There are three things conference attendees really want to know about each other.
Connections with people are formed by our experience with them over time. (Yes, Buddhists and Taoists, the present moment is our only reality, but we still experience it through the filters of the history and desires in our brains.) Besides learning about people we’re with through our direct experience, we discover more by listening to their descriptions of their past and present experiences and their hopes for the future.
That’s why the first thing that happens at Conferences That Work is a roundtable, where each attendee answers the following three questions (there are no wrong answers!) to the group:
How did I get here? (past)
What do I want to have happen? (present & future)
What experience or expertise do I have that might be of interest to others? (past & future)
As people, one by one, share these three things to know, they share their past, present, and future with everyone in attendance. Each person opens a window for others to see the timeline of their life more clearly. This sharing provides the foundation for connections to deepen during the conference that follows.
Long ago, when I was a British college student, I would set off to explore Europe each summer. There were no budget flights in those days, so I traveled by train. Some of my trips lasted days, but I loved the journey because of the people I met. I still remember the G.I. returning from Vietnam, now a Denver judge. The Belgium cabinet minister who tried for several hours to convert us to communism. And the cute Irish postgraduate student who…well never mind.
Now I live in the U.S. where trains are a rarity, at least in my part of the world. So I fly when it doesn’t make sense to drive. And I still enjoy striking up conversations with the stranger(s) sitting next to me. I’m not pushy—some people don’t want to talk, and that’s fine—but, more often than not, we end up exploring each other’s lives for a few hours. Over the last few years I remember, among others, the French airline executive who kissed me on both cheeks when we parted, the nun who visited prisoners and showed me years of correspondence, the fascinating sales director of a major internet hosting company, the lay ministry provider of counseling support for military families, and the British basketball agent who also owned a debt collection agency.
Some of these people shared intimate things about their lives during our time together. Things I doubt they shared with most of the people they worked with every day. They did this because we were never going to meet again. For a few hours, they were with the Stranger on the Airplane. And, of course, they were my Strangers on the Airplane, and sometimes I told them intimate things as well.
The Stranger on the Airplane during Conferences That Work
I’ve seen a similar thing happen at Conferences That Work. The intimacy is not as deep initially, because, I think, attendees are aware that they may meet another time if the conference is held again. On the other hand, if they do meet a sharer again, attendees have an opportunity to go deeper. I find it strange, yet enjoyable, to meet people once a year and expand my connection on each occasion in unforeseen ways.
In my experience, the majority of people (on airplanes and at conferences, at least) enjoy talking quite freely with strangers who they trust. Because the ground rules support a confidential, safe environment this potential of intimacy is present at Conferences That Work. I like that. How about you?
I’ve never run a conference without volunteers. I’ve spent over thirty years organizing meetings. Here are 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.
1) Is this conference marketable?
One of the most important ways I leverage volunteers is during the earliest conference planning stages to determine whether a proposed event is marketable.
Here’s my simple rule of thumb when deciding whether an idea for a conference might work.
Can I find at least five people enthusiastic enough about the proposed combination of topic/theme, audience, location, and duration to volunteer their time and energy to make the event happen?
If I can’t easily find at least five volunteers enthusiastic about a conference, I’ve (painfully) learned that the event is almost always unviable.
2) Use volunteers for creative work
You’ve got a bunch of willing volunteers—what should you have them do? I try to allocate volunteers to creative jobs at conferences. Research indicates that paying people to do interesting work can make them less motivated! Here are some examples of conference tasks well suited to volunteers:
greeting arriving attendees
introducing attendees to each other
facilitating sessions
organizing and running fun activities
I generally use volunteers for creative work and reserve mechanical tasks for paid staff.
3) Check in with your volunteers
Talk with each volunteer individually well before the event. Ask them how they’d like to help and come to a clear understanding as to what’s expected from them.
4) Plan to have enough volunteers
Volunteers are sometimes less reliable than paid staff. Ensure you have a few people who can cover for last-minute gaps in your volunteer staff during the event.
5) Reward your volunteers
Reward your volunteers throughout the event. Make sure volunteers receive refreshments, meals, and access to conference amenities. If they are attending the conference, offer them reduced or free admission. Reimburse them for any incidental expenses they incur.
6) Never take your volunteers for granted!
Make sure you recognize their contributions, not only publicly, using appropriate perks, awards, and publicity, but also privately. Show them you genuinely appreciate their contributions, and they will become your biggest boosters.
These are the 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.
How do you work with volunteers at your events? What lessons have you learned?
For the last three months, I’ve been rehearsing for the Brattleboro Concert Choir’s performances this weekend of Ernest Bloch’s Avodath Kakodesh. Looking back, I realize I’ve been singing with the BCC for the last ten years.
The first weeks of rehearsal of a new piece are not much fun. I don’t know the music well, and I’m not a great sight-reader. I usually spend a significant amount of time creating a soulless electronic version of my part. Precise tones with precise timings, which I share with my fellow tenors. I attend at least one two-hour rehearsal each week. All this work adds up to a large commitment of time and energy to the two, sometimes three, annual concert performances.
So, given the many other interests in my life, and the large number of attractive opportunities I reluctantly turn down, why do I choose to sing with the Concert Choir year after year?
Why I sing
Part of the answer is my pleasure, as the performance dates approach, of my ability to sing increasing competently at points in the music. Sometimes I experience singing beautifully. Even if it’s only a portion of a phrase that suits my vocal abilities. Feeling in harmony with the musical moment is emotionally satisfying.
But the major rush I, and probably all my fellow choristers, feel is the joy of creating. And being a part of, and sharing a beautiful musical experience with others. No one person alone, however talented, can bring our performance into being. To do so, our musical director, our soloists, our choristers, and our orchestra are all needed and must collaborate effectively at many different levels.
At both performances this weekend, there were times when audience members were weeping.
The conferences I design and facilitate are not rehearsed, and what happens does not flow from a central musical score. But what the BCC performances and Conferences That Work share is the joy of connecting with others to create meaningful experiences, and sometimes profound.
I love being a part of both of these worlds.
And I hope you are lucky enough to be able to experience this connectedness in some way in your life.
In 1980, I was one of the students in this picture — the physics lecture theatre at Oxford University. (There were few female students then, so some things have improved.) They’ve repainted the walls and replaced the seating, but the room layout has remained unchanged.
When Oxford University was founded, nine hundred years ago, this is how you were taught. The early universities grew out of the monastic schools, established in the 5th century, where abbots and abbesses inculcated the young men and women novices.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that we have a hard time taking seriously other modes of learning. After all, we’ve been told for fifteen hundred years that sitting and listening to someone who supposedly knows more than you do is how you learn.
Working on a video trailer for my book Conferences That Work reminded me of Margaret Wheatley’s beautifully written turning to one another and its short chapter willing to be disturbed.
She points out how society teaches us not to admit we don’t know. How difficult it is for us to give up our certainties. Margaret believes, as do I, that curiosity about what others believe is what we need, and that we need to be willing to admit that we’re not capable of figuring out things alone.
She recommends that we listen for what surprises us. If what you say disturbs me, she says, I must believe something contrary to you. My shock at your position exposes my own position. … If I can see my beliefs and assumptions, I can decide whether I still value them.
When I talk about attendee-driven conferences, while some people “get” the inherent possibilities, many find it hard to believe that a group of people can create a rich, optimal agenda for the event within a few hours from their initial meeting. Sustaining such disbelief is uncomfortable, and one common response is to stop listening for differences. Although I often feel frustrated when I sense that people aren’t listening in this way, I do my best to continue to listen to their truth, because that’s how I can stay open to learning from them.
Margaret concludes: I expect to be disturbed by what I hear from you. I know we don’t have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined by our human hearts.
There’s still a lot of buzz in the events industry about hybrid events where there are two audiences: people physically present, the local audience, and people connected to the event remotely, via Twitter, chat, audio, and video streams, the remote audience. But there’s a potential drawback to hybrid events.
Event planners are excited about this new event model because it has the potential to increase:
overall audiences
interaction between attendees
exposure for the event
exposure for event sponsors and the hosting organization
the value of attendee experience through new virtual tools
the likelihood that a remote attendee will become a face-to-face attendee in the future
Because of these positives, I expect that events that include local and remote audiences will become more popular over time. Especially, as we gain experience in what formats work and become proficient at resolving the technical issues involved in successfully hosting these event environments.
But there’s one thing we may lose if we add a remote audience to our events.
A potential drawback
At the face-to-face conferences I run, attendees start by agreeing to a set of ground rules. These ground rules create an environment where participants can speak freely and ask questions. They don’t need to worry that others will reveal their statements or viewpoints outside the event.
It’s hard to convey the difference this assurance makes to the climate at Conferences That Work unless you’ve attended one. The level of intimacy, learning, and community is significantly raised when people feel safe to ask “stupid” questions and share sensitive information with their peers.
I doubt it’s possible to create the same environment of trust when an unseen remote audience joins the local participants. Believing that everyone will adhere to a set of ground rules is risky enough when everyone who agrees is in the same room as you. To sustain the same trust when an invisible remote audience is added is, I think, a significant stretch for many people. If I’m right, the result of opening up a conference to a remote audience may be a reversion to the more common environment of most conferences today, where asking a question may be more about defining status than a simple request to learn or understand something new.
Do you think that hybrid events can be designed so that they are still safe places for people to ask questions and share sensitive issues? Or do you think I’m over-blowing the whole issue?
When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this is the Microsoft Word or kitchen-sink approach. Add every feature and ability you can think of (or that any important customer asks for) into the application. Then, let the user work with the entire glory of what you’ve created.
Over the years I found I could make a good living creating integrated systems that did things a little differently. Instead of company staff facing a complete set of menus, choices, and features, most of which they never used, I built interfaces where users only saw the functionality they required. Once logged on to the system, it appeared to contain only the functions and information needed to do their work. Yet, because the software spanned the entire company, any departmental changes were immediately available elsewhere in the organization.
Employees loved these systems because they gave them just what they wanted and no more. Without unneeded menus, options, and reports, employees worked with minimal distraction, leading to less stress and higher productivity.
Large traditional conferences exemplify the kitchen-sink approach I described above. The thinking goes: “If we have a program that includes sessions on anything that attendees might want, then they’ll come and be happy”. And perhaps this seems like the only answer, given that traditional conferences, at best, do a poor job of predicting and then offering what attendees really want.
Give attendees just what they want
Well, we can do better. When we ask attendees what they want to have happen, it turns out they are remarkably good at telling us. Especially if you’ve just presented them with a smorgasbord of possible topics gleaned from the entire group. That’s what the Conferences That Work roundtable and peer session sign-up sessions do. First, they uncover participants’ needs, experience, and expertise. Next, within a couple of hours, they turn these discoveries into a conference program that optimally matches just what attendees want, and no more.
Attendees love these conference programs because they contain just what they want and no more. Wouldn’t you?
What do you think about the feasibility of determining your conference program at the start of the event?
In my post Can we measure the ROI in social media? – Part 1 I argued that it’s pointless to try and calculate ROI in social media. If convinced you might ask, “In that case, how can I justify the allocation of resources towards social media marketing?”
Perhaps the following will help.
As I previously explained, the problem with applying classic ROI to SM marketing is we can’t quantify the Return monetarily. This is because we can’t tie increases in sales or profits directly to specific social media actions or programs. This inability blocks us from talking about ROI at all.
But wait—surely what we really want to do is to make decisions about allocating resources amongst different marketing channels? Since we need to market our products and services, the real question is how and where do we spend our marketing budget. Here’s David Meerman Scott again, emphasizing this point in his usual forthright fashion.
So why not use a slightly different metric, one that allows us to compare the effectiveness of different marketing channels in ways we can measure? Let’s call it the Relative Return On Investment (RROI). RROI sidesteps the problem of assigning a monetary value to Return. Instead, it concentrates on providing a practical comparison between investments allocated to specific marketing channels and our desirable and measurable marketing outcomes. (For example: increasing traffic to websites, new product suggestions, time spent on sites, active memberships, or brand mentions.) In effect, we’re replacing Return with the changes in concrete metrics that we believe are important to our marketing objectives. The units of RROI are then [change in metric] per unit of currency invested, e.g. an increase in daily page views per dollar, or a decrease in weekly customer support calls per euro.
Using RROI we can do experiments and make decisions about where we want to allocate marketing resources. Our experiments won’t be as precise as those possible in the past when only targeted audiences saw broadcast marketing. But by using tagged indicators of traffic origins and existing analytics we can probably get a good sense of the relative effectiveness of alternative marketing strategies. That’s useful.
Be aware that using RROI in this way won’t tell you how much you should invest in marketing. That can be answered by ROI analysis performed across potential profit opportunities available to a business. But if measuring ROI in social media is a fantasy, perhaps using RROI in its place is an honest reflection of what’s practically possible.
Is RROI a useful, relevant way to think about investments in social media? Or am I just blowing smoke? As always, your comments are welcome!
When Samuel J Smith moved back to the U.S. from Switzerland he needed to buy some insurance and asked for a recommendation on Twitter. Having had car insurance with Progressive Insurance for a number of years, and liking the ease of accessing my policy and payments online as well as the competent Vermont representatives I worked with when dealing with several claims, I tweeted Sam this information.
Five minutes later, the following tweet from @Progressive appeared:
@ASegar Saw your tweet – we appreciate you spreading the word ; ) Glad you’ve had such a positive experience.
What can we say about the Return On Investment (ROI) for this little social media interaction?
Exploring ROI for social media
A quick Google search finds this article which explains how Progressive has monitored mentions on Twitter and other social media channels since 2008 and has a dedicated team in its call center that responds to reported customer service issues. Obviously, this initiative costs Progressive money, and the company surely knows how much. So Progressive knows the Investment part of ROI in cold, hard cash.
But what about the Return? Receiving the tweet tickled me! It increased my positive feelings about the company and the likelihood that I would recommend it to more friends and acquaintances. In addition, anyone looking at Progressive’s Twitter stream (which has ~80,000 followers) might see that I made a positive comment. But wait, there’s more! Now I’ve written a favorable blog post that will be read by more people (including you!), possibly influencing more purchases from the company in the future.
Clearly a small but classic social media success story for Progressive.
But can Progressive quantify the value of their tweet in dollars?
I don’t think so.
Why ROI for social media is suspect
ROI was originally a financial term. However, it’s become common to see it used in areas where there is no simple way to connect what happens with a financial value. We have no idea how much more likely I am to recommend Progressive because of their unexpected tweet. We don’t know how many other people will ever see or be influenced by the tweet, or how many people will be influenced by reading this blog post.
And yet, there are plenty of people writing about measuring ROI in social media.
For example, in February 2010, Brian Solis posted ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media. This sounds like a how-to article, but Brian’s article just contains a lot of statistics that businesses have reported about their experiences, beliefs, and predictions about their use of social media, plus one (in my view, see below) weak example from Dell about its claims of increased sales through connecting with customers on Twitter. There’s no how-to, though Brian states that “2010 is the year that social media graduates from experimentation to strategic implementation with direct ties to specific measurable performance indicators.”
This doesn’t convince me. And I’ve got David Meerman Scott on my side. He once said “When someone asks me the ROI of social media, I respond with, ‘What’s the ROI of putting on your pants?'”
What is the Return?
The problem, as exemplified by the Progressive story above, is that the monetary Return on social media marketing cannot be tied directly to the efforts that are made. Now this is not true for many older forms of marketing. For example, it’s possible to test the effectiveness of mail campaigns by sending different coded promotions to randomly chosen subsets of a mailing list and analyzing the response rate. But because social media is, well, social we can’t do this kind of segmented marketing experiment!
To buy a computer from Dell, I decide what I want, go online, and look for a good deal. And that includes checking Dell’s Twitter stream. I do not follow Dell which convinces me to buy; I buy from them when I’m ready. Dell counting a sale to me through a Twitter promo as a Return on their investment in Twitter is not a justification for their investment in social media, because I would have bought from them anyway after finding a satisfactory deal on their website or over the phone. So for Dell to say, as quoted in Brian’s article, that “Dell’s global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue” is disingenuous at best. There’s no way the company can claim that a sale would not have occurred if it hadn’t been featured on Twitter.
Conclusions
So should we throw out the idea of calculating ROI in social media? No, not entirely. I think there’s a better way to think about what we are trying to do when attempting to decide where and how we expend time, effort, and resources on social media marketing. I’ll explain further in my next post.
Do you think you can measure the ROI in social media? I’d love to hear what you think!
Ah, the stranger on the airplane.
For the last three months, I’ve been rehearsing for the 
