Can virtual connections help pave the way to the mind-blowing corridor experiences that will make face-to-face meetings superior?
There is a company here in Leeds (26 Digital) that created an app called iHobo for a homeless charity, Depaul UK, some years back. People would carry a virtual homeless person on their smartphone for three days, and this virtual homeless person would require food, money and shelter at all sorts of inconvenient moments. The idea was to engage people in understanding the complexity of the homeless problem but also to raise funds for the charity. In a YouTube clip, one of the final signs held up by one of the app users describes the relationship with iHobo: "when they’re virtual, it’s real." This phrase has stuck in my mind.
In the future of meetings (FOM) study, many experts identified virtual connections as very far from a threat to real-life meetings. In fact, the majority shared the view that online connections presented quite an opportunity. In the FOM LinkedIn group, I have considered how good it would be to meet these connections in real-time after so many lively online discussions. I must be on trend. As according to the FOM study, the desire to make online connections real will be a future meetings driver.
Trendr, based in Canada, is one of the first movers in the virtual-to-real-world connections that can be made through social networks. The company jumped on the opportunity to transform online connections into real-time meetings—their tagline is "The simplest way for professionals
to meet face to face."
Peter Davison, co-founder of Trendr, says the idea came from the founder, Michael Beddows, who, when he moved to New York City, began to see important people that would have an impact on his professional life were in close proximity to where he was on an almost daily basis. He investigated how to leverage LinkedIn and GPS functionality, and the result was Trendr. The app means business professionals are able to connect with each other across the cities they live in or travel to. For example, Trendr has the functionality to have two professionals meet at a cafe using the venue selection engine if they happen to be near each other. They are not the only company to be seeing opportunities in social media for initiating meetings.
SeatID Travel is an application being offered to airlines that promises to "socialize the online ticket purchase process and allows airline passengers to choose a flight and a seatmate based on their social network profiles." Could your attendees start their conversations on the way to your meetings through software like this?
The Trendr team has already seen the opportunities within events and meeting spaces to leverage benefits for attendees. Davison explains, "We just got back from CrossmediaTO
2013. We had people using Trendr to meet with each other and did a test drive of our Trendr Meeting Zone services. We worked with the event team to ensure that there were calls to action and networking times available for all."
For Davison the technology will speed up our abilities to connect in real time and will enhance those connections, particularly through meetings.
"We can help solve that key pain point that is being talked about, written about and showing up on survey cards—participant experience. Trendr will have participants walking away from conferences with valuable and meaningful exchanges."
As well as highlighting new entrants into the meeting business, the company demonstrates the opportunities that virtual connections can provide to conferences to enhance the benefits and richness of networking. In the future of meetings research, Jesse Schell, author of the Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, believed that more effective networking can and will be achieved through technology."There are opportunities to have smartphone systems to connect with other people at the conference somewhat more efficiently than we do now. Right now you kind of drift around, you plan ahead to some extent, and then you drift around and you kind of bump into people, but I know there are some companies that have started to create products that help you find people you’re looking for at conferences and I think that sort of thing is going to start to grow."
The importance of networking at conferences face-to-face is a critical factor and one that Dr. Graeme Codrington, in the white paper series "From the Outside In," believed could not be ignored. Recognizing the pressure within the sector to do something that cannot be digitized, he explains, "The default setting is for meeting planners to say ’yes, it’s the corridor meetings that are the most important,’ which is nonsense. If the corridors are the real value, then put effort into that. If the rest is necessary in order to have a corridor experience, at least build something into the corridor experience. We need to create the most mind-blowing corridor experience!"
Perhaps these new moves to make more of our virtual connections can help pave the way to the mind-blowing corridor experience that will make face-to-face meetings superior?
It offers a good starting point for us all to consider from our own business perspectives if we really are doing enough to help our attendees use our meetings to make their virtual connections real. TMP
