But seriously, what can we do to keep people’s attention throughout an entire webinar? I know we need to break up the information into small chunks, provide some multimedia, engage in ongoing chat and/or Q&A, but even that doesn’t always keep them engaged. Oh yeah, maybe we just need totally compelling content?

Have you ever attended a social event at a conference where everyone seemed to know each other already, even though they had never actually met face-to-face? Thanks to social media, you too can get to know other conference attendees before you step foot in the hospitality suite. By expanding your networking skills to include social media, you can also learn more about sessions and special events, and share information and resources. In short, combining social media with in-person networking can make conferences much more productive—and fun.

Social Media Basics for Conference Attendees

The main social networks used by business professionals are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

• LinkedIn has more than 160 million users worldwide. It’s a great place to promote yourself, make connections with others in your industry, and find groups of like-minded professionals. Many conferences will set up a LinkedIn group so that attendees can connect.

• On Facebook, you can turn to a conference’s page to get updates and RSVP to events.

• Twitter makes it easy to follow all the news about a conference through hashtags used for tracking tweets. For example, a medical equipment conference might use the hashtag #medequip. Tweets containing a hashtag can be searched and even saved as a stream in platforms such as HootSuite.

• On Google+, you can easily communicate with other conference attendees by adding them to your circles. Or host an audio or video conference among users, known as a hangout.

Before the Conference

When you sign up for a conference, find out if there is a social component. For example, South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music, film and interactive conference, offers a robust social platform where attendees can set up a profile, ask questions, find others with similar interests and participate in conversations. The SXSW Facebook page and Twitter feed offer valuable updates, tips and more ways for attendees to connect.

Preconference tips to try:
• Check your conference registration page for links to its LinkedIn group, and Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages. Join in the conversation by tweeting and posting. Use the official conference Twitter hashtag to find more attendees.

• If you’re new to a particular conference, ask previous attendees for tips on restaurants, panels or breakout sessions. Then seek out other newbies to share your insider information.

• Make plans to meet up with your new connections at the conference to continue the conversation and share information. Schedule a lunch, after-hours social time, or coffee break.

By getting social ahead of time, you’ll meet plenty of new connections before you arrive at the check-in table.

During the Conference

Here’s how to combine in-person networking with social media networking:
• Keep following the hashtag: You’ll find plenty of attendees tweeting at the conference. Keep up with what’s happening by following the conversation on Twitter, including getting valuable information from sessions and panels you missed.

• Check in on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+: Use social media to find out where your new connections or favorite speakers are hanging out or having dinner.

• Maximize face time: Social media is very useful but there’s nothing like making face-to-face connections. Make sure you take advantage of your time at the conference by establishing new relationships. Collect business cards or digital contact information for following up.

After the Conference

Following up after a conference is vital to maintaining relationships with new connections. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ make this much easier, although there are some tips to keep in mind:
• Don’t wait to make contact; get in touch while post-conference enthusiasm is still high.

• Don’t forget to send referrals and opportunities to appropriate contacts, especially if you hope to get the same in return.

Whether or not you enjoy in-person networking, combining it with social media can make it much more effective and fun. Leverage the power of social media before, during and after your next conference.

The right venue today isn’t just about atmosphere and location. With attendees expecting a range of on-screen displays—from straightforward presentations to video and even interactive tools—and crystal-clear sound, it’s essential to pick a venue that enables you to use the AV technology you want, rather than restricting your choices. Here are five key factors our team at Convergence AV has put together to ensure that your event can offer the multimedia experience you imagine.

Room size: how many seats can you really have?
Most venues now state their seating capacity for a theatre-style layout. But in reality, the seating space available may be less than they claim if you’re looking to use rear projection—currently popular for interactive whiteboards, for instance—for your presentations. That’s because when you use rear projection, you need more space behind the screen: In fact, the rule of thumb is that whatever the width of your screen, you should allow twice that to accommodate rear projection.

Ceiling height: can they see at the back?
A 10-foot ceiling in a room for 100 people may sound sufficient. Indeed, when you’re standing in an empty room of that size, it feels fine. However, when it comes to display, there’s a problem: With a 10-foot ceiling, you can’t use a screen wider than 8 feet. This would create poor lines of sight for the back rows of seats—and would be highly problematic if a top table was required.

Hanging points: saving you floor space
When looking at larger venues, check whether there are secure hanging points for mounting lighting bars and other rigging. These are not only invaluable as a way of saving floor space—with no cumbersome lighting stands required—but also improve the overall visual effect.

Power: keeping the lights on
This is an area where there really is no room for debate: If you want to have any lighting for your presentation, then three-phase power is a must. A standard ring main can only power eight standard spotlights safely, leaving no capacity for projection or sound equipment. It’s also worth checking the number of power outlets: Older venues tend to have fewer, which can limit your options.

Access: time and space
This is always a tricky element to take into consideration. If the venue is likely to be fully booked, the chances are you’ll have a limited time slot for setting up your event. If that’s the case, you need to make sure that you know exactly what time you have, and that the access routes are clear for that time: You don’t want to be sharing that half-hour you have to unload your AV equipment with the catering delivery!

While none of these issues is insurmountable, if you bear them in mind from the outset, you can avoid last-minute hitches and changes, and make sure your event has the best possible audio visual solution.

Twitter is the perfect social channel for conferences. It provides a real-time, public and searchable record of tweets about a conference that organizers, speakers and attendees can follow. Twitter even allows people who can’t attend in person to read along as conference events unfold. And Twitter gives conference planners an archive of participant comments, as well as measurable data they can report back to sponsors.

If you’re a conference organizer or producer, here are a few things you can do to make sure you’re getting the most out of Twitter during your next event.

Using an official conference hashtag

1. Select a unique official hashtag. Make sure no other events are using this hashtag and that it’s separate from general topical conversation. Keep it short and easy to remember. A good conference hashtag will include the conference name or abbreviation, and sometimes the year or location. If you can, avoid using underscores or other punctuation in your hashtag to keep it simple (and to be sure the hashtag works in every Twitter client). Some we like include #BWENY (BlogWorld Expo) and #ica12 (International Communication Association).

2. Communicate the official hashtag. Try to make the official hashtag easy to find. Post the official conference hashtag on presentation slides, as well as signs and posters around the conference venue, list it on the conference website, and use it in official tweets from your own and other organizers’ Twitter accounts. Encourage speakers and sponsors to use the hashtag.

3. Track mentions of the official and unofficial hashtags. In addition to the main official hashtag, attendees may adopt track- or interest group-specific hashtags or mistakenly use an incorrect hashtag. Try to keep track of all relevant hashtags, even if they’re not officially endorsed.

Surfacing interesting conference topics

4. Follow conversation as it unfolds. Keep track of attendee tweets about the conference, both to monitor conversation during the event, as well to create an archive for future access. It’s very simple to follow the use of a hashtag in real time with any number of Twitter clients and applications, so pick your favorite. If you want to share these tweets, consider displaying them live on a monitor at the conference or on the conference website.

5. Pay attention to retweets. Use retweet counts to keep track of which tweets are getting the most traction on Twitter. What speakers, presentations, or topics are being retweeted? You can use this information to make your next conference even better.

6. Use official handle to ask questions. Twitter is great for real-time interactions, so use the official conference account to ask attendees how things are going. Get live feedback on presentations, the venue, conference logistics and more.

7. Find problems quickly. Monitor conversation about the conference throughout to detect problems. Is the wifi not working? Are participants unable to find certain rooms? If something is going wrong and you’re actively monitoring conference tweets, you can fix small problems before they become big problems.

Sharing important conference content

8. Use official handle to post announcements and schedule changes. Give participants a central and reliable channel on Twitter where they can access important conference information. If there are any important announcements or changes to the conference schedule, post them to the official Twitter account so attendees can find and share them.

9. Distribute speaker slides. Use Twitter to make it easy for attendees to find speakers’ presentation slides. Encourage speakers to share their slides through their own Twitter accounts, and retweet those slides from the official account. Also share links back to the conference website where participants can access and download conference slides and other documents.

10. Answer attendee questions. Throughout the conference, use Twitter to answer audience questions, direct attendees to the appropriate resources and make sure everyone is getting the most out of the event.

Tracking audience engagement

11. Measure total Twitter audience size. With the spread of conference content on social media like Twitter, the size of the audience can grow well beyond the number of attendees physically present. Measure the total reach and exposure for conference tweets, as well as the number of total tweets and unique contributors.

12. Determine popular speakers and presentations. Analyze conference Twitter engagement by tracking metrics like retweets, replies, favorites and impressions to learn which topics are generating buzz. Search for speaker and panel names, presentation topics and track titles to see which ones are most talked about. Find out which images are being shared the most to determine attendees’ favorite moments, and track shared URLs to see which websites and pages have been most useful to participants.

13. Share metrics with sponsors. Report this information back to conference sponsors to demonstrate the value of their sponsorship. Showing sponsors how many more people their brands reached beyond in-person conference attendance can be very valuable to securing future sponsorships. When possible, share specific examples of effective tweets about or from conference sponsors.

Gathering feedback for your next conference

14. Tweet links to conference feedback survey. In addition to sending a post-conference email asking attendees for feedback, also post a link to the feedback survey on the official Twitter account. Some attendees may be more likely to respond on Twitter, so this gives them another opportunity to respond.

15. Compare this conference to other events. How did this conference compare to recent or related conferences? If you have Twitter metrics for previous years’ conferences or other similar conferences in your industry, use them to see how this year’s event measured up. Look specifically for changes in engagement and participation, as well as reach and exposure. If this event’s metrics were lower, try to figure out why and how you can improve next time. If they were higher, that’s great, but try to learn more about why your numbers were up.

16. Analyze qualitative tweet content. In addition to quantitative audience and engagement metrics, tweets are a great source of qualitative data about the conference. Read through a tweet transcript after the event is over to see what attendees liked and didn’t like. Mine this transcript for any feedback you can use to improve for next time. In some cases, an in-depth content or sentiment analysis might be useful.

Jenn Deering Davis is co-founder and chief customer officer at Union Metrics, the makers of TweetReach. She is primarily responsible for the company’s communications and customer development. She holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication & Technology from the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focused on the communicative and workplace impacts of social and mobile technologies. Jenn has more than a decade of corporate communications experience at companies like UPS, All Kinds of Minds, and zUniversity.com and has taught college communication courses at UT Austin and North Carolina State University. You can follow Jenn at @jdeeringdavis.

Photo credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid at laughingsquid.com

The chart says it all. Virtual meetings and events are expected to triple in the next five years. Through the convergence of technology, bandwidth, and mobile devices, marketing managers, sales managers, and meeting professionals will see not only more virtual meetings, but also a wide range of hybrid meetings, which are a combination of face-to-face and virtual attendees and components. These live-plus-virtual events will dramatically change the face of the conference meeting, event, and tradeshow industries. Get ready for a wild ride!

Here are just a few of the ways meeting managers are enhancing their programs with virtual technologies:

1. Web Conferencing: Connect meeting attendees and speakers in different physical locations by using VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), which allows real-time streaming of audio and video. While Skype is probably the most familiar, there are Web conferencing systems that offer more advanced interactivity, including user camera control and collaborative tools. We are also seeing more hotels and business centers adding high-definition virtual conference rooms that can be used to host hybrid sessions during your f2f meeting/event at a particular venue.

2. Online Collaboration Tools: Open source your meetings and events by allowing virtual participants to share documents, Web pages, whiteboards, slide decks, audio, video, and more. All in real-time of course. Some Web conferencing systems allow you to record your events, thereby creating a collective knowledge base. These tools can be used for small meetings or for larger groups of thousands.

3. Webinars: Whether standalone or as a complement a face-to-face event, webinars are great education tools for broadcasting content from a single source to multiple viewers or listeners simultaneously. Most webinars include audio transmission of the speaker/presenter along with visuals (usually a slide deck presentation). A moderator helps to monitor questions and comments from the virtual attendees via real-time chat.

4. Live webcasts: Broadcast your keynotes, general sessions and breakouts by streaming your live audio and visual presentations via the Internet in real-time. Allow f2f and virtual participants to communicate together about the event and/or presentation by utilizing real-time social media tools (see below). Content can be made available “on-demand” for a set period after the meeting/event.

5. Remote Presenter(s): Use a streaming video feed of a speaker who is in a different physical location. This can be done as a realistic 3-D hologram, or a live feed of your guest speaker! Remote presenter options can be a great way to attract high-profile speakers who may not have the time to travel to a physical event.

6. Social Media Channels: Often called the “backchannel,” social media represent the virtual conversations taking place in the background before, during, and often long after your live meeting or event. Take the time to set up and promote social media activity through things like assigning a specific Twitter hashtag for your event, creating event-specific Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and setting up Foursquare check-in locations. And then, bring the backchannel forward by including highly visible digital screens to show the Twitter feed at your live events. These tools are becoming indispensable for event managers who want to build a meeting and event community and tap into the power of collaboration. As iPads and other “always online” tablets and devices become more prevalent, we will discover even more ways to share and capture knowledge and ideas wherever, whenever.

7. Virtual Environments: Multimedia formats like Second Life, ON24, and others offer virtual attendees a rich experience of moving around and interacting within a 2D or 3D environment in real time. During a live meeting/event, these environments can offer attendees an opportunity to “virtually” interact with presenters, organizers and/or live meeting attendees. You can expect virtual conference centers and meeting rooms, tradeshows, exhibit floors and more to become more common as well as more realistic.

8. Complete Virtual Meeting/Conference Platform: Especially for larger annual conferences, product launches, and tradeshows, consider creating an overall virtual attendee platform to complement your live event. This should include promoting the menu of virtual options on your event Web site. You may want to offer different virtual attendee fees which determine level of access to sessions, breakouts, the exhibit floor, on-demand content, etc. And don’t forget plans to encourage social networking and feedback. And of course there are many other possibilities such as custom mobile apps for events, interactive virtual exhibit booths, video sharing, interactive Web-based games, virtual goodie bags, and more.

The hybrid options for meeting management and event planning are limited only by your imagination and creativity, and they are here to stay. What other ways are using using technology to enhance your meetings?

What A/B testing is, according to Wired: “Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior—gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases—it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it’s quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. A/B allows seemingly subjective questions of design—color, layout, image selection, text—to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science.”

If you can use this technology to maximize your meeting (and organizational) Web site, wouldn’t that just be the bee’s knees? But what’s easy to do on the Web is a little harder in real life. You can’t control all the variables or truly randomize the testing in the same way. But still, it’s the same concept that has meetings professionals use when they break their marketing program into pieces to address their niches, isn’t it? And when they tweak a piece of the program, introduce something new in formatting without doing away with the old first, then gauge which “works” best (with “works” meaning whatever it means for you, be it learning achieved, new behaviors cemented, information shared, etc.)?

While it makes me uncomfortable to think that it’s not important to understand why certain things work better than others, as the article notes, maybe I need to just let go of that and trust that if the data says something is better, it just is even if I can never figure out why? That has to be better than relying on HiPPOs, right? (HiPPOs being “highest-paid person’s opinion,” as defined in the Wired article.)

Like it or not, we’re living in an increasingly data-driven world, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think we just have to be careful not to lose the meaning behind the numbers. Anyway, it’s a fascinating read, and a reminder that, whether we know it or not, we’re all both the scientists and the guinea pigs in the great experiment of life.

And in case you were wondering just how much of a cash cow Wi-Fi can be, they estimated the numbers for a typical 250-room New York hotel thusly:
Average total Wi-Fi installation cost: $125,000
Average yearly Wi-Fi maintenance cost: $7,500
Average yearly profit from Wi-Fi: $200,000

Moo.

8 Steps to a Winning Mobile Meeting App

How-to Guide to Mobile Meeting Apps

Your Mobile Meeting Apps Questions, Answered

App Map: How to Produce a Mobile Meeting App

What Mobile Meeting Apps Can Do: 36 Features

Mobile Technology Strategies for Meetings

App Happy: How to Put Your Corporate Meeting on Attendees’ Smartphones

Then there’s always this free webinar: How to Create a Mobile Meeting Strategy

And a video:

Wow, we’ve covered this even more than I thought! But we need to, since it looks like most attendees expect at least a bare minimum app these days.

With social media being the buzz of today and gaining moment everyday, it is smart to get on the “Bandwagon” and use these platforms to your company’s advantage. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are providing such a broad area to connect with people and other companies, it makes it a perfect platform to share real-time information and promote your events.

Facebook, for example, has over 800 million users and is said to have over 1 billion accounts by August 2012! On no other platform can you reach so many people. This makes Facebook a perfect forum to promote events, conferences, meetings, and any other functions that your company is organizing. With your friends and colleagues already on your Facebook page, it makes these people and their friends much easier to reach. The following steps will show you how to set up an events page and promote an event.

Login to your personal account, then click on the “Events” link on the left hand side of the page (if for some reason the “Events” link is not there, click on “Edit Page”. Then, click on “Apps” and then “Events. After that you click on “Go To App”.

Now you click on the “Create Event” button. You can now fill any information that you wish in this area. You can also upload an image that promotes the event.

At this point you can promote your event by clicking on “Invite Guests”. Now you will need to go through your friends list and manually invite the people you want.

If you would like to further promote your event, you can post it periodically to your wall on Facebook with a link to your events page. You can also send this link to friends and ask them to share it also. Remember, for every person that is your friend, there are 150 people that are in your network. This means that all these people can view the information that is posted on your friend’s walls and news feeds.

The event feature on Facebook would be excellent for also promoting other meetings, trade shows, and even international conferences. Facebook is the number one most visited site in the world; so don’t let your opportunity go by to promote you next event.

Sue here again. So what are your best tips for promoting events using social media? I always worry about crossing the line between offering useful information about something people will want to know about and being one of those LinkedIn or Facebook spammers who offer nothing but marketing messages wherever they go. So I guess my biggest tip would be to follow the 90/10 rule, where 90 percent of what you post is just useful stuff and just 10 promotes your stuff (or is it 80/20? Best to err on the conservative side).

I’m not sure how others in the room might have felt, but I’m not sure the tool fit the needs of the session. Basically, the Idea Rally was a process that went something like this: Each table brainstormed a challenge, then came up with two or three proposals to meet the challenge. We then had to agree on one proposal, and spend the remaining 12 minutes of the 25 we were given to flesh it out on the iPad.

Then the entire room was given access to each table’s challenge and proposed solution, and every individual could then rank each idea on its relevance and value, and add comments to improve or critique the ideas. Then the proposals, now attached to rankings and comments, went back to the tables for further refinement. A final ranking of all the proposals was tallied in the system, and the top three ideas were recognized.

I liked the system and could see it working for some topics, but I think for this particular big hairy problem, it didn’t allow us to really dig in and get to more than superficial solutions, or first passes at ideas for solutions that may or may not be possible to carry out. Given the quality of the conversation at my table (and there were only three of us), I think we may have gotten more value out of just talking it out among the group, or some other format that would have let us maybe chunk down the topic to something that could reasonably be attacked during that timeframe, then setting us all to the task of solving it through discussion.

I know there were a few more ReThink sessions using Wizerize, notably one on the role of third party planners and new ways they can bring more value to the table rather than be stuck getting in a fee war in an increasingly commoditized meetings world, that may have been more conducive to the system. If anyone reading this participating in one of the other ReThinks, I’d love to know your thoughts (comment below or here’s my e-mail).