“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.
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 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!
Three years have flown by since, excited by my immediate purchase of the original iPad, I shared 13 great iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch apps for event planners. I am still a big fan of five of these apps (Simplenote, DropBox, Square, Evernote, and GoodReader) while the remainder have been discontinued (WifiTrak and, sadly, TweetDeck), or superseded in my affections (Adobe Ideas, Beat the Traffic, Box.net, Instapaper, iTalk, and WeatherBug) by other apps. Here are 7 more great iPhone/iPad apps for event planners
My original iPad is now in my wife’s hands, and my Tumi Alpha man purse (je t’adore, read the reviews!) contains these days an AT&T iPad 3 (fits in the Tumi perfectly), a Verizon iPhone 5s, and a second-generation iPod touch holding music and podcasts which, with the addition of an $8 FM radio transmitter, I use solely to pump audio into my car radio as I drive.
It’s time for an app update. Here are seven more apps that I actively use and enthusiastically recommend to event planners:
Birdbrain ($2.99)
If you are active on Twitter (and I’d argue that most event planners should be) Birdbrain is a fantastic way to manage your Twitter network. The app provides an excellent overview and management of your followers and those you follow. Birdbrain handles multiple accounts, makes it easy to investigate anyone on Twitter, allows you to track unfollows as they occur, list people you’re following who don’t follow you, display mentions and retweets, and provides informative statistics showing changes in your Twitter stats over time. The only feature I’d like to see added is the ability to show inactive accounts you’re following. Recommended!
Waze (free)
Waze is my favorite traffic and navigation app of the many that I’ve tried. Unlike traditional GPS units with traffic updates that I’ve often found to be woefully out of date, Waze uses information from its own users to detect traffic snarls and reroutes you on the fly when necessary to avoid that accident that happened up ahead five minutes ago or the rush hour traffic jam building up on the interstate you normally drive on to get home. Purchased recently by Google, my only concern is that the company will start using my location in nefarious ways. If I start seeing annoying ads promoting the tattoo parlor I’m passing by I’ll reconsider. Until then, this is an amazing app that has saved me hours of driving and frustration, and shown me countless new neighborhoods as I bypass traffic where other drivers sit fuming.
Flywheel (free app, $1 per trip surcharge)
Flywheel is my latest app love, recommended to me by my fashionable younger daughter when I was visiting her in San Francisco last month. Unlike Lyft, SideCar and Uber, Flywheel uses legal licensed taxi services to get you where you want to go. Currently, the app allows you to effortlessly hail cabs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Daytona Beach, Miami, Naples, Atlanta, Louisville, Lexington, Lansing, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, and Seattle (and they say more cities are on the way). Once you’ve set up an account tied to a credit card (this takes just a few minutes), hailing a cab requires just two taps on your phone. You can then view a constantly updating display of the time before the cab arrives (never more than a few minutes in my experience), watch the cab approach on a map, and talk directly to the driver if necessary. You have a couple of minutes to change your mind; if you cancel after that you’re charged a $6 fee. The service costs $1 per trip, and your desired tipping percentage is built into the app. You never need to give cash or a credit card to the driver.
All this beats stepping out into the street in the rain and waving frantically at a cab that blithely drives past you!
Foursquare (free)
Foursquare started as a game (be the mayor of places, win badges, and have more points than your friends) and a way to see where your friends are and what they’re doing. I live mostly in a rural area and, while I have occasionally discovered and met up with friends I didn’t know were near me, my main use of this service is to store a searchable history of where I’ve been. When did I drop off that luggage to be repaired? What was the name of that great place I ate dinner with Susie in Atlanta? When exactly was I in Anguilla in 2009? Foursquare’s history of my check-ins is often useful in unexpected ways. And, yes, I admit it, it’s fun to triumphantly win back the mayorship of my favorite local restaurant once in a while…
GateGuru (free)
GateGuru is an airport information app that was purchased by TripAdvisor in June 2013. While it attempts to replicate some of Tripit‘s functionality, I use it to scope out the places to eat (aka amenities) at airports. The traveler’s reviews, while sometimes spotty, usually allow you to pick out the best place to satisfy your current gustatory desires, and I’ve occasionally found a real gem tucked away on Concourse C that I’d otherwise have missed.
Google Voice (free app, most but not all services are free)
Google Voice has been around for years and has a bazillion options, many of which I don’t really understand. But that’s OK, because I find it very useful for two things: a) transferring calls made to my cell to my office phone when I’m at home where my cell phone doesn’t work (ah, the joys of living in rural Vermont) and b) texting. Now let’s be clear: I hate texting and refuse to pay the inflated rates that carriers charge for it on my cell phone, but sometimes it’s the only way to communicate with some people (especially my two younger kids). Google Voice to the rescue! I can text for free from my free Google Voice number, which works with strangers as long as I let them know in the message that it’s me, Adrian Segar, texting them.
Incidentally, though I haven’t yet used this feature, calls made using Google Voice from outside the U.S. to U.S. numbers cost just 1¢/minute; a pretty good rate!
OpenTable (free)
OpenTable allows you to make free reservations at ~30,000 restaurants in the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and the UK. No more phone calls to a restaurant only to get an answering machine, having to leave a message, and wondering whether you’ll get the reservation you wanted or not. The app works quickly and many reservations give you OpenTable points which can eventually be redeemed for a discount off your meal.
Well, these are some of my favorite iPhone/iPad apps for event planners that make it a little easier to travel, communicate, and eat while I’m on the road. What apps have I missed that are especially useful to event planners that you think should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments below!
Last month Twitter quietly rolled out some very useful free analytics tools. I say quietly, because I’ve seen very little discussion of them online. Perhaps that’s because they have not been made available to everyone yet. Whatever the reason, they have been eye-opening for me, so I’m sharing my initial impressions here.
Here’s how to access Twitter’s new tools. You’ll find them on the Analytics menu on the Twitter Ads page, as shown in the above screenshot. This page requires you to turn off any ad-blocker you have running in order to load—fair enough!
If you see an Analytics menu (at the time of writing not everyone does) you’re in luck. There are two options: Timeline Activity and Followers. Pick the former and you’ll see something like the graphic above.
Timeline activity
The Timeline shows statistics about your last thirty days of tweets. What is most interesting to me is the number of clicks on any link included in a tweet. Traditionally, social media mavens tend to focus on how many times tweets are retweeted and mentioned, and obviously that’s important. But I had no idea how popular some of my tweets were in terms of people clicking on embedded links. Much of my content is narrowly niche-focused, so I generally don’t see a lot of retweets. But conferencesthatwork.com receives over two million page views a year, and those hits come from somewhere. What these Twitter analytics show me is that many people are clicking on my links, even if most of the time the associated tweets are not being subsequently retweeted. And, most important, I can now see which tweets were popular. This is valuable information!
Yes, these analytics has been available for some time via other mechanisms. All the URL shortening services provide similar statistics for individual shortened links. But in practice, you’d need to use a) a unique short URL for every tweet and b) only one shortening service. a) is cumbersome, and b) is impractical because some services that auto-generate tweets from posts, like LinkedIn and Google Plus, insist on using their own link shorteners, requiring manual amalgamation of clicks over multiple services.
The timeline of mentions, follows and unfollows at the top of the page provides a nice overview that can be helpful for noticing interest peaks, but I prefer to monitor this information using the excellent Birdbrain IOS app.
Followers
The Followers option displays a graph of follower growth plus some demographics on interests, location, and gender.
This is interesting but less useful to me, though you may find it valuable. It would be great to be able to drill down further into the location demographics so I could see my followers in, say, the Netherlands, and then be able to reach out to them when I was visiting.
Conclusion
For me the gold here is the clicks per tweet statistics. Although I don’t write blog posts based on what I think will be popular, this information gives me a much better picture than I’ve had before of how interesting specific tweets are to others. Over time it should help me understand better how my tweet content and timing affect what people read, allowing me to reach more people with better-marketed content. For free, what’s not to like about that?
Are these new tools of interest to you? How would you use them?
During a video chat last week, the delightful Australian sociologist Stephen Mugford asked me an interesting question. How can we hold an effective real-time virtual discussion? As anyone who’s tried it knows, creating an effective face-to-face discussion with twenty or more people is challenging enough!
Stephen, who consults extensively on cultural change with police and military organizations, had an idea. Both of us use the fishbowl format for face-to-face group discussion because it clearly delineates who can talk at any moment and prevents the monopolization of discussion by a few individuals. Is there, Stephen asked me, some way to translate the fishbowl format to an online environment? He had been unable to find such a service.
I told Stephen about my experience, three years ago, using the amazing Maestro Conference system, a teleconferencing system that can indeed provide fishbowl discussion functionality (and a great deal more besides) but only for audio. We agreed that what we really need for effective real-time virtual discussion is an audiovisual conferencing system.
What would be the features of an effective system? The hardest technical requirement is the ability to handle a live A/V feed from each participant. This is hard—there’s a reason why Google Hangouts are limited to a maximum of ten participants! Handling the bandwidth and switching of multiple A/V streams is challenging, and, with current technology, expensive.
But it’s probably doable. And, I suspect, the first company that brings this product to market will find many customers.
Are any technology companies out there willing to rise to the challenge?
[Added five years later…]
Five years after I wrote this we have this technology and use it daily. As time passes, it gets harder to remember when we didn’t have Zoom or Teams, or a hundred different platforms for effective real-time virtual discussion.
The first Conferences That Work event was held June 3–5, 1992, at Marlboro College, Vermont. If you had told me then that the format would spread all over the world, and that just twelve years later I would devote my entire professional life to designing, facilitating, and evangelizing participant-led and participation-rich events I would have said you were crazy.
Even last week, glimpsing a couple of copies of my book lying on a table behind a Swiss conference organizer during a Skype call evoked a moment of disbelief. (Though it was quickly followed by a mixture of excitement and pride.)
That original 1992 conference has been held every year since. We’ve added an extra day. And we’ve become, in the words of one participant, “The best education-focused tech conference on the planet.”
Hardly a month goes by these days without hearing about events organized by people who have purchased Conferences That Work. It’s becoming clear to me that there are many Conferences That Work taking place that I’ll probably never know about.
A free gift for you
Although I’m hard at work finishing my next book I haven’t forgotten Conferences That Work. The format continues to evolve, so I’m writing a supplement that describes the improvements, both large and small, that I and many collaborators have suggested and implemented since the book was published in 2009. I’ll publish the supplement as a free ebook in the next few months.
Want a copy? Let me know using the form below and I’ll send you a copy when it’s ready.
Think of it as a 21st birthday present on the 21st anniversary of Conferences That Work, to my creation and its practitioners. This drink’s on me!
I love our community and have greatly enjoyed the work of discovering topics, finding and encouraging interesting guests, and moderating many chats. But the work involved as the community manager of the #eventprofs Twitter chats is taking too much time from an increasingly busy professional life. With a second book on the way and a travel schedule that is becoming more and more packed, I don’t believe I’ll be able to dedicate the amount of time needed to do a competent job in the coming months.
I want to thank the hundreds of people who have moderated, been guests, or tweeted during #eventprofs chats, which have been running continuously since May 2009. Though much has changed since we started, and the initial excitement of using social media to meet in a new way has become almost routine, the chats still provide a valuable opportunity for event industry veterans and newcomers alike to meet and share, irrespective of their physical locations.
Whatever the future of the #eventprofs chats, I believe they can continue to serve the important needs of the events community, and I’m happy to have been able to play a small part in facilitating their development and value.
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.
Three years have flown by since, excited by my immediate purchase of the original iPad, I shared 
Foursquare
GateGuru
Google Voice
OpenTable
