each other.

Driver of Engagement #2: Encourage Participation

Carlson Marketing Group maximizes the application of technology to encourage participation. Using social technologies, they are expanding event experiences to 3-4 months in length and a maximum of 9 months. Also, by getting the attendees comfortable with engagement before the event – attendees are more comfortable with interacting onsite. Some of the tools that they are using include – webinars, surveys, videos, voting and mobile messaging.

When it comes to using technology Fay offered the following crucial advice:

• You need to empower people to opt-in and opt-out of the technology
• Focus the technology tools on content – make it central to the business so people use the tools.

Driver of Engagement #3: Target Communication

You need to explore communication and engagement strategies that are aligned against your audience demographics. Right now, there are four generations attending events. Each group wants to engage and communicate on their own terms. When you are designing your content – you need to ask yourself how will you communicate with this group? and how will you connect them? Here Fay had an excellent slide that laid out the differences in attitudes between each group. You need to consider how these different attitudes influence your event design.

Driver of Engagement #4: Provide Value

Providing value means making the event relevant to the audience and to the community at large. As programs trend smaller – make them passionate, honest and make it seem like a smart choice.  Amplify – yet simplify. As an example, Fay pointed out that team building exercises are still happening – but they are BBQs & chili cook-offs.

We have 20 Minute Minds in a 60 Minute World

In building a case for moving beyond bullet points, Ray Hansen used audience response technology to ask the audience two questions: how long is the average adult attention span? AND how long is your average conference session? The answer to the first question was 20 minutes and the answer to the 2nd question was 60 minutes. Then he asked a rhetorical question — if adults have an attention span of 20 minutes – why are we asking them to sit through 60 minute conference sessions?  Great Question – I thought this was an excellent application of ARS to help the audience arrive at the speaker’s point on their own.

Creating 60 Minute Minds

In order to expand the audience attention and retention during the session – Ray offered the following ARS tips:

• Engage the audience with an ARS question at least once every 10 15-20 minutes.
• Use discovery questions to learn about the audience and discover misconceptions at the beginning of the presentation.
• Ask verification questions to manage attention and retention during the presentation.
• Ask questions to make sure that participants get the key messages at the end of the presentation.

Building the Spirit of Co-Creation

Dan Rose took the speaker’s point of view. He suggested that the speaker can create a spirit of co-creation in the way that he/her engages the audience. Dan highlighted the following benefits of co-creation:

1. Puts part of the investment in the final results and takeaways on the audience.
2. Allows the speaker to create the presentation based on things common to the people in the room.
3. Allows the audience to prioritize the order of the discussion.

Equally important, Dan suggested that leading the audience through an exercise and having them create some artifacts on their own helps them engage in the presentation. Also, he suggests ask the attendees to compare notes from their exercises before the speaker makes the main point.

Bottom Line

There are several ways to engage the audience, put your community into motion and move them from passive listeners to active participants.  Hopefully you found one or two new ideas in this post that you can implement in your next event.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or sharing it with others.

Photo Credit: Kaptain Kobald

The post 4 Drivers of Audience Engagement and Other Invaluable Tips appeared first on Interactive Meeting Technology.