Noted meetings industry technologist Jeff Rasco admits that he has not fully embraced it. Industry hall of famer Joan Eisenstodt is overwhelmed by it. Pharma conference planner Courtney Richman calls it a labor of love. Prominent hospitality educator Patti Shock warns that to ignore it will render you obsolete.
No matter what you think of it today, social networking is relentlessly wedging its way into our professional and personal lives.
How Did We Get Here?
It could be argued that online community within the meetings industry started about 10 years ago with MIM, the Meetings Industry Mall. In a press release from May 8, 2001, MIM v2.0 was described as a “member-centric Web portal [where] the community members [users] input much of the content for features including the MIMcalendar, MIMnews, MIMjobs and MIM photo gallery of members.” There was also a place for mentors to publish words of wisdom. (Today we call this a blog.)
Even as MIM attracted attention, and encouraged user-generated content (UGC), it eventually failed for lack of a decent revenue model and absence of engaged participants. When the Web version morphed into the MIMlist, an e-mail discussion group, most of the 4,000 users were inactive, or “lurkers” at best.
While various forms of interactive online communities for the meetings industry have cropped up since then, most have experienced that brilliant flash of growth and buzz, but then either failed or became something on your favorites list that you never click on. Why? No sustainable revenue and lack of critical mass.
It’s the Law
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, stated that Utility=Users2. Simply put, Metcalfe’s Law states that the more people use a connected network the more useful it becomes. We have seen this come true time and time again, going back from mobile computing to the Web, e-mail, faxing, telephone, telegraph, the pony express and carrier pigeons.
But the corollary states that as you lose users, the value of your network decreases exponentially. When was the last time you sent a message by bird, or wired a telegraph?
If you combine these two halves of the equation, over time you have a shark fin graph, which describes rapid adoption to critical mass, and eventual attrition and extinction. As technology evolves and changes, the new replaces the old, especially where there is a lack of a healthy and renewable stream of revenue. This is why some things die out altogether, like the Palm Pilot, while others, like Google Search and AdWords, continue to evolve and thrive.
Critical Mass
Previous technologies have laid a foundation and then stepped aside for the latest entry into our must-have communications repertoire, social media. As of November 2008, My-Space had 250 million users, followed by Facebook with 124 million, Linkedin with 30 million and Plaxo with 15 million. I think we can agree that we are approaching the critical mass.
It does not take too long to become savvy and establish a presence within multiple social networking systems, thus allowing us to be maximally connected while distributing our personal brand through various channels. Widgets, gadgets and gewgaws add to these sites, both extending functionality and delivering threatening viruses to unwary computers.
No matter what, we have the numbers to achieve the ubiquitous state, but without a visible revenue model, can we sustain? Are we headed for a dive down the back side of the curve? As Twitter states on its website, “…our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”
Industry Specific
To create more value and serve up a greater return for our invested time, a new wave of innovators and developers are rolling out alternatives that combine social networking and focused professional support. Pharma Planners Connect, an offshoot of the Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum, has 550 to 600 members who can connect year-round, but the core group is only about 50.
Other sites offer meeting planner reviews of facilities, hoping to gain some of the momentum of proven collective collaboration sites like TripAdvisor, Amazon and Best Buy. Meeting Universe (www.meetinguniverse.com), Meetings Collaborative (http://meetingscollaborative.com), Meetings Intelligence Exchange (www.meetingsintel.com) and Elite Meetings (www.elitemeetings.com) each have their own style and feature set, but surely lack in a critical mass of users, each of whom must create a profile and take part in the contribution of UGC, a tall order for a time-strapped planner. At this point, none of them appear to have much content, and without the needed lifeblood of a revenue model, I wonder how they will sustain.
In my next column, I’ll write about the latest entry to the social networking melee, www.i-Meet.com.
