It should have been the perfect keynote. The conference, SXSW 2008, was one of the most eagerly anticipated events of the year for both the technology and music industry; the interviewer, Sarah Lacy, is a well-respected and photogenic blogger and journalist; and the interviewee, Mark Zuckerberg, is the founder, CEO and president of the wildly popular social networking application Facebook. A perfect combination to set the tone for the entire nine-day event.
So why was the crowd getting restless? Why were people starting to boo the questions? Did someone really just shout, “Ask something interesting!?” How could something so good have gone so horribly awry?
After almost an hour of sparring with both Zuckerberg and her audience, Lacy finally demanded, “Someone send me a message afterward about exactly why I [performed so poorly].” The answer, shouted from the back, yielded a roar from the audience and a shiver from old-school event organizers.
“Check Twitter!”
Tweet-Tweet
Twitter, an Internet service that allows people to send 140-character-maximum messages to whoever wants to listen, was a huge driver in audience reaction to the SXSW 2008 keynote and has been making its mark felt on events ever since.
The reason Twitter was able to have an impact is that it allowed the audience to have a conversation with itself during the interview. Audience members who otherwise would have sat quietly with their dissatisfaction were broadcasting messages and realizing they weren’t alone in their discontent. Instead, the echo chamber of the “Twitterverse,” as the collection of messages being sent within the service is known, was creating a resonance of revolt that bubbled out of cyberspace and into the vast conference hall.
Online social networking services aren’t just impacting events during the event itself, either. Conversations about the quality and content of events is happening prior to and after events on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. On the Pathable site for the New Media Expo, a 16-message thread unfolded in the weeks after the event entitled “Next year anywhere but Vegas.”
Resistance Is Futile
What’s a responsible meeting planner to do? Ban Twitter? Censor Facebook? Attack LinkedIn? Admonitions regarding spit and the wind come to mind.
Facing the inevitability of audience use of online social networking services, meeting planners must learn to channel the conversations so they can be helpful and healthy to the event as a whole. Here are some basic steps you can take:
- Define your arena: Events will often have a short set of characters, known as a “hash tag,” that can be used to mark Twitter messages (“tweets”) as relevant (e.g., “#SWSW08”). They’re known as hash tags due to the convention of preceding them with a hash mark (“#”). If you tell your audience members what hash tag to use, you can then easily monitor all the activity relevant to your event with a service like Twitscoop.
- Be responsive: When you see a Twitter message, blog post or forum post that’s negative, reach out to the sender and see if you can make them happy. It’s amazing how positively people react to positive feedback. For example, when I saw this Tweet come across for an event we were serving recently:
Ok, so Pathable kinda sucks when trying to search for attendees. But I’m not sure if that’s because #rubyconf is over
I wrote the sender a short note apologizing for the problems he was having and asking for clarification so I could get it cleared up. Later that day, I saw this Tweet come across:
@hreview Pathable; I twittered complaining about search, and the CEO sent a hand written email to help troubleshoot. Very very cool *****
Revolt averted! Attendee adoration earned!
- Be proactive: You know your attendees are going to have conversations. Either create a social network for them or go to the network they’re already using. Post updates and ask questions. Want to know what keynote speaker your attendees really want to hear from? What they thought of the venue? What their favorite style of music is? Ask them! The old adage that people like to talk about themselves didn’t become any less true when the Internet appeared.
The truth is, the basic rules of social interaction haven’t changed that much, just the venues in which they’re unfolding. In his timeless book The Art of War, the philosopher Sun-Tzu wrote, “Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.” The Internet and social networking services aren’t your enemy, but the principle is the same: Powerful forces are better addressed head on than ignored.
And the Internet is a very powerful force.
