Chapter 7
Connecting the Dots at In-Person Events
“An event should be a happening. If nothing happens then it’s just
boring. Change the energy. Demonstrate you’re after something
different. Create something for people to talk about and feel in toes.”
—Graham Brown-Martin
Founder, Learning Without Frontiers
At The Brewery, a stunning state-of-the-art conference facility in London, the lights were dim but the room was abuzz. The song “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads surrounded everyone like a cloud, making them feel energized, knowing something big was about to begin.
The Handheld Learning Conference delegates chatted, introducing themselves to people they hadn’t met before. Some snapped photos, others reported to colleagues at the office, some closed their eyes, taking in the electrified feel of the space.
Graham Brown-Martin, the event producer, stepped to the stage and explained the potent ingredients he had assembled for the following two days. The events he and a handful of others put on are intimate, yet they are growing in size, running rings around larger enterprises because their use of social media has leveled the field.
He shared a story, as he does every year, of his youngest daughter, lovingly referred to as “Handheld Learning Girl.” She was born several days before the first Handheld Learning event in 2005, delivered by Brown-Martin at home via instructions on his smartphone because the midwife had not yet arrived. Her development as a person and the technology advancements in those same years offer a timely glimpse of social tool evolution. Thought-provoking talks followed from Malcolm McLaren (former manager of the Sex Pistols), new media literacy professor James Paul Gee, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. News zapped quickly around the twitterverse as delegates tweeted insights from the godfathers respectively of punk, game-based learning, and artificial intelligence. The event began showing up in the list of Twitter’s trending topics, and people worldwide joined the conversation.
What might have looked like an ordinary event morphed into a social beehive, punctuated by provocative statements, shared and challenged virally by the community, aggregated and disseminated far and wide.
What might have looked like an ordinary event morphed into a social beehive, punctuated by provocative statements, shared and challenged virally by the community, aggregated and disseminated far and wide. Everything was captured by a small video crew and posted to the event’s online community within an hour of each session’s end. People sat in corners of the room, blogging and typing quietly, talking and reflecting, considering the implications of the experience on the work they do.
Before the event they had contributed to online communities that would be around for years to come. People who were not at the event could also log in, connect with delegates and speakers, and watch and comment on the posted media.
The coffee and lunch breaks featured food meant to be eaten while talking with others, often with a mobile device in one hand. Asian fusion, cups with lids, all part of the social mix. Evenings typically involved dancing, providing further chances to connect, consider, and fuse learning with life.
Brown-Martin created social media before he curated events. He began as an educational technologist and then joined the entertainment business in music, games, and film. He built a large social networking site aimed at 18 to 34-year-old opinion formers, which streamed radio and video shows, had online editorial pieces for hundreds of thousands of members, and provided a way for them to link.
He realized then that human interaction was vital and arranged still-legendary club nights with the hottest DJs in London and abroad. These were events people came out for, people who had and would continue to connect through his online activities. No advertising was required because everyone was already connected to everyone else.
When he launched a new enterprise, it started as an online professional community, connecting people who otherwise might not have known about one another. He strung together his contacts from the worlds of education, technology, and entertainment in an unusual brew.
It seemed logical to him to bring together people every so often at festivals and conferences that could be recorded and distributed online, enabling the conversation and networking to continue. The events started with social media; that has always driven them, not the other way around.
The Handheld Learning Conference, one of a half dozen he produces on themes such as game-based learning and digital safety, is the world’s largest conference on mobile learning. It is also one of the United Kingdom’s largest conferences about technology and learning regardless of the platform discussed.
As Brown-Martin reflects on the history of his events, he talks about his naïve expectation that delegates would be largely early adopters and power users. With notable exceptions, most people, while passionately interested in new ways to improve learning, were slower to pick up on the opportunities of social and digital media than Brown-Martin anticipated.
For him the events are a form of activism meant to disrupt the Victorian-style teaching practices living on in the 21st century. There are no badges (using instead music festival–style wrist bracelets), which forces people to talk with one another, introducing themselves in a personal way. There are no conference guides; although it took years, he says, to wean attendees from thinking they needed them. There are still conference bags, but they contain mobile devices—one year a Nintendo DS, another year an iTouch, and in 2010 an iPad.
The conference delivers a heady cocktail, frequently provocative, challenging, polarizing, exhilarating, thought provoking, and exhausting—everything that a good conference ought to be and where participants frequently and in most cases good naturedly are drawn out of traditional comfort zones to confront the new.
Brown-Martin is passionate about learning, innovation, technology, music, and people. His greatest skill, however, has been in spotting trends early and connecting the dots. He doesn’t consider himself an event organizer as much as someone who brings together “happenings” that he would like to attend on topics he is passionate about and believes in. He brings about change by using social media to create a platform to see, hear, and engage with those doing remarkable work.
He says, “It’s the only way to do it. Social media is the perfect way to connect with the right people, almost like osmosis, creating a venue—and opportunity—where we each can be more.”
Growing Together
Coming together to talk, visit, and learn is as old as time. Using in-person opportunities to humanize learning that you’ve begun (and will continue) online adds a modern dimension.
Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory, which hosts communities and dialogues focused on what it takes to create transformative change, describes in-person events as a communal Petri dish for growing connections and insights. “Incubation is spontaneous and palpable. It’s as if there are luminescent tags networking us together. There is an electric feeling of potential and possibility.”1
In previous chapters we introduced you to the approaches you can use in your organization to take advantage of the new social learning to extend and deepen collective and individual opportunity to grow in the connected world. People in physical proximity to one another can also use each approach we’ve covered up to this point.
In this final chapter, we meld the in-person practices we all know with technologies that can enhance the experience in fresh ways. Although our focus is mostly on conferences, many of these practices can be applied to classes and small ad hoc and informal gatherings. We will show how the use of social tools can increase their value, making them remarkable and exhilarating.
Events can mash up the physical and the online worlds. Social networks you already belong to can connect you to people at the event who have interests similar to yours.
This chapter assumes you wear many hats. Sometimes you’re a speaker, playing a part akin to a teacher in a classroom, often on a bigger stage. Other times you’re an event attendee, a student of sorts, interested in learning all you can. Occasionally you’re an event organizer or meeting facilitator, and sometimes you pay the registration fees for your employees, wanting the greatest value for your dollars and their time spent. These events can be conferences put on by professional event producers, corporate events, or gatherings of association members.
In today’s connected world, you are probably also an influencer of the work done by those putting on events and who want your business or seek your counsel. Each role provides opportunities to make informed decisions and offer sound advice.
We address how you can take action in each role and then offer a glimpse of some alternative event formats that are beginning to catch on.
Speaker, Teacher, Audience, Student
If you speak often at events, meetings, or classes, you know firsthand that audiences no longer sit quietly absorbing your words and the images you show, waiting to ask a question or make a comment. Technology-enabled societal shifts have started moving the ground under your feet, says Joel Foner, a project manager, process consultant, and blogger, who has engaged large hyper-connected audiences for years.2 The new social learning, with its emphasis on people learning from one another, plays up the fact that both speakers and attendees have something valuable to share.
Olivia Mitchell, a presentation trainer who writes the “Speaking about Presenting” blog and is considered the leader in tackling thorny issues about presenting in the digital age, says, “There has been a shift in power from the speaker to the audience. The best speakers don’t care about themselves, they care about their audience, and they care passionately, working hard to ensure everyone is getting value from their time together.”3
Through global communication technologies, people now have so much access to each other and to information that they’ve “grown accustomed to the idea that they can and should be able to discuss, rate, rank, prioritize, link, and converse in text with anyone, at any time,” says Foner. “They comment on and rate web sites, blog posts, music, videos, books, vendors, manufacturers—and you and me. Social media everywhere has made this hyper connectedness part of everyday life.”
Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist, author, and popular blogger, reminds us that “We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it with an audience, too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse.”4
The Backchannel |
Real-time text communication among audience members using something like Twitter or a local chat room during a live event is often referred to as “the backchannel.” Backchannel is a term coined in 1970 by linguist Victor Yngve to describe listeners’ behaviors during verbal communication. Today the new backchannel represents an audience who is now networked—connected in real time, learning with each other and the world all the time. The back-channel doesn’t have a limited number of chairs—anyone can join—and this changes the game for presenters, the audience, and the rest of the world outside the room. |
Instead of looking across a sea of faces, you may be speaking to an ocean of heads looking down at their laptops and smartphones, or watching you from behind flipcams connected to people in other rooms and around the world.
When audience members using Twitter add an event hashtag (#) to their tweets, they open the conversation to anyone on Twitter, including those in the room specifically following that tag. For example, #ASTD10 was the hashtag for the 2010 ASTD International Conference, Lotus-phere used #LS10 at its 2010 event, and #e2conf is the hashtag used each year for the Enterprise 2.0 conferences. Anyone can run a Twitter search to find all the backchannel tweets related to that event.
A survey of leadership events by production company Weber Shandwick shows that blogging and twittering at conferences has significantly increased in the past few years.5 The backchannel is increasingly a factor in any sort of education where wifi connections allow people to chitchat, check facts, rate sessions, and evaluate their experiences.
Presenting while people are talking about you can be disconcerting and distracting. In the past, you may have used eye contact with your audience to measure their engagement. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there may be a flurry of thumb tapping. This kind of communication can be terrifying to a speaker because everybody in the room and around the globe participating virtually can now rate you, share their thoughts, comment on your work for better or worse, and point out mistakes—or what they think are mistakes—in the middle of your sentences. For some people, that is “scary beyond measure,” adds Foner.
Mitchell says, “To balance that shift, there are huge benefits to individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting. Most of all, it shows people are interested in what you’re saying—so interested they want to capture it and share it with others.” In her work, Mitchell has identified the following benefits and more.
Real-Time Participation
The backchannel blurs the line between the presenter and the audience and even between those physically in attendance and those participating from afar. Now everyone can participate and share information.
Gary Koelling, founder of Best Buy’s BlueShirt Nation, said of a Twitter-fueled meeting, “What struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting. But the conversation was roaring through the room via Twitter. It was exploding. People were asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the PowerPoint was progressing along its unwaveringly linear path. The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. Here are two tools that couldn’t be more at odds with each other; the linear, planned, predictable progression of slides versus the raucous, organic free-for-all of Twitter. I wanted the twitterfeed to actually change the presentation—to update it, edit it, extend it, pull it into areas it wasn’t exploring.”6
Gary Koelling, founder of Best Buy’s BlueShirt Nation, said of a Twitter-fueled meeting, “What struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting. But the conversation was roaring through the room via Twitter.”
Real-Time Focus
“Prior to the technology advancements, I backchanneled with myself,” notes Dean Shareski, a digital learning consultant. “That is, I processed by thinking or taking notes. I would ask questions and answer them myself. The more engaging a speaker, the less I backchannel. That said, some less engaging speakers who understand and permit back channeling can create as powerful a learning experience as the most dynamic speaker. The more the presentation relies on the backchannel, the more I focus. Knowing that my comments are going to be seen by the presenter or live participants seems to make me pay more attention. The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content, the more I’m engaged and ultimately the more I learn.”7
Online community maven Rachel Happe likes that Twitter enables her to participate in presentations without disrupting them. Happe says, “Twitter allows me to add my perspective to what is being presented and that keeps me more engaged than just sitting and listening—even if no one reads it.”8
Real-Time Innovation
As your presentation sparks ideas, audience members can tweet them and build on one another’s thoughts. They can build and share their own insight into what’s being discussed.
As a speaker, if you monitor the backchannel, you can innovate along with the audience. Jeffrey Veen, designer, author, and entrepreneur, was moderating a panel at a conference and monitoring the backchannel through his smartphone. “As the conversation on stage continued, the stream of questions and comments from the audience intensified. I changed my tactics based on what I saw. I asked questions the audience was asking, and I immediately felt the tenor of the room shift in my favor. It felt a bit like cheating on an exam.”9
Real-Time Contribution
People tweeting during presentations add explanations, elaborations, and useful links related to the content. “My ‘take-away content’ from the backchannel equaled or surpassed what I got from presentations directly,” said Liz Lawley, director of the lab for social computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “I can already see that there’s more I want to go back to and digest, discuss, and extend.”10
Instead of asking your neighbor, “What did she mean by that?” you can tweet your question to the group, and someone will tweet back an opinion. Laura Fitton, entrepreneur and founder of Twitter-store oneforty, recounts a time when some of her colleagues who’d helped with the presentation were following the event virtually and were answering questions asked by those in the audience as she gave her talk.11
Remote or on stage, Bryan Mason, co-founder of Small Batch, calls this person an “ombudsman for the audience.” At an event he and Jeff Veen hosted, they put a desk on stage and had a friend sit right there keeping tabs on Twitter, an instant message tool, and email, listening to what people were talking about. She synthesized the questions and sprinkled them into the conversation in real time.12
Real-Time Connections
Being at a conference where you don’t know anyone can be intimidating. People who know each other cluster together, and you can feel out of the action. But if you participate in the backchannel, you get to know people virtually and can then introduce yourself in person at the next break.
Real-Time Evaluation
With a backchannel you get immediate feedback when you search the event’s #hashtag and the speaker’s name and presentation keywords.
Paul Gillin, author of Secrets of Social Media Marketing and The New Influencers, remembers years ago waiting six months to get audience evaluations, so the immediacy of tweeted feedback is wonderful for him. He also uses it to get a quick read on the tech savviness of the audience and adjusts accordingl.13
Graham Brown-Martin knows an event is working well when he receives ample feedback, even when people snipe about the coffee or the price of London beer. He reposts all comments to an online community. It’s part of the personality of his organization to encourage and publish commentary, even if it’s outrageously negative. Asked why, he responds, “Because they can be so funny!” He adds that feedback can be helpful in seeing situations from others’ vantage points.14
Takeaway
We’ve all been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best intentions, things lose steam after the event is over and nothing much gets done. Can we—should we—really rely on just our brains and notes to gain value from events?
Even the best presentations have limited value if you can’t revisit their best content as you reflect on what you experienced. New digital tools can support such access.
These include just-in-time book publishing, tweetbooks, live blogging, and live video blogging.
Publish a Book
Just-in-time book publishing is a way for anyone to create and publish a book. Event organizers can produce such books compiled from content created by speakers and attendees. Pepper the book with observations from people walking the event, doing interviews, taking polls, and snapping photos.
Encourage conference producers to include the following on their event web-sites, all updated frequently: |
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The books can be sold online and delivered in hard copy. Events including PopTech, Maker Faire, and Web 2.0 Conference create their own books, sometimes from the main stage, giving participants a different medium to learn from over time.
Create a Tweetbook
Usually made up of the tweets from an event, Tweetbooks create a narrative of what people noticed, attended to, commented on, and shared. Trish Uhl, learning strategist and founder of Owl’s Ledge, describes a Tweetbook as a compilation of historical tweets documenting a trend, news story, or event as reported from the twitterverse.15 At the eLearning Guild’s 2009 conference, attendee and education technology specialist Tracy Hamilton took on the task of creating the event’s Tweetbook. It included more than 5,100 tweets chronicling the preconference events, general and concurrent sessions, and an alternative reality game run during the conference.16
Live Blogging
Live bloggers transcribe or create commentary about an event as it unfolds. The blogs encourage real-time commentary from readers—either from other participants in the room, people who are at the event but in another room, or people who are participating virtually—which can be brought back into the event to build even more ideas and perspectives.
Bloggers may use conventional blog tools or, for large-scale events involving many bloggers, opt for tools specifically designed for live blogging. Live blogging platforms provide the ability to integrate images, audio files, video clips, presentation slide decks, and other multimedia content, enabling feedback and participation with the blog stream.
Live Video Blogging
Taking live blogging a step further, live video blogging enables bloggers to send live, real-time video streams to the web during events. With live video blogging, web viewers can see and hear the event as it happens, and those at the event can have a record of everything that happened. Real-time video broadcasting used to require renting an expensive mobile video truck. Today, a handheld video camera, a webcam attached to a notebook computer, or a smartphone that supports live video streaming can show thousands of people across the world the event as it happens and go viral with the event’s tweets and blog posts.
Because the stream can be recorded, after the event it can also be indexed and made part of a media-sharing site or online community along with videos captured but not streamed by event participants. Together these videos can convey a message and generate conversation that can lead to more learning and change.
Respond to Critics
As with all new and atypical ideas, there will be resisters. Here are the most common objections we hear and ways we believe you can address them.
People Aren’t Paying Attention
People who appear to be fully engaged with their smartphones and lap-tops may still be paying attention to you—even more so than if they are looking at you. But if you think you’ll do a better job if people are looking at you, consider opening your presentation this way: “I notice many of you are using your phones and laptops. I’m absolutely fine with that. But I also know that I can do a better job if you are engaging with me and looking at me. So when you’re not using your phones and laptops I’d love it if you can look up.”
Many people still assume that someone who appears to be doing something other than listening to a presenter cannot be learning what the presenter is covering. This assumption, however, is not supported by evidence.
Scott Berkun in his book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, describes an approach he’s taken. He says to his audience, “Here’s a deal. I’d like you to give me your undivided attention for five minutes. If after five minutes you’re bored, you think I’m an idiot, or you’d rather browse the web than listen, you’re free to do so. In fact, I won’t mind if you get up and leave after five minutes. But for the first 300 seconds, please give me your undivided attention.”17 Most people close their laptops and put their smartphones away.
Another approach is to put your Twitter ID on your first slide and then ask who in the room is currently on Twitter, a social networking site, or is live blogging. When you see their hands you know who is probably writing about you and not ignoring you.
People Cannot Learn from Me and Social Media Simultaneously
Many people still assume that someone who appears to be doing something other than listening to a presenter cannot be learning what the presenter is covering. This assumption, however, is not supported by evidence.
Many people use secondary tasks to help them stay engaged and focused. In an experiment reported in Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodlers were able to recall 29 percent more details from a phone conversation than non-doodlers, for instance.18
Researchers believe that by using slightly more mental resources, doodling helps prevent the mind from wandering. This study is part of an emerging recognition in psychology that secondary tasks aren’t always a distraction from primary tasks but can sometimes actually be beneficial.
Edie Eckman, fiber arts educator and author of How to Knit and The Crochet Answer Book and a frequent speaker at conferences, points out that when she speaks to people who are knitting and crocheting, she sees laser-like focus. It’s as if the handwork allows them to connect with other people far better than if they were empty handed.19
The secondary tasks we use to stay focused are now often high tech. People can take notes on their smartphones and laptops, or they may have a game on their phone equivalent to doodling. Seeing a tweet can reinforce what’s going on in the session or introduce peripheral topics that will expand the attendees’ thinking. Taking notes in an online community can offer useful detail to others back at the office and provide a springboard for further conversation when returning to work.
Recommendations
We opened with the story of the Handheld Learning Conference because it was a natural setting for combining the benefits of mobile technology and the joy we get from connecting with people in person in real time. Graham Brown-Martin points out, however, that the first few years of the London-based event weren’t all that interesting.
It took hours of culling suggestions from previous event attendees for the next years’ events to capture the right mix. The event brought together more than 1,500 delegates from around the world plus more than 200 young learners who had been sponsored by various schools and programs.
In addition to those who physically joined the conference, the event appeared as a trend for three consecutive days in the global top 10 on Twitter, demonstrating how far this movement and its participants reached.
As we spoke with Brown-Martin and others who are spurring on the new social learning at in-person events, we found the following themes.
Don’t Go Unless There’s Time to Share a Meal
People may open up more when sharing a good meal. If you only have time for one short day of people talking at you, consider ways you can learn from them online instead. So far, there’s no way to duplicate online that emotional connection—the joie de vivre, the juice, the joy of life—we share in person.
Trust One Another
To attend an event involves sacrifice. People come together because they are committed to getting something valuable from the event. When organizers trust attendees and speakers to determine for themselves what patterns are relevant, what connections are valuable, and which stories are most energizing, events are more likely to be memorable. Although it seems basic, our nature is to be prescriptive, to tell people what they are supposed to get out of an event, what conclusions they are supposed to reach, who they should collaborate with, and what they should work on. If you trust the audience to create the insights and connections that make sense to them and you provide an environment that is conducive to connecting, the magic will happen.
Prepare Yourself
If you choose to go to an in-person event, prepare yourself beforehand by learning as much as you can about what the event offers. Kaliya Hamlin, at the forefront of the unconference movement, encourages people to identify questions you want to ask and topics you want to learn more about.20 Here are more suggestions for preparing:
To prepare to visit trade show booths, type keywords about your industry niche into your favorite search engine and see what suppliers come up. Visit the websites of the companies that will be demonstrating their wares. Figure out which suppliers you want to meet and talk with.
To prepare for the content of the event, read papers and articles posted to the event’s website before you go. See if speakers have posted slide decks from previous conferences on Slideshare and look through them.
To get a sense of speakers’ styles, whenever you can, watch them on YouTube or see if they include video clips on their own websites.
Get a sense of who will be there by reading the blogs and viewing the Flickr streams of speakers and anyone you know will be attending.
Face time with other people is valuable, rare, and expensive. Have meaningful conversations, get advice from peers, and tackle challenging issues in ways that you don’t feel you could do online.
Get Twitter-Ready
If the conference doesn’t provide it, give your presentation a Twitter hashtag. Make it as short as possible so people can include it on every tweet. Make it unique so people outside your audience don’t accidentally use it.
Encourage people to get the conversation going ahead of time by using the hashtag that you developed. Their questions may reveal themes you will want to cover in the presentation.
Stream and display the Twitter backchannel on a screen behind you that everyone (including you) can see and ask people to tweet their questions and comments. Spend time at the beginning of your presentation explaining how you will respond to the Twitter stream, and you’ll find audience members will be more likely to use it responsibly rather than tweet things like “Hi Mom.”
Ask a colleague or a volunteer from the audience to monitor the feed and interrupt you if any questions or comments need to be addressed right away. If you can’t find someone to take on this role, take regular breaks to check Twitter. You can combine this with asking the audience for “out-loud” questions too.
Invite people to use the hashtag after the session, posing additional questions and tapping into the collective experience of others who participated in person or virtually.
Set a Mood
Consider all of the conditions that enhance a social atmosphere: time to talk with people, comfortable seating and lighting, and even good music. Lotusphere 2010, with more than 8,000 people, opened with two street violinists, Nuttin But Strings, and a drummer getting everyone pumped up. People tweeted, downloaded files from the website, ordered CDs, and talked to those around them while they listened. This created an energetic vibe that said, “Get ready for something great.” As a speaker, consider adding music to your presentation, providing time for people to talk with one another, and thinking about the environment you’re creating where people are excited to learn.