This report comes from Rowland Stiteler, a meeting industry journalist who attended digitalNow for One+.

If you’re looking for detailed specifics about how social media impacts the profits of your business or the membership levels of your association, they may not be out there yet.

That’s the conclusion of Susan Etlinger, social media analyst and strategist for the Altimeter Group, a consulting agency with a Fortune 500 clientele.

“If you are looking for outside standards and outside benchmarks as to what constitutes an effective social media program, right now you are wasting your time, because they are just not out there…maybe two or three years from now, but right now the standards are not out there,” said Etlinger, a keynote speaker on the second day of the digitalNow 2013 conference.

Etlinger is in a good position to know about this. For 20 years, she has been in the electronic media strategy business, working for Charles Schwab and then the Horn Group before joining Altimeter.

“Right now, most companies are in a rigorous test-and-learn phase with regard to social media,” she said.

According to Etlinger, there is still plenty of testing and learning to be done before the impact of social media on profitability can be easily measured.

That, of course, doesn’t mean it’s not important for organizations to forge ahead with social media campaigns, which clearly allow both corporations and associations to learn a lot of detailed information about the likes and dislikes of their constituencies. Certainly there is a high volume of information coming back at the purveyors of social media campaigns, and clear results in spreading brand awareness and other valuable goals. 

One+ has, however, led the field in broaching these important questions about social media. In October 2010, Editor Michael Pinchera spoke with leaders at the cross-section of social media and business for the cover story, “Untangling the Value of Social Media.” The fact remains, the value of social media can be measured—it just depends on how you wish it to be quantified.

“There will never be a single equation from which to determine the value of any and all social media campaigns,” Pinchera said. “If you want to measure engagement, start building your metrics well in advance of starting social media campaigns and identify your goals. The value is based on the results in relation to your goals—much like determining the ROI, or other returns, on a specific meeting or event. That value can be determined, but one must come to the game with data and clear goals.”

Participants in this year’s sold-out digitalNow conference—held at Walt Disney’s Contemporary Resort—included a who’s who of professional associations: the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the American Institute of CPAs, the Professional Golfers Association. Digital media directors for the various associations conducted workshops and symposia, sharing best practices and strategies, and about a dozen corporate resource partners—companies specializing in communications and association management software—provided a trade show component to share insights about the use of digital tools.

A star of the show this year was the new digitalNow smartphone app, which allowed participants the ability to do everything from keep up with the conference schedule to download presentation screenshots from various individual symposia and workshops to post and share their own personal agendas within the conference.

“This new app is a key tool to making the conference experience more effective for every participant,” said Hugh Lee, president and CEO of Fusion Productions, which produces the conference.

Dr. Michio Kaku, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York, also spoke at the event. Kaku is a futurist, a bestselling author and a science media guru. He is a frequent contributor to The Discovery Channel, the BBC, the History Channel and the Science Channel. He gave key insights into where social media is going in the near future, but also how science will shape the world in the next 30 years. Be sure and check out the June issue of One+ for our exclusive interview with Kaku.

Straight out of Star Trek, scientists in Brazil and the U.S. recently announced that they may have captured the basis for the “Vulcan Mind Meld.”

Scientists are calling this latest development a “brain link,” but for any Star Trek fan, the concept is familiar—it’s the connection of brain waves between two people allowing for the exchange of thoughts, and in essence, allowing for the two participants to become one mind.

It got me thinking, what knowledge would I want to pull from someone else’s brain if I had the opportunity? What knowledge exists out there, that I currently don’t have, but would love to have (literally) instantly?

Before we go down that road, let’s lay out what’s actually been discovered: Scientists in Brazil captured, through electronic sensors (rather than telepathy, which was the Star Trek way), the thoughts of a rat in a lab and then sent the thoughts via the Internet to the brain of a rat in a Duke University lab in the U.S. The result was that the second rat received the thoughts of the first rat and instantly mimicked its behavior.

Amazing, yes, but it’s not the first time the Internet has been used to transmit thoughts. You may remember in 2008, when Duke University researchers captured the brain activity of a monkey and sent it via the Internet, ultimately controlling a robot arm in Japan. That drew media attention five years ago, but this discovery is different and it has the science world abuzz because it specifically involves direct brain-to-brain communication. And it raises the question—what could this mean for the future of how we learn? Think of the possibilities.

Personally, I have always wanted to be fluent in more than one language, and this discovery suggests that it might be possible to instantly exchange that knowledge with a native speaker.

Is there an aspect of your career that you wish you knew more about? How would it change your career if you could instantly learn something from someone else? How would this type of knowledge transfer affect how we learn in school and how would it affect how we learn at meetings and conferences?

We know some of these answers already.

“MPI’s research on the future of meetings shows that the future would see a focus on neuroscience and neural interactions and this would be based on enhanced understanding of how our brains work,” said researcher Jackie Mulligan, with Leeds Metropolitan University in London. “As more understanding emerges from studies [like this one] that explore neural communications, emotions, processes this area could grow in importance by supporting meetings to read audiences more effectively whether through face-to-face events or virtual events.”

Andrea Sullivan, neuroscience expert and president of BrainStrength Systems, says right now virtual and hybrid can’t even come close to face-to-face meetings, but she sees an opportunity to make better connections virtually.

“I see this as an opportunity that would further the ability for us to do long-distance work together. Not necessarily complete the shift to virtual meetings, but it would go a long way,” Sullivan says. “Right now our brains are just not capable of engaging completely with others virtually. It isn’t possible to accurately communicate any of the necessary emotions via digital communications—not like it is in a face-to-face meeting. We communicate so much through our bodies, so if the body is not there, we lose 90 percent of the value and the physiological information we need to understand each other.”

But again, this study suggests that the possibility to exchange such physiological information could exist. Could it in fact change the face of meetings? Mulligan thinks so.

“Imagine a Skype call now with an ability to read those neural signals,” Mulligan said. “These are all interesting possibilities to explore that could well deepen engagement in meetings in the future. However, one huge challenge with all of this which came out of the research was to what extent humans would be willing to engage and the ethical issues that would arise with these kinds of developments.”

Rhodri Thomas, professor of tourism and events policy at the International Centre for Research in Events, Tourism and Hospitality (ICRETH), suggests the ethical issues could take longer to manifest than the technology itself.

“The ethical issues are very complex and obviously require strict regulatory mechanisms internationally as medical scientists undertake research projects and develop their understanding of how the brain works. The likely outcomes for events practitioners will certainly be associated with enabling openness, consent and control for attendees over what is done to them or revealed about them. I’m sure there will be a myriad of other issues that we will need to give some serious thought to as these new insights and associated technologies emerge.”

This specific research is just the beginning, and as far as actual transfer of knowledge from one human brain to another, that’s much further down the road, Sullivan says.

“In terms of it being used for the normal population, we are talking way, way, way down the line,” she said. “It’s an interesting thought experiment, because we are learning more and more how to communicate with each other in ways other than face to face. We are headed toward some very interesting things, that’s for sure.”

The Duke research team is currently trying to expand their research to link four rat brains and two monkey brains to prove that the brain-to-brain communication can extend across multiple species.

But again, while the idea poses some interesting logistical and ethical questions for the meeting and event industry, we are still dreaming of a technology that’s at least a few years away. So for now, if you want to know my thoughts, you’ll just have to ask.

Consider the last presentation you heard at a conference. Was the speaker's speech emotionally charged? Or was it neutral? Do you remember the content? 

The reason I'm asking you these questions is because according to Annett Schirmer and colleagues from the National University of Singapore, emotion helps us recognize words quicker and more accurately straight away. In the longer term, however, we do not remember emotionally intoned speech as accurately as neutral speech. When we do remember the words, they have acquired an emotional value; for example words spoken in a sad voice are remembered as more negative than words spoken in a neutral voice.

In anger, sadness, exhilaration or fear, speech takes on an urgency that is lacking from its normal even-tempered form. It becomes louder or softer, more hurried or delayed, more melodic, erratic or monotonous. And this emotional speech immediately captures a listener's attention. Schirmer and colleagues' work looks at whether emotion has a lasting effect on word memory.

A total of 48 men and 48 women listened to sadly and neutrally spoken words and were later shown these words in a visual test, examining word recognition and attitudes to these words. The authors also measured brain activity to look for evidence of vocal emotional coding.

Their analyses showed that participants recognized words better when they had previously heard them in the neutral tone compared with the sad tone. In addition, words were remembered more negatively if they had previously been heard in a sad voice.

The researchers also looked at gender differences in word processing. They found that women were more sensitive to the emotional elements than men, and were more likely than men to recall the emotion of the speaker's voice. Current levels of the female sex hormone estrogen predicted these differences.

"Emotional voices produce changes in long-term memory, as well as capturing the listener's attention," Schirmer said. "They influence how easily spoken words are later recognized and what emotions are assigned to them. Thus voices, like other emotional signals, affect listeners beyond the immediate present."

The study, looking at the role of emotion in word recognition memory, is published online in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience.

If you're a speaker, do you strive to present as neutrally as possible? Would you prefer people to remember you for your emotionally charged speech or your content? How can you achieve both? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. 

One of the most interesting books I read this year was Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive by Robert B. Gialdini, Noah J. Goldstein and Steve J. Martin. As someone who consistently meets walls when trying to pitch my ideas, I found the book helpful because it offered (new to me) ways to get someone to fully listen to you or get on your side. The 50 mini narratives are based in science and psychology, and they all fall into one of six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking and consensus. 

If you haven't read the book and you'd like to know more about how to be persuasive, watch the video below from Influence at Work. And please let us know in the comments if you've used any of these strategies successfully in your personal or professional lives.

Hands-on learning and delegate-led sessions are much discussed in our industry when it comes to figuring how best to structure a meeting. We know that education from these types of sessions sticks more with attendees after the session is over, but what we don't know is why. Why is self-directed learning more beneficial to participants?

In an article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, researchers Todd Gureckis and Douglas Markant of New York University address this gap in understanding by examining the issue of self-directed learning from a cognitive and a computational perspective.

Gureckis and Markant say that cognitive research offers many explanations that support the advantages of self-directed learning. For example, self-directed learning helps us optimize our educational experience, allowing us to focus effort on useful information that we don’t already possess and exposing us to information that we don’t have access to through passive observation. The active nature of self-directed learning also helps us in encoding information and retaining it over time.

But we’re not always optimal self-directed learners. The many cognitive biases and heuristics that we rely on to help us make decisions can also influence what information we pay attention to and, ultimately, learn.

Gureckis and Markant note that computational models commonly used in machine learning research can provide a framework for studying how people evaluate different sources of information and decide about the information they seek out and attend to. Work in machine learning can also help identify the benefits—and weaknesses—of independent exploration and the situations in which such exploration will confer the greatest benefit for learners.

Drawing together research from cognitive and computational perspectives will provide researchers with a better understanding of the processes that underlie self-directed learning and can help bridge the gap between basic cognitive research and applied educational research. Gureckis and Markant hope that this integration will help researchers to develop assistive training methods that can be used to tailor learning experiences that account for the specific demands of the situation and characteristics of the individual learner.

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)

New experiments in group decision making show that having a seat at the table is very different than having a voice.

Scholars at Brigham Young University (BYU) and Princeton examined whether women speak less than men when a group collaborates to solve a problem. In most groups that they studied, the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation – amounting to less than 75 percent of the time that men spoke.

“Women have something unique and important to add to the group, and that’s being lost at least under some circumstances,” said Chris Karpowitz, the lead study author and a political scientist at BYU.

There is an exception to this rule of gender participation, however. The time inequality disappeared when researchers instructed participants to decide by a unanimous vote instead of majority rule.

Results showed that the consensus-building approach was particularly empowering for women who were outnumbered by men in their group. Study co-author Tali Mendelberg of Princeton says these findings apply to many different settings.

“In school boards, governing boards of organizations and firms, and legislative committees, women are often a minority of members and the group uses majority rule to make its decisions,” Mendelberg said. “These settings will produce a dramatic inequality in women’s floor time and in many other ways. Women are less likely to be viewed and to view themselves as influential in the group and to feel that their ‘voice is heard.’”

For their experiments, Karpowitz and Mendelberg recruited people to be part of a group and discuss the best way to distribute money they earned together from a hypothetical task. In all, the researchers observed 94 groups of at least five people.

On average, groups deliberated for 25 minutes before settling the matter. Participants voted by secret ballot, but half of the groups followed majority rule while the other half decided only with a unanimous vote.

Notably, the groups arrived at different decisions depending on women’s participation – swinging the group’s stance on the level of generosity given to the lowest member of the group.

“When women participated more, they brought unique and helpful perspectives to the issue under discussion,” Karpowitz said. “We’re not just losing the voice of someone who would say the same things as everybody else in the conversation.”

The new study is published in American Political Science Review.

(Story materials from Brigham Young University.)

We make choices every day based on recommendations from friends and family. What about recommendations from strangers?  

In his Ph.D. study at BI Norwegian Business School, Ali Faraji-Rad conducted seven experiments to see whether we are more easily persuaded by people who are similar to us than by people who are dissimilar to us. He looked at what circumstance might make the differences greater.

In all the experiments, participants were asked to imagine that they were going to book a hotel room online and that they were reading a review of the hotel they were considering. Participants were then given a negative review of this hotel, along with a profile of the reviewer. The profiles were designed to create a feeling of similarity or dissimilarity with the participant in the experiment.

“Participants were more influenced by reviewers who were similar to themselves than by reviewers who were dissimilar," Faraji-Rad said. "This difference was greatest when the choice of hotels was based on emotions and not logic."

Half of the participants in the first experiment were asked to use logic in evaluating the hotel, while the others were was asked to base their evaluation on feelings. Those participants who based their evaluation on feelingswere influenced by reviewers similar to themselves.

Similar reviewers had no influence on participants who chose their hotel room on the basis of common sense and logic.

In the second experiment, half the participants were asked to write down some thoughts on why it is good to use logic when making decisions, while the other half was asked to write about why it is good to use our emotions when making decisions.

In this way, participants were primed to base their choice on logic or emotions.

The second experiment showed the same results as the first one. Participants who used their emotions were influenced, while those who followed their sense of logic were unaffected by reviewers who resembled themselves.

In experiments three and four, Faraji-Rad instructed half of the participants to imagine that they were going away for fun, while the other half thought they would be travelling for work.

Previous studies have shown that we are more likely to use our emotions when we travel for fun than if we have more functional motives (such as a business trip).

Those participants who were thinking of a trip for fun were, as expected, more affected by the similar reviewer than those who were told to imagine a business trip.

One half of the participants in the fifth experiment were asked to evaluate the hotel and imagine that they would be travelling next week, while the others were told they would be going in a year’s time.

Participants who thought they were going next week were more influenced by similar reviewers than those who were to travel in a year’s time. 

“Our choices are more based on emotions when they concern the near future,” Faraji-Rad said.

In the sixth experiment, half the participants were told to imagine they were in a lottery where the chance of winning the hotel package was one to five, while the other half received much longer odds, one to 5,000.

Participants with the best chance of winning were more influenced by the similar reviewer than participants with longer odds.

“With a good chance of winning, we feel that the trip is within reach, and we base our choice more on feelings,” Faraji-Rad said.

In the seventh and final experiment of the Ph.D. study, half the participants had to remember a seven-digit figure while assessing the hotel. The other half only had to remember a two-digit figure.

Earlier research has shown that we are more likely to use our emotions when we have to retain too much information in our memory.

Those participants who had to remember the seven-digit figure were more influenced by the similar reviewer (than by the dissimilar reviewer), even when they envisioned going on a business trip.

When you book something for yourself, do you rely on your emotions or reason?

(Story materials from BI Norwegian Business School.)

People who give positive encouragement and constructive criticism could be wasting their breath according to the latest research from a psychology expert at Queen Mary, University of London.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that when people received either positive or negative feedback about their performance on complex decision-making tasks, it made their decision making worse.

“The kind of task people had to perform was difficult and demanding," said Dr. Magda Osman, the study's author. "So, when people received positive or negative feedback, it overloaded them with too much information and distracted them from making a good decision.

“We found that people’s performance got worse when they had to make sense of the feedback they were given while also performing the main task," Osman continued. “The role of feedback is over emphasized. People typically think that any form of feedback should improve performance in many tasks, and the more frequently it is given, the better performance will be. However, what needs to be considered is how complex the task is in the first place, because this will determine how much feedback will actually interfere with rather than facilitate performance.”

The study involved approximately100 people who were given the task of choosing how best to either predict or control the state of health of a baby, revealing that feedback can play a negative role in a particularly complex decision-making scenario.

However, Osman says this type of finding can be generalized and applied to a variety of other complex situations.

“The introduction of smart energy meters into the home to monitor the amount of energy you’re consuming seems like a nice ‘green’ idea to help you consume less energy, but the complexity of the feedback people receive may not necessarily help them to reduce their energy consumption,” Osman said. “If the energy meter keeps changing and people are unable to track what appliances are on, how could they possibly learn how to lower their energy consumption?

“People are already being bombarded with high levels of complex information with the influx of new technology into our lives and the increasing reliance on information from the smorgasbord of apps we have at our fingertips," Osman continued. "It is bound to take its toll on our ability to make good choices in difficult decision-making situations.”

Osman warns that people in management positions need to be aware of the type of feedback they are providing to their staff.

“We have shown that feedback really doesn’t help people who are making complex decisions," Osman said. "People in management positions need to give their staff more time to analyse and evaluate things in detail when dealing with difficult situations so they can come up with solutions without any distractions in order to get the best out of them.”

Osman added that her findings disagree with Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who writes in his popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow that feedback is good, and is also at odds with the authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein whose book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness was named "Best Book of the Year" by The Economist.

“My work shows that feedback alone is not enough to ensure success in decision making," Osman said. "I may not be popular for my research into the role of feedback in complex decision-making tasks, but I hope it will make some people think twice about whether they could potentially hinder people’s performance with the feedback they provide."

(Story materials from Queen Mary, University of London.)

Call it self-fulfilling prophecy. People who are paranoid about workplace rejection or sabotage can bring it upon themselves, according to University of British Columbia (UBC) research.

The UBC Sauder School of Business study reveals that paranoia about negative gossip or being snubbed leads people to seek out information to confirm their fears, ultimately annoying colleagues and increasing the likelihood they will be rejected or subverted.

“It may be best to ignore impulses that tell you that you’re the victim of office politics,” said lead author and Sauder professor Karl Aquino, whose study was recently published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Aquino explains that it’s natural for people to wonder how others view them, especially when social acceptance in the workplace is often rewarded with power and financial compensation.

“However, our research shows employees should do their best to keep their interactions positive and ignore the negative," Aquino said. "As the expression goes, kill them with kindness.”

In one of the study’s experiments, the researchers discovered that people who more readily interpret interactions with others as negative are also more likely to try to root it out through such means such as eavesdropping or spying.

Another experiment showed that individuals who reported wanting information about unfair treatment within a group were more likely to have angered their group members and be the focus of rejection.

A third experiment measured study participants’ comfort level with a co-worker who is worried about unfair treatment as compared to other types of employees. Rather than be saddled with a worrywart, participants were 3.5 times more likely to choose individuals who demanded feedback on work quality. Participants were 16.5 times more likely to prefer working with others keen to get information on work group dynamics as a whole.

So, stop worrying so much. It's wasted energy, and it annoys your co-workers. Just remember Joseph Heller's famous line from Catch-22: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." People may always be after you. Worrying about it won't stop it.  

(Story materials via the University of British Columbia.) 

We recently published a column by Jackie Mulligan about why downtime is critical for your conference. 

"Many people report their most creative moments come to them when they least expect it, when they just begin drifting off to sleep, when they take a shower or simply ride a bus," Mulligan wrote. "New ideas squeeze into our consciousness when our mind takes a break. This is why downtime rocks."

Another reason downtime rocks is because it reinforces newly learned information. In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

“Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” Dewar said. “Our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.”

In two separate experiments, a total of 33 normally aging adults between the ages of 61 and 87 were told two short stories and told to remember as many details as possible. Immediately afterward, they were asked to describe what happened in the story. Then they were given a 10-minute delay that consisted either of wakeful resting or playing a spot-the-difference game on the computer.

During the wakeful resting portion, participants were asked to just rest quietly with their eyes closed in a darkened room for 10 minutes while the experimenter left to “prepare for the next test.” It didn’t matter what happened while their eyes were closed, only that they were not distracted by anything else and not receiving any new information.

When participants played the spot-the-difference game, they were presented with picture pairs on a screen for 30 seconds each and were instructed to locate two subtle differences in each pair and point to them. The task was chosen because it required attention but, unlike the story, it was nonverbal.

In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later. Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.

Dewar explains that there is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is “just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time.”

We now live in a world where we are bombarded by new information, and it crowds out recently acquired information. The process of consolidating memories takes a little time and the most important things that it needs are peace and quiet.

Remember that the next time you attend or plan a conference. 

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)