Nicholas Christakis—physician and social scientist, WEC 2012 keynote speaker and co-author of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives—will be connecting live with the MPI community network on Wednesday, July 11, at 2:15 p.m./14.15 (central standard time). This is a great opportunity to engage pre-WEC with a researcher dedicated to the exploration of social networks who, in 2009 and again in 2010, was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers and who in 2009 was named to the TIME 100, TIME magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Dr. Christakis' lab, the Human Nature Lab at Harvard University, is currently focused on the relationship between social networks and health. People are inter-connected, and so their health is inter-connected. This research engages two types of phenomena: the social, mathematical and biological rules governing how social networks form ("connection") and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings and behaviors ("contagion").

People live in networks and have since the beginning of rational thought. Through multiple and many-faceted paths that include family connections, friendship connections and work connections, we are interconnected to many hundreds and thousands more connections, most of whom we do not know. We still affect them and they still affect us.

Christakis' work examines the multiple types of rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place. 

Before you join us next Wednesday, please enjoy some pre-conversation videos and reading that will answer many questions and open up more:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics.html

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/10/qa_wih_nicholas/

To join us on computer to type your questions in directly on the webinar platform, please register at www.mpiweb.org/education/online.

Alternatively:

To text a question prior or during our conversation, please text to 254-442-0230. To tweet a question prior or during our conversation, please tweet to @MPIwebinars. To email questions prior or during our conversation please email to webinars@mpiweb.org.

We will get to as many questions as possible in the half-hour, and continue the conversations on the MPI Twitter, LinkedIn and community forums, as well as in the WEC Daily and blogs.

We also have two other great webinars next week that you may be interested in: "Business Value of Meetings: Let's Measure Together" and "Using Webinars to Engage Prospects." Just click on the names of the webinars to sign up. 

(Image (CC) jurvetson)

I’m currently in Baltimore, Maryland, attending the Association Media & Publishing Annual Meeting. In addition to accepting One+’s gold award for magazine general excellence from the organizers, I’m attending many of the event’s professional development sessions.

One of the most interesting sessions was the opening keynote “Why We Buy, Why We Brand” presented by Debbie Millman. It was a fascinating anthropological investigation about, well, branding.

Millman started by taking the audience down the branding history road. A couple of interesting trivia bits included that the word brand comes from “brond,” which is in the epic poem Beowulf from 1010 A.D. Also, the world’s first trademark was for Bass Pale Ale, a beer. Humanity, of course, has its priorities straight.

We were then presented by the various waves of branding. The first wave (1875-1920) of brands guaranteed quality and consistency, with package goods equalling signified premiums and expectations of safety.

Branding’s second wave (1920-1965) brought on anthropomorphization. Metaphor was injected into a brand. This wave was popular, and still is, because people love puzzles, they love figuring out what a logo or image means for a brand. For example, the Morton Salt girl is walking in the rain trailing salt behind her. The slogan is “When It Rains It Pours.” Trying to figure out why Morton says that is part of the fun (Morton figured out a way to cause salt to pour from a container even in humid weather is the answer). Another reason this wave is popular is because people can relate to and project onto characters. The next time you’re in a grocery store check out children’s cereal boxes. All of the characters eyes will be looking down toward the children who are looking up to them.

The third wave (1965-1985) was all about self-expressive statements, that a brand could provide status. If you’re a Mad Men fan, you’ll see this wave in the pitches that Don and Peggy present to clients for Jaguar and Heinz.

Wave four (1985-2000) was the experience era, with experiential marketing a popular tactic.

Now we’re in the fifth wave of branding. Humans are at their happiest when they feel attachment to other people. However, one-in-three current households are comprised of one person (compared to one-in-10 in 1950). Because of this, our brains have found new ways to connect to others. In the current wave we’re in, brands act as connectors.

Your event, your meeting, is a brand. Its sole purpose is connections. This could mean connections to content to new business to new friends. If you’re not thinking of your event in this way, if you’re not even thinking of yourself this way as a meeting professional, then you’re behind the times.

Sure, it’s fine to have a status symbol attached to your event’s brand. Or maybe your brand’s event creates an experience. But without that final piece, the connection, your event will come up sorely lacking. Who wants to attend an event where they don’t bring back any new ideas, business, or friends? No one that I know.

Wired's May issue features an interesting story about Klout, a service that measures online influence. It's a great read, and what caught my eye—and what you may find interesting—is the story about the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

"At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in," Seth Stevenson wrote. "Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of ecommerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers."

Stevenson writes that Matt Thomson, Klout's VP of platform, says major companies and brands are seeking how to best utilize Klout scores.

"Soon, he [Thomson] predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets," Stevenson wrote. "'We say to brands that these are the people they should pay attention to most,' Thomson says. 'How they want to do it is up to them.'"

Now, I embrace technology. I'm an early adopter. I have a Klout score, etc., etc., so I guess I'd qualify for these types of perks. But what about those who don't tweet, who don't work on a computer all day, who may be working blue collar jobs? It's like when people talk about the meeting industry and only talk about lavish parts of it, while forgetting about the taxi drivers, the maids, the cooks preparing 350 deviled eggs for an event. 

Just because someone's influence can't be measured with an algorithmic score doesn't mean that person is not influential. It's maddening how much we put data on a pedestal, when it's only one part of the story.  

I know a lot of people want to feel important in life, and attaching a number to your personality is an easy way to identify that importance. It's times like this, though, that I'm reminded of the writer Maya Angelou's much quoted words: “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” 

What do you think of rewarding people based on social media use? Is this something you do regularly in your business? Have you received perks based on an algorithmic score? Please let us know in the comments. 

Jonah Lehrer—our opening keynote speaker at WEC 2012 in St. Louis—wrote in a recent New Yorker article that "the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone."

It's true. Most of humanity's challenges are so complex today, it takes a group effort to work on them. The days of individual problem solvers are over. It's a new time, when collaboration and connections are tantamount to survival. 

Part of the group process, though, is empowering individuals to realize they have important ideas to share. It does no good to have a group working on a challenge if the individuals aren't aware of their own knowledge.

Dr. Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, believes the first step to building successful organizations is simple: self-realization by each participant of his or her unique knowledge and experience. 

Bonner co-authored “Leveraging Member Expertise to Improve Knowledge Transfer and Demonstrability in Groups” with Dr. Michael Baumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio. The study, published in February’s edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that “for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.” 

“It doesn’t take much. All you have to do is have people sit there for a while and think, ‘What is it I already know about this, and how can that help find the solution?’” Bonner said. “People find they often know more than they think they do; they realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.” 

The researchers used 540 University of Utah undergraduate students, assigning half to three-member groups on one hand, with the remaining 270 participants working as individuals. Their task: arriving at estimates closest to the correct answers to such questions as the elevation of Utah’s King’s Peak; the weight of the heaviest man in history; the population of Utah; and the minimum driving distance between Salt Lake City and New York City. 

“We solve problems by using the many examples, good and bad, we’ve gathered through hard-won experience throughout our lives. The problem is that we’re not nearly as good at applying old knowledge to new problems as you’d think,” Bonner said. “Research over more than a century has tried, without much success, to figure out how we can do a better job.” 

Bonner and Baumann, however, are convinced their study shows that “although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it.” 

And that's where meetings come into play. They are a catalyst for change, for igniting new ideas, for giving your worldview a good, hard shake.

"The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together," Lehrer wrote. "It is the human friction that makes the sparks."