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Friday, February 27, 2009
Inside Meetings & Conferences
Videoconferencing, web conferences improve in-person meetings
By James M. Connolly
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It was just a few years ago that advocates of videoconferencing and web conferences were predicting the death of face-to-face meetings. While technology has helped the virtual meeting replace some in-person events, tech has had another unforeseen effect on the meetings business: It has enhanced in-person meetings and conference, enabling new forms of communications and even turning the annual meeting into a yearlong event, according to consultants and other experts in the meetings business.
From the simple staff meeting to the 20,000-attendee trade show, technology is having an impact as organizers experiment with new approaches to get-togethers.
Shayne Gilbert, president of Boston media firm Silverweave and Future Forward Events LLC, has been organizing the Nantucket Conference for entrepreneurs and investors for a decade. “I used to liken it to a reunion, where you meet your friends and catch up once a year. It’s not a reunion anymore. It’s an ongoing conversation,” said Gilbert.
The springtime event (www.nantucketconference.com) still brings people to Nantucket for face-to-face meetings, and there are follow-up events throughout the year. But the organizers also are extending the event online through social networking with a fan page on Facebook and in a Linkedin group. “When you register, you can see who else is registered and reach out to them and network before you even go to the event,” noted Gilbert. “You have to ask how you take this community that you build, and what else can you provide for them throughout the year. We’re just beginning to take advantage of what is available. Social networks have had a consumer focus in recent years. I’d like to see how we can engage our business colleagues and friends.”
Gilbert added that the simple step of showing who else will be at an upcoming event, and enabling pre-event networking allows people who are better at one-on-one communications rather than group schmoozing to set up discussions and make better use of their time on site.
Identifying how to use technology in connection with meetings really starts when people first decide to get together, even for meetings of a handful of people, according to Kate Brodock, founder of Boston-based marketing firm Other Side Group. Factors such as travel time and expenses play into those decisions, as well as the ultimate goal of the meeting, said Brodock.
“Analyze what you need, and figure out how to translate that into the virtual world. At the lower level, if you are just trying to get one thing accomplished, something like an online wiki may work, where people are uploading text and documents,” she said. “If you may be shifting from a face-to-face meeting to more a virtual meeting, ask what you find to be important in face-to-face meetings now. If it’s important that you interact, for example, where body language is important, then you maybe should go with a videoconference.”
Brodock sees a drift away from some smaller in-person meetings, noting that when serial entrepreneur David Friend founded Carbonite Inc., he “almost immediately installed Skype for internal meetings,” allowing his development team to work from home most of the week. They then met in person weekly, she said that she and her business partner recently did a panel discussion using BrightTALK’s webcast platform, which allowed them to share slides with other participants on a conference call.
Brodock notes that some larger events, such as trade shows, have successfully moved to an online approach, such as last year’s College Week Live, run by PlatformQ, which served as a virtual college fair. However, she says that some of the larger events are still handicapped by the need for a better business model. “When you get into the virtual space there is this push to have things either free or economically priced. Gone are the days when you could charge $1,000 for someone to sit at their desk,” said.
Social networking plays a growing role in event promotion, Brodock says, whether it involves informal Twitter-driven “Tweetups,” or peers spreading the word about upcoming conferences. She estimates that she learns about 70 percent of her networking events through Twitter.
Yet, she says there is still a role for face-to-face events, noting that if they disappeared, “I’d miss being face to face with people. I still value that body language with somebody being right in front of you. There’s a lot of communication that can happen even without saying something.”
One group that relies heavily on the need for face-to-face meetings is the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which manages facilities such as the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and the Hynes Convention Center. MCAA executive director Jim Rooney said, “We’ll never replace the need for that face-to-face interaction, but technology will have a role in redefining the way meetings and conventions take place.”
Technology has allowed global collaboration through webcasts and videoconferencing during events at the convention centers, including online audience participation from Tokyo during a Siggraph conference last year. Several years ago, the Heart Rhythm Society featured a surgeon doing remote robotic surgery from Boston on a patient in Italy.
Rooney says that exhibitors are increasingly requesting Internet access on the trade show floors and setting up plasma screens to exhibit products “as opposed to just picking up a widget,” and that wireless data access built into the South Boston-based BCEC gives that facility an edge over older facilities that have to retrofit for wireless.
In addition, technology is making it easier for trade show exhibitors throughout the convention business sector, with web-based tools that enable exhibitors to have all of their logistical needs met before they show up at a venue.
Rooney emphasizes the importance of face-to-face events in a business-to-business environment, which accounts for most of the MCCA’s large events.
“One is able to achieve a personal level of comfort with respect to who they are dealing with or doing business with that might not be achievable in communications that are tech-based. There is a social interaction element to selling,” he said.
Unconference, Untech
Technology is shaping business events and enabling new approaches to meetings and conferences, yet one of the more radical changes in conference formats actually relies on a pretty low-tech solution.
The “unconference” is a term that applies alternately to any nontraditional conference and to a particular model in which participants shape the agenda practically on the fly and where the roles of speaker and attendee morph.
Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology Inc. and principal of Warner Research LLC in Cambridge, had been involved with the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s investor conference for 10 years. “That was the more classic conference with meetings between companies and investors, and essentially it became a pitch session. It became less useful for people on both sides. People can find a lot of information about a company on the web today,” noted Warner. “What I felt was needed was a meeting where you could really help an entrepreneur at a variety of stages.”
In the classic conference model, organizers draft agenda topics, then recruit speakers to talk about those topics and attendees to listen to those discussions.
Warner and MassTLC worked with California-based conference organizer Kaliya Hamlin, who had managed a number of unconferences in which everyone could speak and everyone could listen. They launched the MassTLC Innovation unConference in October, and it quickly sold out with 300 attendees. The 2009 conference (www.masstlc.org) is scheduled for Oct. 1 at Sun Microsystems Inc. in Burlington.
Organizers recruited experts who came up with ideas for sessions the morning of the event and were assigned to time slots and rooms based on the amount of attendee interest. The core technology? A wall of handwritten cardboard signs.
“It only took about 12 minutes, and people went off and had meetings. During the day, some meetings were added and others were taken off,” said Warner, noting that if people didn’t find a meeting to be useful they would vote with their feet and move to another meeting.
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