Social Networks Around Events

Good conferences have always been as much about the networking opportunities as they are a chance to listen to expert speakers. So it's no surprise to find a number of technology vendors popping up with social platforms pitched at supporting conferences and business events. Those platforms tend to be good for introducing attendees and stimulating basic networking, but most are fairly lightweight when it comes to any kind of meaningful collaboration and customization.

Quite often sites built on these technologies tend to be transitory. That's not surprising because conferences are by their nature point-in-time events. Once the event is over, the site loses relevancy and quickly becomes stale and dead.

Back To Basics

It's easy to get carried away in the social media hype and forget what the purpose of introducing these tools should be all about: it isn't just to connect to an audience, it's about creating and sustaining a relationship with them over time for some mutually valued purpose.

In my opinion, that objective of building a sustained relationship must apply to social networks created to support a conference if they are to maximize the value deliver to members. It's just a matter of perspective. The event itself is just one way in which your organization reaches out to customers or partners. They are part of a continuous effort to engage, add value and build a better relationship with your target audience. So while a single conference might only last for a short time, the more valuable application of social networking technology is to cultivate a site in which there exists an ongoing continuum of events and reasons for engagement.

Individual communities built around a conference or event can then either grow and morph into wider interest groups (i.e. a community of interest), or remain accessible for search and use at future events. But the point is, they form just a little portion of the wider site in which the individuals can continue to engage with each other. You might want to engage the audience for insight and research, or to have them participate at other events you're hosting. What is important is that the first conference can be a catalyst for ongoing engagement and useful collaboration.

Doing It On Sixent

With that in mind, building a social network for your conference on a fully featured social networking site (like Sixent) makes a lot of sense. We've recently implemented one for the American Marketing Association to support two large conferences they've hosted: Marketing Research Conference 2009 (#amamrc); and Symposium For The Marketing of Higher Education 2009 (#amahighered)

These conference social networks co-exist in the same Sixent site, tied together by the consistent AMA branding that appears in the site navigation menu. They are really just separate Groups, and as such can have:

- completely different visual styling
- separate memberships
- different administrators, permission structures and visibility
- different tools activated for members to use
- private areas designated for admin / conference coordinator use only

Because Sixent has multiple profiles, it's even possible for members to create a different profile for each conference. Alternatively, they can create a "Conference" profile and share that with groups built for these events (that's just what we did with the AMA).

We built a schedule for each conference, and linked both the individual keynote speakers and daily activities to separate pages in either group. And because Twitter is huge at these events, a twitter search pod was used to create a real-time feed based on the conference hashtags.

The really nice thing about Twitter Pods is that even without a lot of content in the social network, the stream creates an impression of activity. That's important because, to use an metaphor, very few of us like to be the first on to an empty dance floor. Overcoming that "empty community" inertia is vital to stimulating member participation. The downside to Twitter is that posts don't survive for ever on Twitter's servers (but you can always create a Google Search pod).

The recent introduction of a Discussion tool to Sixent enabled us to create discussion rooms for each day of the conferences. We allowed members to post photos, comments, blogs and discussion topics to the sites to create some buzz. And with a bit of manipulation, we fired up the video player in the Groups to post video testimonials from attendees.

The Benefits

With both conference groups in the same site, it is now possible for the AMA members of one conference to connect with a wider group of people, find content from other conferences that might interest them and, potentially, discover a reason to attend a conference they previously weren't aware of. Each group also serves as a great promotional vehicle for the AMA when advertising these conferences in 2010.

Most importantly, the Sixent site provides a single environment for the AMA to securely reach out and talk to all their conference attendees without having to build and maintain expensive in-house databases. At the same time the Group Admin tools can be used to communicate with members of just one or the other conference and follow-up conference materials can be posted to the site, hopefully stimulating further interaction with (and between) attendees.

For future conferences, we are going to explore the potential of creating sub-pages within a Group for each of the conference sponsors as way of further enhancing the value delivered to both the sponsors, and the attendees.