Human Connections and Conversations
The Energy of Many
By Bruce MacMillan, CA
I like to say that MPI, and indeed all the members of our global community, are in the business of connecting people, ideas and marketplace opportunities—human connections. What is increasingly important to each of these types of connections are the inherent conversations that crystallize as a result of our efforts.
Research shows that meetings and events are the biggest driver of business results. However, societal shifts, technology developments and demographic changes are positioning meeting professionals into a different type of role as conversation and connection leaders.
This really struck me at DigitalNow 2009 in April at Walt Disney World. The annual conference brings together association executives and leading-edge business thought-leaders to consider the future in a time of disruptive change. This year’s conference focused extensively on the way people are increasingly connecting, sharing, collaborating and activating without the benefit of a formal organization.
Should association CEOs whose organizations have tried to manage these conversations be worried? Should meeting professionals who have looked at the face-to-face event as the source for all conversations be worried? The lineup of blue-chip speakers such as Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody), Peter Hirshberg (chairman of Technorati) and Allen Blue (co-founder of LinkedIn) say no way. The key is for associations and meeting professionals to stop trying to control the conversations and instead find ways to stimulate their creation, as well as coming out from behind the organization and becoming part of the conversations. And after seeing the way the DigitalNow speakers, Fusion Productions and the Disney Institute meeting professionals collaborated to stimulate conversations that inspired sharing and innovation using some of these tools, this is an enormous opportunity for meeting professionals to grow their value proposition.
Using Linkedin, attendees were offered pre-conference thought-starters to help guide the speakers’ focus and equip attendees with current case study examples and business strategy developments. Attendees shared their perspectives well in advance so that live conversation was rich and relevant. Throughout the conference, including during the sessions, Twitter was used by attendees and speakers to share thoughts, takeaways and video content to keep the conversation alive and also to share the energy with those not “in the room.” At one point during the event, DigitalNow was the third-most “tweeted” conversation on the planet—perhaps not too surprising since the opening session webcast and an “offsite user guide” extended the experience beyond the venue.
After the event, attendees were able to go back and mine LinkedIn and Twitter threads for important takeaways as well as the DigitalNow Web site that linked to these conversation threads and conference content. My personal takeaways were well beyond my expectations. It’s now time to put them into practice. And we will.
As part of our Future of Meetings initiative, you told us that extending the meeting experience before and after the face-to-face experience was essential but difficult to effectively implement because attendees would not make the effort. Now this is no longer essential but imperative to getting greater meeting results. The tools are readily available, and they are free. If we think about ourselves as building human connections through conversations (that most human of activities), we will succeed, and our attendees will love us for it. One+
BRUCE MACMILLAN, CA, is president and CEO of MPI. He can be reached at bmacmillan@mpiweb.org. Follow him at www.twitter.com/BMACMPI.