An alternative to Twitter for #eventprofs

An illustration of a mastodon towering over a group of people in conversation, suggesting that the federated social media Mastodon may be an #eventprofs alternative to TwitterLast week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)

Mastodon

Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.

“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.”
from a Mastodon blog post

Think of Mastodon as a “galaxy of interconnected social networks based on a common platform”. To recap key points from my recent post:

  • No one owns Mastodon, it runs on free, open-source software. There are no ads. The platform has currently about 8 million members, with more arriving daily.
  • Anyone can set up a Mastodon server (aka instance) that focuses on a specific community of any kind. (For example, as I write this, journalists are flocking to Mastodon after Musk banned some, apparently for writing critically about him. Already, people have set up a number of instances for journalists.)
  • Mastodon works like Twitter but with longer posts (up to 500 characters) and important design differences that discourage those who are trying to build their followers and influence by any means possible.
  • Each Mastodon server has its own community, rules, admins, and moderation. Mastodon’s structure and moderation tools permit a series of efficient and immediate actions against “bad” accounts or instances, where “bad” is defined by the instance administrators and community.
  • Running a Mastodon instance requires some work and a fairly modest amount of money. The cost rises with the number of users, so you can start small and see how popular your instance becomes. A server with five thousand users currently costs ~$150/month for hosting and bandwidth. Many Mastodon servers are crowdfunded, though server admins are free to come up with other ways to cover costs. Some organizations set up their own instances for their employees and associated community.

The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?

Mastodon: An #eventprofs alternative to Twitter?

“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.”
—Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter

Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?

The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.

That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.

Most meetings are small meetings

small meetings: photograph of two tiny vehicles parked in one parking space. Photo attribution: Flickr user caribbMeetings industry publications seem to focus on “large” meetings. This is not surprising. Big meetings require big fancy venues and command big budgets. They employ lots of event professionals and can command high-price speakers and opulent spectacle. Though we don’t talk about it, being responsible for big events is implicitly higher status than small ones.

So I think it’s worth pointing out that large meetings are the exception rather than the rule. For example, here are a couple of panelists at the August 2014 Hotel Data Conference quoted by Ed Watkins, Editor-At-Large of Hotel News Now, in this article:

“Faust [VP of Sales, Omni Hotels & Resorts] said the biggest change at Omni has been the growth of smaller meetings: 65% of the chain’s meeting business comes from groups that book 50 rooms or fewer at peak. At MGM Resorts, 80% of group business is 100 rooms or fewer at peak, and 62% is 50 rooms or fewer, Dominguez [Senior VP of Corporate Sales, MGM Resorts International] said.”

The Conferences That Work meeting format described in my 2009 book works well with meetings of up to a hundred people, (and I’ve shared ways to extend it to larger events in a free supplement, though you’ll need the book to fully understand the update.) But what hospitality data indicates is that for around 80% of the meetings held today, if you want a participant-driven and participation-rich conference, the book’s meeting design is all you’ll need.

Sure, we’ll always have large meetings for all kinds of reasons, and we’ll continue to enjoy the unique possibilities that big events can provide (despite some significant downsides). Just remember that the beautiful large meeting facilities prominently featured in meeting magazines may be what you and your clients lust after, but, most of the time, they aren’t what your clients actually need.

Photo attribution: Flickr user caribb