"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
Two words that no one would ever use to describe me would be “sports fan”. Yet I’ve been moved by my friend John Chen‘s epic adventure into high-end Super Bowl madness this week. Which brings me to what Seth Godin writes today on the eve of the game itself:
“…every year, the [Super Bowl] commercials disappoint, while the game includes eleven minutes of action over the course of four hours of not so much. And yet we do it again and again. Because the corporate hoopla is beside the real point, which is a chance for all of us to talk about the same thing at the same time. This is part of what it means to belong.
…these occurrences happen often in much smaller tribes as well. The buzz about Fashion Week or CES or the latest from Sundance are micro varieties of the same desire to be in sync. Your customers and your employees want to feel what it feels like to do what other people are doing. Not everyone, just the people they identify with.
It’s easy to be persuaded that this event is somehow about the game, or the coverage or the hype, but it’s not. Like Groundhog Day, it’s a pointless thing we do over and over again, because hanging out with people you care about…is almost always worth doing.”
—Seth Godin, Groundhog Day and the Super Bowl
This is the opportunity and the promise of participant-driven and participation-rich conferences. And there’s an additional benefit. To belong: coming together around not just a “pointless thing” but a topic, an industry, or a cause that we all care about.
Photo attribution: John Chen profile picture on Facebook
“What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity.”
—Jenna Wortham
She then laments: “Twitter is starting to feel calcified, slowed down by the weight of its own users, cumbersome, less exciting than exhausting“.
Most of the comments on her post go even further than Jenna, smugly dismissing Twitter as a waste of time—unless you’re a narcissist.
“I can handle Twitter because it is irrelevant.” “…this writer sums up exactly how I feel about social media in general, not just Twitter. This whole idea of likes and followers — it’s like setting up one’s business based on some vacuous high school popularity contest. Are we grown ups or not?” “Brevity may be the soul of wit, but I find little soul in twit. (er)”
—The three most popular comments on Jenna’s article
I disagree
When you see Twitter solely as a broadcast tool, you are overlooking its most important use: as a tool for discovery, conversation and connection.
On this site I write about a niche topic: participant-driven and participation-rich events. For me, Twitter has turned out to be the most important way for people to discover my work and for me to discover and connect with thousands of kindred souls from all over the world who share my specialized interests. When I began this website 16 years ago, I discovered that traditional search engine optimization was useless because no one was searching for the new ideas I was writing about. Today, with ten million annual page views, I’ve found that the core value of Twitter comes from its ability to discover and connect with geographically dispersed individuals with whom I have something important in common.
How to use Twitter effectively
If you’re not a celebrity, you need to use Twitter effectively. Twitter becomes powerful when you use it for appropriate two-way communication and connection, not broadcast.
You can’t have a conversation with a million people on Bieber’s antics. But you can have a valuable conversation with smaller numbers of people who are interested in a more specialized topic, and who find each other through appropriate use of hashtags.
For example, there is a community of event professionals on Twitter who tag their tweets with #eventprofs. This community also uses a host of other hashtags related to their interests, professional affiliations, upcoming events, etc. This soup of appropriately tagged tweets provides a great way for those interested to discover what is happening and talk about it. One beauty of Twitter is that all these tweets are public and searchable. So it’s easy for newcomers to the profession to discover interesting information and peers on their own schedule.
Yes, over the years the #eventprofs hashtag has been used increasingly by people who view Twitter as a broadcast medium. They pump out “listen-to-me” tweets while rarely or never responding to anyone else or retweeting interesting material. So Jenna is right that the amount of noise on Twitter has increased. That’s the inevitable tragedy of a social media commons where posting costs nothing but the poster’s time. I don’t dismiss this noise lightly. It makes finding interesting tweets harder. There can come a point when you decide that the effort to filter is just not worth it any more.
The power of the hashtag
What has happened in the event community as a result of increasing noise is the creation of more specialized hashtags for smaller niche groups. Because anyone can create and use a new hashtag, it’s possible for a community to coalesce around a useful hashtag. Hashtags are flexible Twitter tools that anyone or any group can use.
I like that I get to decide how Twitter works for me. Unlike Facebook there are no secret, ever-changing algorithms deciding what I should see. Yes, it’s work to filter the fire hose of information that Twitter serves up; the daunting collective output of currently over 200 million monthly active Twitter users sending 500 million tweets per day. But when you use Twitter effectively, you can reap the benefits of meeting and connecting successfully with people who are of value—value that you get to choose.
“My philosophy is that it doesn’t pay to go to a conference unless you’re prepared to be vulnerable and meet people, and it doesn’t pay to go to a Q&A session unless you’re willing to sit in the front row…
There are more chances than ever to attend, but all of them require participation if you expect them to work.“
—Seth Godin, On doing the work
Attendance versus participation. Attendance is easy. But to do the work, you need to participate.
As a meeting designer, one of my most important jobs is to create meeting designs that encourage and support meaningful participation for every attendee. I try to make this as easy as possible for everyone: from the grizzled veteran who’s seen it all to the newbie who’s just entered the profession.
But ultimately, I can’t make anyone participate if they arrive with an attending-only mindset.
Ultimately, the attendee chooses, either consciously or unconsciously, whether they will do the work.
Will Airbnb impact traditional meeting room blocks?Brian Chesky, 32, is the founder and CEO of Airbnb, “a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world” that was founded in 2008 and, in just six years is expected to become the world’s largest hotelier.
Perhaps the most informative answer to this question to date comes from a study published in December 2013: The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry by G Zervas, D Proserpio, and J Byers, at the Boston University School of Management <pdf, free download>. The research looked at data collected from Texas hotels between 2008 and 2013 and found that:
Every 1 percent increase in the number of Airbnb bookings led to a .05 percent decrease in hotel revenue;
The impact of Airbnb falls disproportionately on hotels with little or no conference space; and
Luxury and upscale hotels in Texas were not significantly impacted by the arrival of Airbnb.
This doesn’t look too bad for the meetings industry, unless you’re booking room blocks in midprice or value hotels. But I think there are some factors that this excellent study of the past doesn’t include when we attempt to predict the future.
Airbnb is still relatively unknown and is growing incredibly quickly
Airbnb’s growth is commonly described as “hockey-stick” (think Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). Check out the company’s annual reports for details. Airbnb had booked 5 million cumulative nights by February 2012; by June, it had doubled that to 10 million. A year ago I knew nothing about Airbnb and never considered staying anywhere but a hotel or traditional B&B when I traveled. Having trouble finding conventional accommodation for a trip that met my needs, I joined Airbnb in September 2013, along with 5 million other people that year. Since then I have already used the service four times. What happens as we pass the early adopter stage and move into a world where it’s easy and normal to stay in/rent out residential accommodations for short periods?
I just returned from PCMA Convening Leaders in Boston. I have a local apartment, so I commuted and didn’t stay in the room block. The conference offered block rooms from $175 – $209 per night single/double occupancy. A quick browse of Airbnb turned up several small attractive two-bedroom apartments within a few blocks at $170 per night (for two occupants, $150 for one) with kitchen, internet, and a washer & dryer.
There’s no way that Airbnb can currently match the quantity of hotel rooms available around the Hynes Convention Center. But the offerings I found were extremely competitive on price alone. They also included amenities that are not available for free or at all in most hotels. And given that two employees could stay in separate bedrooms in one of these Airbnb properties, the cost savings become even more attractive.
In my opinion, this is one of the most compelling arguments for an Airbnb impact on traditional meeting room blocks. My older daughter, director of sales for a mid-size company, has started to book larger Airbnb properties when she is attending conferences with several other employees. They like the cost savings, a private common space to meet, and the extra amenities.
Airbnb offers rooming options that are often not available via traditional accommodations
The four Airbnb reservations I’ve made since joining the service have all been in San Francisco. My younger daughter lives within a few blocks of Golden Gate Park. There are only two bed and breakfasts (and no hotels) in her area. Both B&B’s were booked when we wanted to be there, but an Airbnb search turned up many options for staying close to her apartment. Since we didn’t want to share a home with others we searched Airbnb for self-contained apartments. We found two nearby that matched our requirements. If room blocks sell out I believe that the variety of Airbnb choices close to a meeting venue provide an attractive backup. And if room prices are seen as too high, Airbnb makes it easy to search for nearby cost-effective alternatives.
Airbnb makes it easy to look for just what you need
I have a personal story here. Last month, my younger daughter was crossing the street at a crosswalk in San Francisco when she was hit by a car, breaking both her legs. (Luckily she suffered no other injuries, and should eventually be fine.) After surgery and rehab she could not return to her apartment right away, as it is, like many San Francisco accommodations, only accessible via a steep flight of steps. We faced an immediate problem of finding her somewhere to stay. It had to be handicap accessible, in central San Francisco, and close to friends that could assist her for about six weeks until she could weight-bear and get around on crutches.
Short-term rental agents were unable or unwilling to return our calls. Hotels had a few handicap accessible rooms but provided nowhere for her to cook any meals. Craigslist, besides being a potential source of sketchy room listings, presented us with the daunting prospect of calling every potential lister to find out whether the accommodation was accessible.
Airbnb allowed us to quickly search for handicap accessible accommodations for our daughter. Based on the detailed listings and customer reviews we were able to pick several possibilities. We sent messages to the owners asking about access, door widths, etc. As a result we were able to find two three-week rentals that fit our unusual criteria. Without Airbnb I’m not sure what we would have done.
Quirkiness can be compelling
Yes, there are many meeting attendees who want the predictability of a bland hotel room. But the boutique hotel sector is one of the fastest growing, an indication, perhaps that quirky Airbnb accommodations are an attractive alternative for an increasing number of business travelers who enjoy something a little different from the average cookie-cutter places to stay. Airbnb, which offers everything from a couch in a room in someone’s home to modernist architecture, green buildings, and castles has something for everyone.
Conclusion
Clearly I’m a fan of Airbnb. Signing up for the service was reassuringly thorough; the verification process required social media logins—either Facebook or LinkedIn—plus offline proof of ID, a driver’s license or passport (digital scanning included in the Airbnb app) and took about 30 minutes. (If you’re still concerned, you can choose those that have enough satisfied user reviews to reassure you.)
Will Airbnb impact traditional meeting room blocks? I’m a meeting designer who is occasionally responsible for attendee accommodations. I fully understand the reasons for room blocks and will continue to use them myself whenever possible. The question remains whether more meeting attendees will, like me, join the Airbnb bandwagon and add it to their list of alternatives to the room block. Only time will tell. But my gut feeling is that over the next five to ten years Airbnb will noticeably reduce the demand for in block housing, creating a significant impact on how we’ll need to plan our meeting accommodations.
Here’s our live blog of PCMA Convening Leaders 2014. We used ScribbleLive, the live event reporting platform used by The Associated Press, ESPN, the Press Association, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and many other leading media industry players.
I was happy with the performance of ScribbleLive, using it on my MacBook for administration in the evenings and exclusively on my iPhone for blogging. For video, the app could quickly compress video on my phone and upload it to the portal. Picture and video posts took a few seconds to a few minutes to appear; text was more or less instantaneous. We also used the platform’s settings to auto-post tweets containing the #pcmacl hashtag from some of our bloggers, cleaning up duplicate entries or off-topic posts the same evening.
Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love is featured in this reprint of the first half of Kelsey Ogletree‘s article How We Learn: Books That Changed Meetings, published in the January/February 2014 issue of CONNECT.
In an era of ultraportable tablets, smartphones, glasses and even watches connecting us to the Internet, Google can find the answer to all of your big questions in .0001 seconds. For our gotta-have-it-now culture, knowledge is instantaneous and everywhere, because we demand it. But there’s still something to be said for books, especially when it comes to thought leadership. The shelf for meeting planning help books isn’t a crowded one, as the industry is still relatively young. But within the collection, there are three authors who stand out: Adrian Segar with “Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love”; Paul O. Radde, Ph.D., with “Seating Matters”; and Marcia Conner, an outside expert who found her way into the meetings and events space with “Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice,” among others. The ideas that each book offered up have fundamentally changed the way planners approach meetings, as well as sparked conversations that shake up centuries-old ways of thinking about how we learn.
Starting out as an academic, Adrian Segar went to a lot of conferences. “I hated them,” he says. “They were very little about learning and more about broadcasting information, and also status.” When he moved on to owning a manufacturing company and also working in IT, he began organizing conferences around those topics because he wanted to get together with people who were in his field. “I started a conference where there were no experts,” Segar says.
“Ninety percent of what we learn today is not in the classroom but from our peers or from ourselves.” —Adrian Segar
“All you needed was a collection of adults that had something in common that they wanted to learn about together.” After about 15 years of putting on these peer-learning conferences (“totally as an amateur, not as my day job,” he says), he decided to write a book about it. And what that effort amounted to was Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love which focuses on a way of doing events that turn into what the attendees, not necessarily the planner, want them to be.
“In the pure form of the event, people come together with a common interest,” says Segar. “The first half-day of the event, you learn about who else is there, why they came, what they want to learn, what problems they have, what they want to discuss, and what expertise and experience people have. People always have expertise that other people want to know. Those people end up running the sessions, because people want to learn that.” A smaller group then takes that information and turns it into a schedule for the remainder of the conference, which is now optimized for what the people there really want to discuss.
Most people are cautious about this less-formal, on-the-spot format. But the key is to create a safe environment so participants feel comfortable. Segar advises planners to help people move slowly into a participatory environment so they gradually realize the value of it. “About 1 in 50 people do not like this style of event once they’ve actually been exposed to it,” says Segar “But the other 98 percent prefer it. If you try to make everyone happy, you’ll never do anything different.”
In Conferences That Work, Segar explains the main reason that traditional conferences no longer facilitate quality learning: The rise of easily available information online has been the game-changer. “Up to about 20 years ago, it was true that most of what you needed to do your job was learned in the classroom,” he says. “Traditional meetings were an extension of that and were a very good fit. People knew things we didn’t, and we could go listen to them. But that is no longer true. What has been called ‘social learning’ is now the dominant way we learn what we need to know to do our jobs.”
Segar cites “The Teaching Firm: Where Productive Work and Learning Converge,” a study published by Education Development Center, to prove his point. According to the study, 70 percent of what people need to know comes from experiential learning. About 20 percent is self-directed learning; if you need to know something, you look it up. The final 10 percent is classroom-style learning.
“These are rough figures and depend on the industry, but 90 percent of what we learn today is not in the classroom but from our peers or from ourselves,” Segar says. “Meetings need to match how we learn these days. People often say, ‘the best learning was in the hallway.’ What we need to do is bring that learning into sessions and make it the core part of the event.”
When planning a Conferences That Work-style meeting, Segar says planners have to measure success in a different way, by looking past the attendance figure. “Social learning does not work with 1,000 people in a room; you can’t learn from 1,000 people simultaneously,” he says. “But you can learn a tremendous amount in a day from 50 people. These conferences may be small by traditional standards, but success is measured by feedback from attendees.”
Since his first book came out, Segar has surprised himself and decided to write another. This one will focus on participative learning and specific techniques that planners can employ at their own events to involve people in learning. One such technique is body voting or human spectrograms. “It’s having people get up out of their chairs and show their opinion on a particular topic by where they’re standing in a room,” he explains. “It’s a way of physically replicating what happens with audience-response systems. With clickers, the information is confidential. But it’s interesting to learn more about who thinks what. In 45 seconds, you can get a visual picture of the feeling in a room about a particular topic.”
What we’ve known for many years, Segar emphasizes, is that experiential learning is far more effective in creating long-lasting, accurate, more valuable ideas than passive learning. “Learning is about taking risks, to some degree,” says Segar. “You don’t learn anything new if you don’t stretch yourself in some way.”
Here’s how to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step. Yes, there is a way to delete all your unwanted iPhone/iPad emails from the Mail app in one step! No more left-swipe: tap Trash for every individual message. No more Edit: tap the single open circle next to every individual message and finally tap Trash. And you don’t need to jailbreak your device.
If you leave your iDevice on for a few days and come back to find a few hundred messages on it that you’ve already downloaded elsewhere this trick will save you time and irritation. I didn’t discover the method—it’s far from obvious—but found it on one of many Apple discussion threads bemoaning this irritating hole in Mail functionality.
Updates
GOOD NEWS UPDATE [added October 3, 2015] IOS 9.0.2 finally displays a “Trash All” button after Edit is pressed! If your phone won’t handle 9.0.2, the following procedure is often successful; read the comments for a detailed description of hundreds of people’s successes and failures.
BAD NEWS UPDATE [added September 25, 2016] IOS 10 has removed the “Trash All” button. Who knows why? The procedure listed below (the original 2014 post) still works for many people.
GOOD NEWS UPDATE [added January 5, 2020] IOS 13.3 allows you to “Select All” your emails and then touch “Trash” to delete all selected emails! If your phone can’t be updated to this IOS version, the following procedure is often successful; read the comments for a detailed description of hundreds of people’s successes and failures.
It works! I present to you this great tip from shashbasharat found on MacRumors (slightly edited for clarity).
How to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step
How to delete or move ALL emails at once on a non-jailbroken iPad or iPhone
It took me weeks of research to figure out finally how to decode this yet another secretive secret of Apple. There is a perfect way of deleting ALL emails at once without jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad…and here it is:
If any of your messages are marked as unread: Open Inbox >> Edit >> Mark All >> Mark As Read [added May 21, 2014 by Adrian; this extra step makes the difference between success & failure for some.]
Open Inbox >> Edit >> Check/select the top message; it will highlight the Move button.
Press and hold the move button and, keeping your finger on the Move button, use another finger to uncheck the message that you had checked earlier.
Lift all your fingers off the iDevice screen and leave it alone. Wait until all your messages pile up on the right-hand portion of the screen (in iPad); iPhone will give you the actual number of emails it has selected for the action.
Choose trash to delete all of them or any other folder where you want to move them. Remember this will replicate your action on the server so you will ACTUALLY move them or delete them on the server and not just the iDevice.
After moving all messages to the trash you can leave them there for the scheduled cleaning or empty them right away. To empty immediately go to the trash folder and touch Edit. The Delete All button shows up at the bottom of the screen. Hit it! You’re done!
If you do not see the effects of your actions on the server make sure you have enabled your email accounts for such actions.
Tips
Allow enough time (could take several minutes depending on the number of emails to be moved) for selecting the emails to move. Your screen may be unresponsive for a while. On an iPad, you will see them zoomed out on the right-hand side of the screen. On an iPhone you will see a message showing you the actual number of messages selected.
Avoid purging a very large number of emails, the mail app might freeze or crash. If your inbox has thousands of emails change your sync settings to store less emails in your inbox.
[Added Jul 20, 2014, by Adrian] Many people have reported needing to repeat the above procedure several times before it succeeds. (I too have found this to be necessary a few times on my iPhone but not on my iPad—go figure.) So my final tip is to repeat the procedure 3-4 times if the mail doesn’t disappear the first time. In my experience, if your messages disappear momentarily and then reappear, repeating the procedure will eventually make them stay deleted for good.
That’s how to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step!
What could be wrong with requiring measurable outcomes?
“Enough of this feel-good stuff! How do we know whether people have learned anything unless we measure it?”
—A little voice, heard once in a while in learning designers’ heads
Ah, the lure of measurement! Yes, it’s important. From a scientific perspective, a better understanding of the world we live in requires doing experiments that involve quantifying properties in a statistically meaningful and repeatable way. Science has no opinion about ghosts, life after death, and astrology, for example, because we can’t reliably measure associated attributes.
The power of scientific thinking became widely evident at the start of the twentieth century. It was probably inevitable that it would be applied to management. The result was the concept of scientific management, developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Even though Taylorism is no longer a dominant management paradigm, its Victorian influence on how we view working with others still persists to this day.
The essence of these classic problem-solving steps is the belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now…
…In fact it is this very mindset, one based on clear definition, prediction, and measurement which prevents anything fundamental from changing.
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging
One of my important learning experiences occurred unexpectedly in a workshop. A participant in a small group I was leading got furious after something I had said. He stood up and stepped towards me, shouting and balling his fists. At that moment, to my surprise, I knew that his intense anger was all about him and not about me. Instead of my habitual response—taking anger personally—I was able to effectively help him look at why he had become so enraged.
There was nothing measurable about this interchange, yet it was an amazing learning and empowering moment for me.
The danger of focussing on what can be measured
So, one of the dangers of requiring measurable outcomes is that it restricts us to concentrating on what can be measured, not what’s important. Educator Alfie Kohn supplies this example:
…it is much easier to quantify the number of times a semicolon has been used correctly in an essay than it is to quantify how well the student has explored ideas in that essay.
—Alfie Kohn, Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests
Another reason why we fixate on assigning a number to a “measured” outcome is that doing so can make people feel they can show they’ve accomplished something, masking the common painful reality that they have no idea how to honestly measure their effectiveness.
This leads to my final danger of requiring measurable outcomes. It turns out that measurements of learning outcomes aren’t reliable anyway!
For nearly 50 years measurement scholars have warned against pursuing the blind alley of value added assessment. Our research has demonstrated yet again that the reliability of gain scores and residual scores…is negligible.
—Professor Trudy W. Banta, A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes, Inside Higher Ed
Given that requiring measurable outcomes often inhibits fundamental change and is of dubious reliability, I believe we should be considerably more reluctant to insist on including them in today’s learning and organizational environments.
How can we improve conferences? Well, consider a bucket.
A bucket. A container with a handle. Pretty basic. Unchanged in design for thousands of years.
Until now.
Home Depot hired the design firm Herbst Produkt to design a better bucket. Scot Herbst watched people using buckets and noticed the traditional design was:
uncomfortable to hold;
didn’t pour liquids well; and
hard to lift and maneuver.
So he designed the Leaktite Big Gripper bucket to provide a better bucket experience. The handle has a comfortable molded grip, the lip is shaped to provide a smooth pour, and two added grip pockets make it a cinch to pick up the bucket and pour its contents.
Yet, the new bucket is no more expensive to make than a traditional one. It just works better.
Similarly, it’s not hard to notice that traditional conference designs are:
largely unresponsive to the actual needs of attendees;
lacking significant experiential flow or arc; and
poor at supplying and supporting connection, engagement, and community.
If we want to improve these aspects of our conferences we need to redesign them. We know many ways to do this—the Conferences That Work format is just one possibility. These redesigns are no more expensive than the old ways. They just work better.
Good meeting design can radically improve your conferences. It’s available now.
What it means to belong.
“My philosophy is that it doesn’t pay to go to a conference unless you’re prepared to be vulnerable and meet people, and it doesn’t pay to go to a Q&A session unless you’re willing to sit in the front row…
Here’s how to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step. Yes, there is a way to delete all your unwanted iPhone/iPad emails from the Mail app in one step! No more left-swipe: tap Trash for every individual message. No more Edit: tap the single open circle next to every individual message and finally tap Trash. And you don’t need to jailbreak your device.
