Leveraging Social Media to Create Better Business Conferences

A few weeks ago I posted about being approached by a global conference organiser to sponsor a social media event – I declined because the event was decidedly unsocial.

Over the weekend I caught a really interesting post about how to use social media in order to deliver more effective, engaging events. The post reminded me of another story I caught 7 months ago – Five reasons why your business conference sucks.

Looking at these two posts now and in light of my comments about the unsocial social media conference, I’ve created a check list that utilises content from each of these posts and summarises what I think constitutes an event that embraces social media.

These points are the first version of a framework that I’m going to build out that will outline how to plan and execute a business event that properly leverage’s social technologies and the community.

I’ve grouped these key points into the 3 lives of an event – before, during, and after.

Before the Event

1. Make sure the venue has adequate internet and power – too many event venues seem to believe that providing a basic wireless network will suffice.
2. Set up a specific event website that encourages pre-event interaction
3. Agree a hashtag before the event and then start promoting it – it should be on every piece of promotional material
4. Distribute the attendee list and keep it up to date. Many event companies retain the view that an attendee list is their god-given property and no one will be allowed to see it so they send you useless summaries of the types of people attending. Get over it and share.
5. Use a number of core tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to keep people up to date. Key here is understand where your prospective audience is and connect to them there – that might be via LinkedIn or Facebook or both. I like the idea of a dedicated Facebook fan page as you have greater flexibility over posting multi-media content than you do on LinkedIn.
6. If you have the budget undertake Facebook advertising – again I’ve found this to be cost effective and very useful.
7. Another suggestion if you do have some budget I’d encourage you to invest in a social media monitoring service like Scout Labs to monitor pre-event discussions and to also build a knowledge base of articles of interest for the event. It can also be a very effective way of bringing real time discussions into the agenda and helping your presenters break from their canned presentations.

During the Event

1. Don’t be afraid to adjust the agenda on the fly – in fact, make it mandatory that all speakers are flexible and will work in with any on the fly agenda changes.
2. Encourage, if not demand that your speakers are committed to the event. They need to be at the event early, and after their presentation and most of all, they need to be engaging with the delegates. The best example of this I’ve seen are the Sales Leadership events run by Selling Power in the US. CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner insists all speakers attend for the whole day and get out into the audience engaging with the delegates.
3. Use podcasts and vodcasts to capture and distribute content both before, during, and after the event.
4. Encourage attendees to use their own blogs, tweets etc to contribute to the content of the event. Using RSS and an event wiki will allow you to aggregate this user generated content in a way that everyone benefits
5. If you can, dedicate a laptop and projector to the Twitter feed so that everyone attending can contribute. Make sure you take questions that are posted on Twitter and have speakers respond to them.
6. Hold an event like a cocktail function that includes those that couldn’t attend. Here in Australia most events are held in Brisbane, Sydney, or Melbourne so it’s very easy to organise an additional micro event so as to expand your audience reach.

After the Event

1. Keep the event site open and encourage feedback from all who touched the event.
2. Encourage attendees to create and send you short voice or podcast summaries of their experience – this will give your next event a really personal touch and build future value.
3. Make session ratings open and encourage everyone who attended to help generate an alpha version of the agenda for the next event.
4. Distribute the content and again encourage collaboration.
5. Don’t forget those who wanted to attend but couldn’t – distribute (some) content to them as this builds a sense of community and reinforces the events value in the future.

These points aren’t exhaustive nor are they solely for business conferences. I think Governments (of all persuasions) could follow these points and achieve very different outcomes for the types of internal and public events that they hold. Adopting this approach could be a very simple but effective way for Government departments to start down the Gov 2.0 road.

I use Huddle as a collaborative platform for both internal and external communities, so as I noted earlier, I’m going to create a workspace  to start extrapolating on these points and hopefully build out a framework for how to plan and execute a socially compatible business conference. If you’d like to contribute let me know and I’ll provide a login for you.

Where is the Public in Public Development?

One of the projects I’ve been working on over the past 12 months relates to Government 2.0 and how social technologies could help Australia down the road to citizen-centered Government. One of the key angles I’ve researched is how public developments/projects are created, approved, and delivered. As part of this research I’ve kept a close eye on a couple of major public projects around the country including:

• Barangaroo – a major urban renewal project in Sydney
• Clem7 – Brisbane’s first road tunnel project
• Brisbane’s City North Infrastructure projects – major road infrastructure projects involving Brisbane Airport

A number of these projects are locally quite contentious – which is why my thinking has been around how web 2.0 and social media could in fact be applied to help these projects. It’s worth noting that of these projects the City North Infrastructure projects seem the most open in terms of engagement with the community

From what I’ve been able to understand so far, most of these projects involve community consultation – but consultation in the old sense of the word

We’ll tell you we’re going to build something grand, then you Jo Public can write or email us with any objections. OK?

The following simple diagram is how I view this type of engagement:

This is a typical monologue model. There is little if any open exchange of ideas, thoughts, or information. The one-way arrows represent one way information flows, as opposed to dialogue.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any better once a project is up and running. Most of the major developments that I’ve followed (like Barangaroo and Brisbane City Council’s Clem7 tunnel project) have dedicated websites – but these sites are simple one-way communication outlets – some nice multimedia stuff, project updates, links to other Government departments etc – but no engagement.

This is a simple representation of this model:

So it seems like once a project is running we should all just let it run it’s course and be happy with updates pushed out to us?

Why are we persisting with this model?

I’m not seeing the public in public development? Given these two models, is it any wonder some of these projects seem surrounded in negativity?

The opportunity here seems to be a need to take the notion of public/community consultation and modernise it such that a community can gather both physically and online and engage in dialogue.

This is my immediate focus – building out a model for social community consultation and show how to apply the social community technology so that we can improve the whole development process for everyone.

Crossing the Personal Divide in Social Media

Laura Lake from About.com raised a really interesting point in a recent blog post about crossing the lines of personal and professional lives in the social sphere.

Has the line between professionalism and personal been blurred when it comes to social media?

I’ve thought about this topic a lot and mid last year raised it as an issue in terms of what I thought at the time was a lack of mutual respect in the whole social space.

From talking to CEO’s and senior executives here in Australia, this is a top of mind concern and interestingly brand damage isn’t their #1 concern.

The macro issue is clearly the personal/professional line – though I see this line in different lights:

1. How does a senior executive deal with issues of etiquette – who to connect to? What are the boundaries regarding online exchanges?
2. What do you do when someone takes an honest admission and turns it into a storm?
3. How do you deal with employees who are dismissed who then use social networks to unleash hell on an organisation?

Are there any easy answers to these questions or Laura’s for that matter? No!

Yes I believe you can be too personal – but I also believe these obligations are two-way. I think consumers need to pull their heads in and realise that their demands for openness, honesty, transparency etc also means we sometimes make mistakes and they as consumers have a mutual obligation to be accepting, patient, and reasonable.

Let’s focus on this mutual obligations point…because none of us are perfect are we!

Privacy in a Social World – Have We Gone Too Far?

The last few months have seen some interesting developments as technology companies start to flex their PR muscle – making announcements around how their technology is now social and gives companies the ability to effectively live with their customers, prospects and general consumers (Salesforce.com’s recent ‘Chatter’ announcement is one example of this)

I’ve been a proponent of social media monitoring for some time now – as far as I’m concerned the real value in social media monitoring is how we use tools like Scout Labs as a strategic and operational tool rather than just monitoring buzzes or mentions. (See my presentation to social media tools week for more information on what I think about this topic).

So I think I get where this is going. I’ve been around this technology and sales in general to see the bigger picture. I’ve watched with immense interest as the debates about social CRM have raged amongst people who are clearly smarter than me – see here for a great example

But…

Have we really thought through the business implications of these developments (and for the moment let’s put aside any questions about whether these developments are real or vapourware or as I like to refer to it now – hype-as-a-service)

What worries me is whether these types of developments are a step too far? Are we in fact enabling the next generation of abuse – but at a level that doesn’t stop at the inbox?

Some of the questions bouncing around my head include:

1. If we drink the vendor kool-aid are we going to start invading the privacy of consumers? Interfering in their online lives in ways that may in fact destroy social media as an effective tool.
2. Have the vendors (i.e. Salesforce.com, RightNow, Lithium etc) given any thought to how their technology might be abused?
3. Is there such a thing as privacy in the social sphere? If not why not?
4. Has any company given any thought to what internal controls needs to be in place to prevent abuse? Just because the information is out there – does that mean we have a license to use and abuse it?
5. As many companies rush to put social media policies in place, are they already deficient?
6. Are interactive tools like Chatter simply a more automated way for marketers to blast consumers?

Given the proliferation of spammers and scammers on Twitter – what’s to stop them using Salesforce.com’s Chatter tool to really invade the lives of their targets? As Mike Schaffner pointed this out in a recent Forbes article – even Salesforce.com’s CEO admits he knows more about strangers on Facebook then he knows about his employees.

So where is the point where we step back and not interfere? Or do we just sit back and let consumers build a backlash that eventually leads to CAN-SPAM like laws?

The Unsocial Social Media Conference

Over the past couple of years I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a number of conferences in the US and I’ve been impressed at how they’ve evolved from the stereotypical – you attend – we talk – you listen model to highly interactive events that encourage contribution from the attendees and where the speakers are highly available and actively engage with the audience.

This quote from LinkedIn sums up how the conference market has changed.

the emergence of tools for self-expression (blogs),  micro- dialogue  (Twitter), alternative reality (Second Life), networks (Ning), capturing and collaborating (podcasts and wikis), and participant-driven organization (unconferences, open space, barcamps).

So with that experience I was surprised last week when Marcus Evans cold called me about a conference they are holding in February 2010 around Social Media – the conference (or Summit as they prefer to call their events) is titled ‘Social Media Marketing Bootcamp.

Given the event was about Social Media, I was very interested in finding out just how Marcus Evans are using the social sphere to build awareness and interest in the event.

What surprised me the most is that they are holding an event about social media but they aren’t doing anything to show that they understand the topic – not even the basics. The event has no social profile, no social promotion, and no attempt to promote the use of the tools and strategies that the event seeks to focus on. In fact, the event doesn’t even have its own site, nor does it rate a mention on their own websites was concerning to say the least.

Here’s the conference brochure that was sent to me via email:

Given Marcus Evans were pitching to me to be a sponsor, why would I invest in an event about social media that doesn’t use the very tools that deliver the sociality?

I declined to participate for a couple of (additional) reasons

1. The whole conference has a heavy brand and marketing focus. Whilst this is OK, it’s not our core focus.
2. My opinion is that this event model is old and too prone to delivering marginal ROI.
3. I’m always deeply suspicious when someone tells me the audience have budgets approved and are ready to spend!

Granted I’m not an event specialist, I’m just a consumer but I do believe they could be doing a better job with the structure and promotion of the event. I’d even be happy to help map out a social strategy for the event – they just have to ask.

#SMTW – Social Media Tools Week – Day 1 Recap

Today was day 1 of social media tools week. It comprised two sessions – one from Axel Schulze and one from John Todor.

Both were cracking sessions and a good intro into the week we all have ahead of us.

Axel as always gave us a really good overview of how social media is starting to impact our business world. I could sense Axel wanting to break loose and really get stuck into some of the entrenched mindset issues that we all confront – but he kept it under control.

John’s presentation took things to a new level. John touched on many of the ideas that we’ve had around social business – and why we’ve set ourselves a goal of becoming a leader in social business strategy space.

Axel and John have set a good foundation for the week. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s presentations as I work hard to wrap up what I intend to present.

And it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the tireless work of Marita Roebkes in bringing this whole program to fruition…herding cats no less

My Ongoing Debate about Twitter’s Relevance

Earlier this year I wrote about my doubts regarding Twitter. I had concerns at the time about the relevance of Twitter and whether it would be effective enough to warrant investment and attention. I’ve kept at Twitter, I’m an active user with the service integrated into my other social activities. Whilst mainstream media continues to be slap happy about Twitter, I’m still not convinced.

I get the whole information distribution thing. I blogged recently about how effectively Australian band Powderfinger had been in using Twitter to build enthusiasm for their free concerts. I see lots of other good examples – ABC Radio for example. We’ve even had tremendous success – for another business I own Twitter has become a very powerful sales and communication channel.

But

The system has issues and the risk for enterprise in my opinion is too great – particularly in the B2B context.

Here are my concerns:

1. The system is flakey – part 1

The whole ‘fail-whale’ thing is cute for like – 2 minutes. Google gets its butt kicked when Gmail is down for 10 minutes yet constant service from Twitter is a rare thing. Running a major service channel through Twitter with this service standard? Sorry, I wouldn’t be hanging my career on that option

2. Hackers Rule the Roost

I used to get angry when people sent me DM’s about ‘I’ve added you to my mafia family’ or ‘are you as smart as me’. Then I realised these users were subject to hack attacks and spam attacks.

Here’s an example of a user who I consider to be prominent issuing an apology:

This would be a tough conversation with the CMO or CIO – ’Lets get on Twitter. Good chance we’ll spam our followers, our account will be hacked – but it’s all good. Everyone’s doing it…’

3. The system is flakey – part 2

What is it with changes being lost, blocks being unblocked, the system being severely constipated before it suddenly spews out a torrent of ‘past due date’ content?

This is poor. And again, in an enterprise context – why would you put trust in a system with these flaws?

4. Inappropriate Content

I’m pretty diligent about blocking anyone who mentions money, sex, or religion. But most days I find companies and individuals with followers who are so suspect it beggars belief that they haven’t been blocked or reported.

I’ve seen some really really inappropriate avatars used by Twitter accounts – why aren’t these users blocked?

Worse, I’ve seen some major US companies following users who have avatars that are quite shocking. I have to ask. If you’re following users who have graphic images of women – what is your Twitter strategy? Is this really a reflection of your company’s values? One of these companies is a major brand in the social media space.

So how are we protecting our brand in this free-for-all world? Can someone fill me in on what Twitter is doing to police this space? And don’t give me that ‘oh there’s a new report spam link’ – rubbish!

5. Widespread Abuse

This really irks me. Company names and brands are being hijacked. The proliferation of this abuse is amazing.

Given I work in the CRM space I’ve been watching a couple of accounts. One account bbakari uses the Twitter API to flood the service with – spam.

Here’s an example

Now, granted I can block this user and not worry about the mindless river of drivel – but the fact is if you search for Salesforce.com or SugarCRM.com this torrent of spam clogs up the search results.

And just so you know, this is bbakari’s second account on Twitter. His first account @freecrm was killed off.

My Conclusion

Personally, I like Twitter. I follow people whose opinions I value and I like that they use the service appropriately. I like the fact I can tie my other social profiles into Twitter.

I can see the value. I can see the big picture with Twitter being a useful tool for information distribution.

But if I put a CEO hat on I have concerns – serious concerns. Would I recommend a B2B company jump into Twitter – probably not! I think their social media strategy would make more sense and they’d get better value focusing elsewhere.

Social Media Tools Week – My Presentation

Thanks to the team from Social Media Academy I’ve been given the opportunity to present at their global multi-day event next week – Social Media Tools Week. Given we’ve just launched Smart Social Media – this is a great opportunity to outline some of our thinking on social media.

The topic of my presentation is

Social Media Monitoring – Why the Executive team needs to be using these tools

Why this topic?

Several reasons. Firstly, social media monitoring tools like Scout Labs have quickly evolved from brand buzz monitoring tools into significant business intelligence portals.

Secondly, TEC speaker Gary Bertwistle is a big proponent of business leaders being active thinkers. Gary’s speaking topics like ‘What made you think of that‘ and ‘Leading Innovation‘ has influenced how I think information should be used in organisations and the importance of a business leader having access to knowledge that isn’t shaped by functional prejudice.

The current business climate means their are many threats and opportunities and business leaders need to be alert and need to be looking across more than the traditional information channels. I’ll also drill into why Government agencies need to be using these tools as well – and why they are more powerful and useful than existing services (like news clipping services).

My presentation is Thursday the 19th at 10.30am AEDT (9.30am for those of us in Queensland).

I’ll be posting more details on my presentation between now and Thursday.

http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/html/socialmediatoolsweek-nov09.cfm

Social Communities – A Simple Explanation

I’ve been doing a bit of strategy work recently around social communities. I’ve posted before about communities and how 2009 seems to be the year they are coming of age. I’m pretty excited about where the community space is going in terms of functionality, deployability, and sustainability.

Building a social community isn’t viable for every company but given the breadth of good platforms (from Ning, through to enterprise solutions like Xeequa, Awareness, Mzinga, and Igloo) they warrant attention and discussion within the context of your social media strategy.

This presentation is a simple overview of Social Communities. It’s an extract from a larger presentation that I put together for TEC groups here in Australia and New Zealand.

Blue Ocean Strategy Innovation in Transactional Banking

Through one of my LinkedIn groups a fellow group member – Munib Karavdic raised a question as to whether a new St George product is an example of a Blue Ocean product. I originally set out to review the site in question and draft a quick response but ended up turning it into a blog post…

So I had a good look through the promo site. I can see a number of BOS principles reflected in this product.

Before I share my thoughts lets look at the existing Australian market space of transactional banking – largely a vacuum of innovation – bitter red oceans of competition. I suspect the last really innovative move was ING launching their internet only transaction accounts which has since been eroded into a red ocean. In reality it’s nothing more than poor tit for tat incremental changes. I think even NAB’s recent elimination of fees is simply a red ocean reaction.

Given the information at hand, I can see some clear elements of Blue Ocean thinking in this product; though some aspects of it might not qualify (i.e. the flat $5 fee per month – is that really lowering costs for the customer? If so, how is this communicated by presenting it as a flat fee when their competitors are promoting fee removal?).

What I find interesting is that I can see how they are appealing to their tiers of non-customers in a couple of interesting ways – primarily through 3 key strategies:

Savings Targets

Helping customers develop good savings habits

I see this as a really interesting attempt to move the idea of a transaction account away from being something you get in the mail every month to an interactive tool that you want to receive.

As we all know, setting up young people with good savings behaviours is important for their financial future. I think this is a reasonable attempt by St George to promote and support positive financial behaviour (as opposed to the disgraceful behaviour of some banks – ‘oh you’ve maxed your credit cards – let me give you more credit).

Budgeting Tools

Simple graphical tools for those customers who aren't numerically minded

This is the bit I think has real traction. This appears to be a legitimate attempt to help non-financially minded people make sense of the flows of money in and out of their lives. Whilst many of us might think it’s a simplistic representation of a financial situation – if it works for the customer then – it works. This isn’t new as some credit card companies already to this – but providing it as a service on a transaction account is. What I see here is the bank realising they have this data anyway to so why not aggregate and package the data so that their customers can use it and potentially modify their behaviours. What’s that you say? Banks and altruistic behaviour make strange bedfellows…

Round Up

An interesting approach to rounding...

I’m not sure what they are thinking with this feature. Whilst I get the virtual coin jar idea I’m not sure it’s solving a problem. But if this feature is another way of forced saving by stealth then in reality it’s a positive. Personally, I think there is more merit in rewarding account holders with bonus interest for every coin deposit they make over a certain amount.

Is this a Blue Ocean product?

Tough question to answer given the information provided – as I can’t help but feel they’ve missed some critical factors that (if included) would have created massive barriers for their competitors – chief amongst these is any form of measure of engagement and contribution. Deep down, this still smells like a bank product. I’m not quite seeing how they understand or recognise participation – and in my opinion – this is the holy grail

Have they really erected competitive barriers – I don’t have enough information to say yes or no. Maybe they have if you look at it in the context of their 3 peers. But I would argue not if you were to look into say the second tier of banks or more importantly the mutual sector (i.e. Credit Unions) where engagement measurement is more natural and intrinsic.

I think St George deserves praise for launching this initiative – but I can’t help but feel someone – more than likely a credit union is going to see this and really seize the day – particularly in terms of engagement that isn’t based on traditional bank metrics (i.e. share of wallet). I guess time will tell!