Last week I attended Event Camp Twin Cities 2011. The event ran August 25 & 26 at the University of Minnesota’s McNamara Alumni Center and focused on giving event professionals a chance to experience and test out new innovations for meetings and events. I attended face-to-face on Thursday and virtually on Friday. I’ll share some of my thoughts based on those experiences in the weeks to come. For now, head on over to Event Camp’s website for access to video and information from the event.
Today, I’d like to share the results of a chat I had at Event Camp with two representatives from San Diego-based Active Network, an event sponsor: Eric Olson (pictured, right), general manager for Active's events division, and Justin Ramers (pictured, left), director of social media. Both hosted sessions during the two-day event. Olson spoke in a session titled “Technology Mixology: How to Choose the Right Technology Mix for Your Events” while Ramers held a session called “Social Media Measurement and ROI.” Here, they explain Active Network, talk event technology and share what the experience of Event Camp meant to them.
What's Active Network all about?
OLSON: Our mission is to really empower events for all kinds of different things. So we provide technology for a lot of different types of events, really fitting into four categories. One is endurance events, and that’s kind of where we got our start. So, marathons, triathlons, stuff like that. Active.com is the world’s biggest network of people who are doing active stuff. Two, we do community activities. Think about parks and rec activities, everything like that. And then we do outdoors activities, so we have the largest campground registration site, Reserve America. So if you ever want to reserve a camp spot in like a state park or something, you’d use us. And then corporate events. We have this unique mix where we provide value to the organizers by providing value to the participants as well as technology for the organizers so it’s a little bit different from most folks in this space.
Eric, what did you share during your session? What advice do you have for planners?
OLSON: I think the most important thing people can do is to really understand the objectives of the organization and the motivations and preferences of their audiences before they select technology. Because technology is only as good as the user. If you have all this cool technology, but no one adopts it, you are not going to get anything out of it. The other thing, and obviously we are passionate about it, is that there are a lot of cool technology options. It’s important not to get overwhelmed by all of that. I’d rather see people figure out what will be most beneficial to their users and the technology that’s best going to support their goals and just do that one thing really well. And see how that goes and where it adds value and then go up from there. Just implement something. If you implement one new thing a year that puts you in a good place.
RAMERS: And the same thing goes for my side, which is more the social media realm. Make sure it’s something the user is familiar with and comfortable with using on a regular basis and focus on one at a time.
What are some misconceptions you hear from planners?
OLSON: I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have is that ‘build it and they will come' kind of mentality. And that’s not true. Just because you have a community for your event, doesn’t mean people are going to use it. I have been to a lot of events that have a community with 10 percent adoption, which doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s also about having this integrated technology platform so that when I am registering for the event, I am registering for that community at the same time. I’m then encouraged to go into that community and start interacting. It becomes this build process, instead of like, I’ve got a live event here, I’ve got a community here, I’ve got a virtual thing going on over here and none of those things connect. You’ve got to look at it from the perspective of an attendee journey and match your technology to that journey so that as an attendee it’s a natural progression. One of the things that I talked about in my session that we see a lot is there’s some anxiety around new technologies from attendees. I think you’ve seen it here today with some of the gaming stuff. There was a woman on our team who was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I’m not even on Facebook or Twitter.’ So it created stress for her. And that counteracts some of the stuff you are trying to do with the event. And so in selecting your technology, it’s about how do you take down those barriers and reduce those friction points so that people feel comfortable using it and it becomes a natural part of the event.
RAMERS: The community angle is really interesting to me, because as we all know budgets are drying up and cutbacks are happening and what that’s resulting in is less people going to conferences and going to events and so we are seeing out of that necessity a lot of great tools evolved to create virtual events and we are seeing here with virtual attendance. Well that’s fine and good from the educational tracks, but what are you missing? You are missing that networking, and that’s a big part of why you go to a conference. If you are virtual, you go online either in your room or in a pod. How do you connect with other individuals that may be in a totally different city or somewhere across the world? The ability to build that community around the event in both on site and in a virtual manner is going to be vital to continued success of an event that is going to become not just in a single location.
Where should planners start the process?
OLSON: Being clear about the problem statement right up front. Too often people come to me and say, ‘I want to add mobile to my event, what should I do?’ It’s like, well: why? What are you trying to accomplish? What problem are you trying to solve? So you have to be really explicit about what your problem statement is to determine what technology you need to solve that problem.
Justin, what are you hoping to share in your session about the ROI of social media?
RAMERS: That followers are important and the fans are important as long as you know why they are important. It’s not just a numbers game and 'I have more than you.' But when I can tie business results to actions that occur on social media and then work back so I can actually know that as a result of something that was tweeted I had another person come to my website, who checked out and filled out a form about interest, who then followed up with a phone call, who then ended up purchasing something or attending an event which I know is actually worth a hard dollar value to me. It’s different for every business. First step is to understand what metrics are meaningful to you as a business. Even before social media a lot of companies haven’t really gone through that exercise.
What’s your takeaway from ECTC?
OLSON: For me it’s seeing [the technology used] in place in this throw everything and the kitchen sink at the event and see what happens environment. So seeing, for instance, the frustration over gaming. I’m a big fan of gaming generally because I think it creates a level of engagement over a concept that you don’t get any other way. But what I realized this morning is that there are some serious implications to it. Where it can, if done poorly, really impact other parts of your event and distract from the other learning objectives at the event. It’s almost more important seeing the stuff that breaks than it is seeing the stuff that works really well because it helps us. As a concept it sounds really good, but maybe we need to rethink what that actually looks like in the wild. I think there are too few people in the event space doing really innovative stuff because it’s hard and if you do something really innovative and push the envelope it can break and your audience can get really pissed and you’ve just wasted an event. In here it makes sense because it’s in front of people who understand. What Sam [Smith]’s doing is cool because he can really push the envelope on this stuff and break stuff. And we can really learn from that and really guide tech strategy. It’ll help us not only to help our clients and make recommendations but it will help us to develop better technology.
RAMERS: The thing I really like about this event is there are a lot of events out there where they try to implement the newest, greatest thing but it’s almost just to show off. It’s not for research purposes, it’s that they want to appear to be the latest and greatest, hip really… But what they are doing here, they are really pushing the envelope but they are watching and they are learning. That’s what I’m getting out of it too, how people are sort of reacting to the different ideas and concepts. You don’t learn this stuff in class. You really have got to get out there and break stuff. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t and then just keep that constant cycle of innovation going.
OLSON: One of the things that I’ve taken away from this, that I’ve thought about before but it’s become really apparent. One of the big challenges of technology for events is going to be that most of the best learnings that people take away from events happen in conversations in the hallway and so, how do we as a technology provider capture that content and share it. How do you facilitate it and how do you capture it and how do you share it. I think that’s really the next challenge of technology. Through meeting design and technology there’s got to be a way to facilitate and capture and share those types of conversations.
RAMERS: Isn’t the saying the best session at the conference is the one you missed because you were talking to someone else.
--Ellie M. Bayrd
Associate Editor
[Photo by Ellie]
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