Social Software for Meeting Planners

Corbin Ball and Jeff Rasco, principals of meetings industry high-tech consultancy Tech3 Partners, stress that social media belong in the meeting professional’s toolbox for the following reasons:

· Online social software is a natural adjunct to face meetings because they are about bringing people together.

· Meeting professionals work in collaborative teams and often in disparate locations. Social software products can perform some tasks more efficiently than older methods of working together.

· The events industry is highly social. Many meeting professionals, especially those new to the industry, will be open to and possibly run with these applications.

· Online networking makes your event last 365 days a year, 24/7.

The Great
Society 2.0

Social media is putting a new ‘face’ on meetings

by RUTH A. HILL

Did you hear the one about Danna Walker, an American University professor who required her “Understanding Mass Media” students to undertake an e-media fast? She insisted they do no TV, computers, iPods or other MP3 devices, radio, video games, CD players, cell phones, or land phone lines for 24 hours. Despite student shrieks of, “What, no cell phones?” and other cries of desperation, the fast was completed, reports were written, and results were discussed.

In her article published in The Washington Post, Walker reported some students said they had gotten more sleep or spent more time with their families. Others said it felt like they were in isolation, because they realized most of their friends weren’t in their same geographic area. Clearly, those students had been spending more time on social media sites such as MySpace than with classmates and others in their real-time sphere.

Walker’s students are among those born between 1982 and 2000—often tagged digital natives, millennials, Gen Y’s, or Echo Boomers. Many of them live with almost constant electronic connect to friends and information sources on one e-device or another. And it’s likely they will carry these habits right into their professional lives.

“Matchmaking programs, which are popular in the singles scene, will continue to work their way into the meetings arena to bring people of like interests together,” says Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP, a meetings industry technology consultant. “One good contact at a meeting can pay for the price of the entire trip. Using these technologies to assist people with connect can increase the value of an event significantly.”

MySpace now has over 100 million users, he points out, and if it were a country it would be the 11th largest in the world.

“The popularity of MySpace and similar social networks should not be seen as just a fad embraced by teens and twentysomethings,” Ball says. “These young people are the largest generation born since their Baby Boomer parents, and they are out in force. The fact that they are so connected electronically as young people means they will expect to be connected as older professionals, and both technology and virtual communities will have to keep up.”

Gen Y’s aren’t the only ones hanging out on the social networking media landscape, however. Keeping up with and getting ahead of the new media adoption curve is what many in the meetings industry are all about. They understand building community with the help of Web-based social media can bring significant benefits to real-time events, such as attendance-building. The new media also helps extend the life of an event well beyond its calendar and real-time boundaries. They eschew the notion that social software will obliterate real-time meetings any more than TV sent radio into oblivion.

What’s Social Media?

Social media reside in the high-tech genre known as Web 2.0. They allow users to interact

Social Media Resources

Websites: The long list of social networking sites is growing. Following is a small slice of the big picture:

Confabb: Post your conference by topic, date and location.
www.confabb.com

Linkedin: Business-oriented social site used by millions for professional networking. www.linkedin.com

Meetup: Post and find events by location and topic of interest.
www.meetup.com

MPI Wiki: This allows visitors from the meetings industry to add, edit and remove content.
www.mpiweb.org

MySpace.com: The “king” of social networking sites, it’s populated mostly by those in the younger demographic. A search for “meeting planning” or “meetings” yields lots of hits. www.myspace.com

SecondLife: The online 3D world that’s used by millions of registered users, including those who visit MeCo mansion, built