"The Ideas-Conference Boom"

New York magazine landed in my mailbox this week, with a story, "Those Fabulous Confabs," that comes straight from the heart of the meetings industry. It's a gossipy look at the growth and evolution of the TED conference, and dozens of similar conferences, like PopTech and the Aspen Ideas Festival, that have sprung up in its wake.

Audience at TedGlobal 2010

The story covers some of the same ground I did in a story last year, although I was more starry-eyed about the trend. And if you were at 2012 Convening Leaders in San Diego, there's a good chance you already know what TED's founder, Richard Saul Wurman, who is quoted in the article, has to say about conferences. (Or you can read Executive Editor Chris Durso's interview with Wurman.)

The story asks a question about the new conferences which nagged at me:  "Are we running out of things to say?" I'm not sure if editors were just trying to be provocative, but the notion that a few dozen or even few hundred conferences could scratch the surface of what there is to say about sustainability, creativity, or solving global problems, just for starters, is one I can't take seriously. Organizers' judgment about who and what is worth hearing may fail, or we may be running out of time to listen to all those ideas, but those are different problems.

What I also found interesting was the short shrift the article gives to attendees. Other than an elite group of speakers and A-listers, ideas-conference attendees are painted as a pathetic and grasping lot. (The story begins with an anecdote about an attempted mugging of a TED conference attendee for his badge.)

The article recounts the value that speakers get from the connections they make from such conferences, and it seems likely to me that attendees —who mostly don't have a voice in the story — could tell similar stories. The conferences aren't proliferating simply because they offer content that, in many cases, is available on the Web. Attendees go for the opportunity to connect, and I don't think they are so clueless they would continue to attend if there wasn't something to be gained.

I would love to hear what you think.

Bringing Back Starbucks

It's a rare CEO who doesn't acknowledge the critical role that  events can play in creating a shared vision for a company.

But maybe even rarer is the CEO who not only acknowledges the key role of events, but dives into their details, from the psychology of site selection down to the messages sent by the materials used in the exhibit hall.

But that's exactly what Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, does in his book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, as he describes the pivotal role that the Starbucks 2008 North America Leadership Conference played in reviving the then-faltering Starbucks brand.

New Orleans plays a co-starring role in the narrative about the conference, where, Schultz writes, "at this tenuous juncture, our partners needed to connect with me, with other Starbucks leaders, and with ones another, not online, but in New Orleans."

There was the local coffee culture, but also the city's ongoing battle to recover from the effects of Katrina. "At that time, no other U.S. city's experience seemed like such a natural extension of our values as well as our crucible," he writes.

I'll stop there, because Schultz's story about the conference is so well-told, you should read it yourself.  And you can, in this excerpt from the book in the July issue of Convene. 

Everybody Comes to Washington, D.C.

My wife and I had dinner with two sets of friends this past weekend -- one on Saturday night, another last night -- and in both cases, someone was in town for a conference. It's a nice benefit of living in a premier meeting destination: Sooner or later, everybody comes to Washington, D.C. And, despite D.C.'s reputation as a one-industry town, no two people seem to come here for the same thing. One of our friends is a law student in Arizona interested in a career in animal rights, and she was here for the Humane Society of the United States' Taking Action for Animals conference at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Another friend is a U.S. Navy officer serving a one-year posting in Baghdad who was here for a senior-level conference on Iraq at National Defense University.

You know what they say: The next best thing to going to an interesting meeting is having dinner with someone who went to an interesting meeting. Or two people who went to two interesting meetings.

Tech10, Take Two

ASAE has just announced that its 2010 Technology Conference & Expo (Tech10) -- which was snowed out in February -- has been rescheduled for Dec. 13-15 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Based on feedback from the association technology community after the original Tech10 was canceled, ASAE decided to move the event "from the January/February timeframe to a November/December timeframe."

One positive aspect of the first Tech10's cancelation: It gave rise, immediately and spontaneously, to UnTech10. Read all about it in our April issue: digital version here, registration required; text-only version here.

Reflections on the Nuclear Summit

The Nuclear Security Summit has just wrapped up, and it was interesting to see how this extremely high-profile, two-day international conference was treated here in the Washington, D.C., area. On the one hand, obviously, it was a story with global relevance -- a historic gathering of world leaders convened by President Obama himself -- and it was covered as such by, for example, The Washington Post. But it was also a big local story, mostly because of its impact on traffic, thanks to the cordoning off of streets around the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the diverting of more than a dozen bus lines, and the closing of a key Metro station downtown.

Living through this dichotomy -- massive universal import, mundane local inconvenience -- has made me think about the meetings professionals who work backstage at events like this. Is it any different putting together something like the Nuclear Security Summit than, say, an annual trade show for the construction industry? Do the potentially world-changing implications lend it an emotional resonance that's lacking from an everyday convention? Might there even be something like stage fright involved, given all the heads of state walking around and the relentless scrutiny of the international media? Or is a meeting pretty much always a meeting? The sum total of the planning and organization that goes into it?

PHOTO: Chuck Kennedy / The White House

Convene On Site: DigitalNow

(The above is from DigitalNow's opening general session on Thursday morning.)

Yesterday afternoon, on the first day of DigitalNow 2010 ("Association Leadership in the Digital Age"), I sat down for an interview with Don Dea, co-founder of the meeting design and production group Fusion Productions — which, along with the Disney Institute, "a recognized leader in experiential training for business professionals," created and continues to produce the conference, now in its 10th year. This year, as in every year since its creation, DigitalNow is being hosted by Disney, at its Contemporary Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida (a.k.a., just down the road from the Magic Kingdom).

I kicked off my interview with Don by asking him whether he felt that DigitalNow had stayed true to the mission that its founders set for it a decade ago. His reply ranged widely, touching on how in the late 1990s associations reacted to the dot com boom (and subsequent bust); how they have matured in the years since; and why DigitalNow is committed to remaining relatively small. I asked Don several more questions — which may possibly appear in a future print edition of Convene — but I thought it might be good to post his answer to my first question here:

Right from the beginning, the critical tenets that both George [Aguel, Senior Vice President of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts] and Hugh [Lee, President of Fusion Productions] articulated I think focused around leadership, focused around management issues, in the context of a digital world. So, from a content perspective, I think that that piece has gotten crystallized. I mean, we talked about it at that time, but what does it really mean?

You know, I think that we’ve been able to really bring that piece to life, I think very clearly over time, and we’ve gotten better and raised the bar on understanding. I think initially, because you also have context at that time — 1999, 2000 — you still had the dot com piece, so there was clearly a very different sense of urgency. You know, people had a very ... there was that piece of fear and uncertainty. You had very clear external variables that people could kind of hang their hat around. So people kind of said, “Hey, there are these people who are out there" — WebMD was coming in, people didn’t know what these things were going to do. All they knew was that people were approaching them and saying either you play with me or you don’t.

And then at the same time, there had been enough traction out there where people saw where the carcasses were. Because at that time, you know, while the dot com period was going up there, clearly people were running out of cash, and then all of a sudden the stories started coming out. “Well, we didn’t know, we gave them our data and they went belly up and now it’s in receivership, it’s in bankruptcy, we can’t get our information, etc., etc.” So I think at that time it was very clear, there was a mandate about, well, “How do we think through that?” I think over time, as we’ve kind of — as the external world kind of continued to evolve and we went through the dot com period, people kind of said, “Whew!” So I think we’ve gone through various cycles, but I think [DigitalNow’s core principles] have always been very clear: focused on leadership, focused on management, in the context of a digital world.

And while that period of time has gone on, you also have not only the external world, you have associations becoming more mature. You have a whole new generation — because there were a lot of people who didn’t know how to talk the vocabulary, things like that. So now all of a sudden you get another generation of people, and both boards [of directors] are getting a little smarter, the staffs are getting a little bit smarter, so now they are experimenting with more and more things. So the content focus, I think, over time has continued to evolve, but I think the basic tenets of it are there.

The other basic elements we talk about, in terms of the conference, the scope of the conference, I think they were very structural pieces that have really stayed very true. There have been times when there’s been pressure to really expand the base, and every time we do that we do get a pushback from people saying, “Well, we’ll lose the personal-ness about the community; we’ll lose the ability to reach out and talk and have that intimate atmosphere — to be able to respond. I mean, we do a lot of things here ... You know, when we do meetings other places, for other organizations, and, you know, other organizations have different kinds of attitudes in terms of how they manage expectations, how they respond, levels of service ... and that’s fine.

[DigitalNow] is really around the notion of being responsive to the community. And that takes a different aura, and we’re very fortunate that Disney has the same set of shared values around content and being very focused to be able to be responsive ... and also live within some of the basic parameters. Because, for many people, Disney and ourselves, it would be probably helpful, certainly financially, to have a broader mix of folks in the equation. But then you start getting into situations where it becomes, you know, many, many more concurrent workshops; you have much larger groups for people to manage. Our advisory group has kind of served to be that soul or conscience behind us.

And it’s not just the advisory group: We do walk around and ask and get people’s feedback. And you know it’s always hard. Because we live in a world where — particularly with those kinds of answers — it’s around a business model, it’s around what delivers value out there. And I think very consistently we would get a sense ... I think we have enough acumen to be reflective and say, “Yeah, if we could only push it up a few, little bit more, and tweak it” — but we just have found that we need to be true to the commitment of what this thing was built around. So the size, the community I think has always been focused around maintaining the community and maintaining the level of responsiveness. I think really the critical tenets [are] the content, and then the community, and then the other pieces are ... they are important components, but I think those are really the critical things and those things have remained true.

SXSW: Top Ten (Slightly Heretical) Networking Tips

Don't bury your face in your iPhone.

Don't be too cool to carry business cards.

Don't be too quick to ask someone to be your Facebook friend.

Speaker Thom Singer offered these and seven other tips for networking at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2010 that make for good advice for attendees at any conference.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

The other night my wife and I attended a PTA fundraiser for our older daughter's elementary school, and during the course of things I got to talking to the father of one of our daughter's best friends. He's a fifth-grade teacher in our school system with a passion for math and science who runs an after-school Lego robotics club, and who has been teaching long enough that his first class of students is graduating high school this year. One of them, he said, recently visited her old grade school and told him that he was her favorite teacher and that thanks to him she was planning on studying physics or chemistry in college. Part of what she remembered so fondly was the Lego robotics club.

How did my daughter's friend's father come to start a Lego robotics club in the first place? He'd always been interested in robotics, but it was only a few years ago that he heard about a robotics-in-education conference. His principal scraped together the money for him to attend, and while he was there he met everyone from fellow elementary-school teachers to master's-level professors -- all working on the educational applications of robotics. When he got back to his school, he asked his PTA to fund a club. And that was that.

My point is this: Never doubt that what you do makes a difference. People get introduced to other people, and learn new ideas, and become inspired to do things that change other people's lives -- all at your meetings. What's better than that?

Lessons from 'Lost'

Jimmy Wales wasn’t at the 2010 Media Summit in NYC this week to talk about Wikipedia, the giant, user-created encyclopedia he created nearly a decade ago. Instead Wales – joined by Internet all-stars including Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr – talked about another massive, user-generated encyclopedia, the Web site Lostpedia, and what it says about the future.

Lostpedia was created for fans of the television show “Lost,” launched in 2005 by a fan and now owned by Wales’ company Wikia. It holds (as of last month) a whopping 5,795 separate articles related to the show’s themes, cliff-hanging plot twists, characters, and digital page after digital page of “Lost” miscellanea.

The site’s popularity is a sign of the influence that user-based communities can wield on producers of content – in response, the show’s creators began to layer in more and more mysteries for online commenters to unpack.

And interestingly, pointed out panelist David Jacobs, vice president at the blogging company Six Apart, the Internet community has contributed to fans being more likely to watch the show on television when it is first aired, rather than later on DVD or by streaming. Fans don’t want to risk being left out of the online conversation, or, for that matter, of conversations at work the next day. (At Six Apart, the show is so popular the workaholic staff schedules time to discuss “Lost” on the group calendar, Jacobs said.)

It’s a lesson that conference organizers are learning: If you make your content compelling enough, online communities will not only not replace your meeting, but will dramatically increase the appetite for it.

They Had Me At the Blue-Fur Hats ...

On March 5, four of five volunteer organizers of last month’s groundbreaking Event Camp NYC will give a behind-the-scenes look at how they pulled it off, in the free PCMA webinar, “Engaging Attendees Today: How to Combine Virtual and Face-To-Face Meetings,” at noon CST. (PCMA was an event sponsor.) If you missed the event, or the online conversation about it, it was a smashing success, from start to finish. (The “unconference” was born on Twitter; co-organizer Mike McCurry tells the story here.) The 70+ participants were engaged right off the bat, in a kind of communal state of flow which lasted all day. And its extensive virtual audience was no clumsy add-on, but incorporated as a seamless part of the conversation.

I was lucky enough to be there in person and two things stood out for me. One was the attention that organizers gave to providing relevant content to attendees. The schedule was created with online input from registrants, and was adjusted throughout the day, according to attendee interest. That kind of active listening also permeated the way that speakers and moderators related to the audience. You could just see that they cared.

And, two, in their efforts to create a truly innovative event, they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They kept track of the basics, like breaking the ice and paying attention to pacing. By an online vote, attendees decreed that the conference should begin with the founders wearing blue-fur, horned hats, copies of the one that Fred Flintstone wore on lodge night (Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge 26). It made everyone laugh and relax, and organizers hauled them out again to close out the day. By wearing the hats, organizers made themselves a little goofy and very likeable — and instantly created a shared group experience.

The registration fee was very low – only $75 — and I wasn’t expecting entertainment at lunch, much less the excellence of The Three Waiters, a trio of comic opera singers. We happily would have blazed through lunch talking about events and social media, but the music gave our brains a chance to cruise along a different track. The whole day was like that – filled with surprises as well as structure.

If I had a blue-fur, horned hat, it would be off to the organizers. Don’t miss the webinar, on Friday, March 5.