Face time
At last month”™s SBIR National Conference in Hartford, many attendees participated in a “speed dating” exercise in which they got three minutes to introduce themselves to others looking to award or secure funding.
Introductions were unnecessary in many instances, as it turns out.
Just more than half of those attending the Connecticut Convention Center event used social networking platforms to make connections in advance of the conference, according to Deb Santy, program director of the Connecticut Small Business and Innovation Research program office in Rocky Hill.
“The online tools really help us target and focus,” Santy said. “We”™ve also provided a (convention center) venue where we believe you can get that offline interactive connectivity going on.”
The use of preconference social networking platforms is increasing, as illustrated by the Professional Convention Management Association creating a suite of tools leading into its own annual conference last January in Dallas (the Chicago-based organization has a New York chapter covering southern Connecticut).
The use of social media essentially allows PCMA to “extend the life” of the meeting, in the words of Kelly Peacy, vice president of meetings and events at PCMA, and she said other planners vowed to implement such technologies for their own events.
To date, only a few companies have been created that cater specifically to social networking platforms for events ”“ and their track record is a work in progress. PCMA relied on Mill Valley, Calif.-based CrowdVine to provide an interactive online community, allowing participants to add sessions and events to their personal schedule; contact friends or people they want to meet; and access speakers to tell them exactly what they hope to learn at the sessions.
The site also allows attendees to aggregate blogs and Twitters through their mobile devices onsite for instant updates. Using Twitter in the months leading up to the conference, PCMA held regular giveaways such as free conference passes and lodging. And the group held a preconference video contest as well.
“We’re showing that event social networks are a major upgrade for both connecting on site and as a way to receive the traditionally printed information,” said Tony Stubblebine, CEO of CrowdVine, in a prepared statement. “Attendees can follow social media conversations from a single social media hub.”
EventVue, another company providing similar services, shut down early this year and posted a “post-mortem” on its web site regarding where it erred in its business model.
“We began to notice that users of the community product actually enjoyed using our ”˜chatter”™ feature that had somewhat real-time tweets about (a) conference,” wrote founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser. “We decided to simplify and focus EventVue on real-time conversation for events ”¦ This was really a Hail-Mary pass because we were out of capital and doing consulting work to buy time.”
After experimenting with a free service for creating social network communities for groups or events, Ning Inc. recently announced it would offer only a paid service. A number of Connecticut organizations and individuals have used the service, ranging from the Connecticut Technology Council to the Great Connecticut Drum and Bugle Corps Alumni Network.
As for the Connecticut SBIR office? As participants headed home from Hartford, they carried with them a 24-page list of contact information for colleagues they had met at the three day conference. While companies, addresses and phone numbers were included, the list omitted contact information for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other popular social networking options.