Creating “interactive experiences” is essential for live events, be them face-to-face (f2f), virtual) or hybrid (a mix of f2f and virtual). Interactive experiences are one of the reasons that justifies being present,  a way to connect attendees with each other, with the content and with the speakers.

Creating interactive experiences is also an over-hyped expression that’s often brought out to justify mobile technology or other kind of rube-goldbergian mechanism that participants end up by not using (not intuitive enough, too complicated, no real value added, etc). An art installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dubbed “The Obliteration Room” shows how a great interactive experience is created and while this one was aimed to kids, it summarizes some of the key factors to create one (more on that below).

Kusama created a totally white room and provided thousands of colored stickers to kids that over the days placed them wherever they wanted, co-creating the new looks of the place.

Starting point: White Room

Work in progress: kid with colored stickers

Final result: room full of colored freckles

Essential Ingredients for a Great Interactive Experience for Your Event

While working on summarizing the process, I came through with a few things that might seem obvious to you but if you analyze many efforts that are made at conferences they totally miss these points.

(A typical failed experience I see over and over again is one including QR codes as an entry point and expecting people to start interacting with them out of the blue. It fails because of one or more of the following: people don’t know what a QR code is or how to use it, they don’t have a smartphone a QR code reader in it, don’t have internet access or it’s not provided by the event, the experience is dull or not worth interacting with in a third place, because of this they don’t invite other attendees to take part in it).

A great interactive experience should:

1. Be designed for all attendees and not just for a specific group
2. Be easy to use (ability factor)
3. Motivate people to take part of it (motivation)
4. Include a trigger that acts as a call to action for people to take part of it
5. Have results that are memorable (wow factor), that stimulate conversation

BJ Fogg, founder of the Standford Persuasion Lab,  created a Behavior Model framework that combines the simultaneous presence of Motivation, Ability (easiness of use) and a Trigger (call to action) for a given Behavior to happen.

Fogg distilled several successful behavior recipes that can be applied to create such an interactive experience, one of them being Simple, Social, Fun. This formula is behind the success of popular iOS apps like Instagram and can also be applied in a low tech environment.

Consider how Kusama’s installation mentioned above satisfies these three conditions: it’s simple to use (give out a few colored stickers to the kids), it achieves its result by social interaction (several people applying the stickers inside the white room) and it’s fun for the kids to do too. The visual result is amazing (wow factor) and am sure than many of the kinds had it photographed it with their parents mobile phone and shared it with their friends (and other parents too).

What kind of simple, social and fun interactive experience could you create at your next event? (And if you do create or created one, I’d like to know about it! Pleas email me the details)

Photos where taken from Colossal and Courier Mail AU

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a rather abused concept and often it means using tricks and not real value to make your content more findable on search engines, but there are a few things that are smart to increase discoverability (the possibility of your event being found).

The main search engines, including Bing, Google, Yahoo!, have created special html tags –documented by Schema.org– which structure content in a search engine friendly way, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

One of these “schemas” has been specifically design for events, so make sure your webmaster is using it to represent basic info like name of the event, time, location, city, speakers, etc.

Follows the complete transcription of the general Event Schema (you also have more specific ones like Business Event, Education Event and others)

Photo by Alex Drennan on Flickr

This is the first guest-post by Ana Silva, specialist in Enterprise 2.0 and social media, and scholarly on serendipitous matter (more on Ana at the end of the article).
Serendipity, the art of looking for something and ending up finding something else, at times more valuable than the thing you were looking for in the first place, is generally seen as something that happens in our personal lives, as portrayed in Hollywood movies.

Truth is that this interesting concept has been making its way into businesses, especially in the field of innovation (just think of “accidental discoveries” such as post-it notes) and has long been present in the world of the Web with services such as StumbleUpon. In fact, Eric Schmidt calls Google search a “serendipity engine”.

The Power of Pull

The notion that serendipity can be stimulated or facilitated is increasingly cited by authors and futurists such as Ross Dawson or John Hagel. In his latest book, The Power of Pull (Amazon), Hagel stated that “Serendipity can be shaped: We can make choices that will increase our ability to attract people and resources to us that we never knew existed, leading to serendipitous encounters that prove enormously valuable”.

Conferences and other events can be great places for increasing our probability of engaging into serendipitous encounters, with other people and also with new ideas, especially those in emerging arenas that attract a diverse set of participants and speakers.

While the participants should attend with a proactive mindset towards serendipitous happenings (it’s for their own benefit after all), it’s the organizer’s duty to design a conference experience that increases the possibility of serendipity happening.

Ideas for event organizers

• Strive for diversity in speakers: invite diversified speakers, offering different perspectives or experiences on a given topic (this can be of course easier for more broad events than very theme-focused conferences). E.g.: if your event caters to the academic world or a specific industry, invite non-academic speakers or people working in other fields/industries that can provide a radically different point of view, spark new ideas and collaborations or just enrich the content being shared at the conference

• Curate your audience: try as much as possible to appeal to a diverse crowd of attendees (don’t confuse this with trying to appeal to everybody) but also the “right” attendees. More than half of the value that your event will be providing comes from the new connections born during breaks and networking time, though these aren’t just any type of connections. You need participants from different walks of life that can provide useful to each other and be relevant for future collaborations. You should make the effort to have valuable people on and off stage alike

"Good conferences don't have 'same old faces' - Twitter exchange between @elsua (Luis Suarez) and @jobsworth (JP Rangaswami)

• Use Twitter as a serendipity engine: conversations on Twitter before, during and after your event can be a valid channel to connect with other community members (past/present/future participants), so make sure you have an “official” Twitter hashtag and that it’s present in all your communications. Stimulate its use by sharing interesting content (the kind that you would like to read yourself, not [just] marketing yada-yada). Ask questions, involve speakers (many of them are probably on twitter too), get involved in [useful] customer service but also listen to what your community is saying (and act accordingly). During the event provide Internet connection to make it easier for the conversation continue

• Design the physical space to favor encounters: provide coffee areas that are comfortable and attractive for people to hang out, not too spacious, not too small (coffee is a powerful link between people… alcohol too but that might be inconvenient). Create meeting points with appropriate signage for those that need a reference area to find each other. South by Southwest creates a huge “Lego pit”, an area with Lego building blocks, for people to meet each other… and entertain themselves or their kids if they arrive early. [more on the Lego pit here]

• Facilitate introductions: not everyone is a natural born networker. Sometimes having a searchable database of the attendees or suggesting 10 people to meet at the event (matching people by interests, activities, etc) can kickstart encounters. The best introductions though are made by humans. Have your community manager (or someone else from your team that knows the audience quite well) to work as a “Concierge” during the conference. Participants could tell her what kind of fellow attendees they want to meet and the concierge can make the appropriate introductions in situ

• Help break the ice: if the group is small enough consider changing the display of the room and having everyone presenting themselves. If this is not possible, simply imagine some ice breaking exercise that helps put people more at ease

Hug ice breaking moment at Ignite Portugal - Photo by retorta_net on flickr

• Game serendipity: very much in line with the previous point, people love games and this can also help drive serendipity by stimulating interaction. E.g.: At UXLX, each attendee got a deck of cards with interesting info on one particular UX-related personality. There were different cards but everyone got a certain amount of the same one. In order to get the full deck of cards -a sort of souvenir of the event- participants needed to talk to each other to trade their cards, helping break the ice

Card trading at UXLX 2011 [Photo by UXLx in Flickr

• Give serendipity time: plan many session breaks that are long enough for attendees to have time to socialize & meet each other

Ideas for attendees

• Seek diversity: the world of conferences and events, once “dominated” by the same old events, is now much more varied. Meeting people from diverse backgrounds in a setting where different perspectives give rise to interesting conversations can be a powerful serendipity engine. Participate in new or different events which could provide content and connections that are complementary to your job or industry. Even attend events that are totally unrelated and could be a source of serendipitous inspiration!

• Prepare in advance: check if there is a Twitter hashtag for the event and browse through the tweets prior to attending. See if anyone in the tweetstream catches your attention and check their profile

• Turn the serendipity engine on: during the conference and in the days after continue checking the event’s Twitter hashtag and other online streams for interesting connections

• Step out of your comfort zone: avoid sticking the whole event with your familiar group of acquaintances and instead go speak to strangers during the coffee breaks and other pauses

• Change seats: in a long event with different sessions try seating in different parts of the venue for each session, preferably close to strangers

• Get social: to facilitate serendipity you’ll need to get social! This means taking advantage of all opportunities to engage into conversations with other attendees: mingle during the breaks and go to the dinner and after-party events

Ana Silva (twitter, blog, linkedin) divides her time between strategizing collaboration and social media initiatives for a large manufacturing company, teaching Enterprise 2.0 at the Oporto Business School, and organizing conferences on the impact of social media on areas such as citizenship and the future of work.

The concepts for running a Lean Startup described by Eric Ries (twitter, blog) in his recently published book (The Lean Startup, Amazon) can also be applied to make a conference better by turning “ideas into products, measure how customers respond and learn whether to pivot or persevere [in your actions].”

Lean Startup principles can help you innovate an event’s marketing, experience design, program curation and many other activities in order to create a radically successful business.

Last week I delivered a workshop at frog‘s studio in Milan on how you can organize a better event by challenging it’s basic assumptions. I mentioned Eric Ries’ book and one of the designers –who’s currently working on concepts to improve a conference’s experience– asked me about how to apply the kind of lean practices that are usually used for software development to an event. This article expands the answer I gave her in that occasion.

A conference works very similarly to a startup. Even if it has been in the market for several years, every edition of the event is the result of iterations that try to move it towards something more attractive for attendees, sponsors, partners and speakers year after year. If you don’t build something your customers want (be it sponsors, attendees or other stakeholders) then you’re wasting your [surely scarce] resources… and might go out of business soon.

What is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of an event? It can be many different things depending on which aspect of your event you’re considering. For example: an affiliates marketing campaign, the program, a mobile App or even a new website. The

The core of a Lean Startup is the BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN cycle. Ries writes that the “fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond and learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.” Actually the same is valid for a conference too!

“Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build –the thing customers want and will pay for– as quickly as possible.”

Good metrics and reports are absolutely necessary for validated learning. Do you have the right kind of metrics? Ries reminds us that “metrics are people too” and that the reports we make to evaluate our progress should deal “with people and their actions, which are more useful than piles of data points.”

“Are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change?”

Marketing, Communications  and PR

This is one of the most suitable places to start with lean startup concepts as the marketing & sales campaigns for an event usually start well in advance, which gives you time to try and iterate through different MVPs. Consider social media channels like Facebook, Twitter or a newsletter. Are you basing your marketing actions on them just because everybody does it or because it really works?

Make shorter campaigns, act them fast and measure. What happened? Did someone react to them? If no one did, just scrap it and think of something else. But if a few dozen people did react, maybe there was something that worked. Find out what it was, improve it, try it again fast, measure… repeat.

Avoid Vanity Metrics (eg. number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, etc) are a deadly sin for a conference. If you have 90,000 Twitter followers but your last campaign targeting them didn’t bring any sale (or other interesting result), then 90,000 is not a valid number to judge your actions by.

Be aware of value-destroying behaviors too (e.g. a conference that after years on the market still depends on massive payed advertising or funding to sell tickets but does not develop a value-creating product). While advertising is not evil per-se, in the long run you should be able to earn media presence or increase ticket sales through word-of-mouth.

If your marketing campaign is not working, don’t expect that it will just by magic. It might be time to pivot! “A pivot requires that we keep one foot rooted in what we’ve learned so far, while making a fundamental change in strategy in order to seek even greater validated learning.”

[UPDATE] Marketing Linchpin Seth Godin wrote an interesting article on his blog questioning the applicability of the “minimum viable product” to marketing (at least to certain cases). Well worth a read: When “minimal viable product” doesn’t work

Experience Design & Logistics

If your event takes place once a year, it might seem impossible to go through the build-measure-learn cycle. There are a few ways around it.

Organize smaller events throughout the year to try out new things. For example make free periodical meetups for your community. They could be short (a few hours) gatherings of past-attendees with a program component (a workshop by a sponsor, a lecture by an interesting past speaker) and a networking part (drinks, breakfast, etc). Not only would you increase customer loyalty, but also build buzz for the upcoming event. These events could be hosted at a sponsor’s office (they earn karma points) so the costs could be close to zero.

Another useful concept is that of Genchi Genbutsu which means to “go and see”. Conference organizers should “get out of the building” and see how their experiences are working. Are people engaging? I find it useful to film people at an event (e.g.: during registration, networking sessions, etc) to see how they’re interacting with the logistics we’ve created.

Eric Ries - Photo by Emily Shur

Program Validation

Some events fail because the program they put together (keynotes, workshops, etc) are not interesting to the potential attendees or sponsors. To prevent this you can go through the build-measure-learn cycle) by giving tidbits of your program to your community as soon as possible. Even more, share with them which speakers or companies you’re considering. Do they like it? Why spend time and money in trying to get that speaker that no one cares for. Ask for feedback well before the program is finalized and you might be able to put together one that’s more attractive (and sells better).

Sponsor Sales

You probably will pitch to many sponsors. Again, the build-measure-learn cycle can help you raise your sponsor acquisition. Identify the MVPs that you’re pitching. Did something create interest in the sponsor? Did the budget meet their expectations? Don’t fossilize on just one sponsorship proposal. Make new proposals with new concepts, you don’t need to build anything (you’ll worry about that when they accept the proposal). At PICNIC we used to prepare several concepts for our sponsors, going through several iterations until we found the right one to sign a contract.

More on the Lean Startups philosophy

• Visit Eric Ries website Startup Lessons Learned
• Buy the book The Lean Startup

South by Southwest Interactive (web, twitter) is probably the hottest event for people into digital business, Internet startups and what’s going to be the next killer app/online-service, etc. It features more than one thousand speakers over 5 days. The producers have managed to fill up such a busy agenda with quality content through a crowd-sourced contest: the “Panel Picker“.

Vote weight in the Panel Picker

The Panel Picker allows “anyone with access to the Internet” to send a proposal (AKA regular guys like you and me but also internet stars like Jeff Jarvis and others). The proposals are then voted through a pondered process that includes SXSW’s Staff (30% of weight in the selection), an Advisory Board (40%) and Public Vote (30%).

Tips for increasing the chance of success with the Panel Picker

Now for the 2011 edition of SXSW they received more than 3,000 proposals so it’s not easy to get picked. In the following video, Shawn O’Keefe (linkedin, twitter) -producer of SXSWi- notes that many of the proposals received are not focused enough.

The sessions last 60 minutes and the organizers want them to be as valuable as possible to the audience, so proposals that are too general or try to cover too much information, become less attractive. During a few conversations with the SXSW team, they have acknowledged that even panels with fewer speakers (or even just one) tend to be more eligible because they stimulate the presenter to be better prepared, while panels with several speakers on stage tend to favor improvisation.

The Panel Picker entry process CLOSES on July 15th!

How to preserve the value of SXSWi

Over the last year the interactive part of Southby has expanded into 10 campuses all over the center of Austin, Texas. Each campus was structured around one particular theme in order to foster the connection between likeminded creatives and make it easier to navigate the overwhelming amount of information present at the event. The 2012 edition will further develop this approach to the event.

Last Thursday I met Ze Frank (web, twitter),  who a few days later would hold the closing keynote speech at the design & creativity conference MAD in Spain. I had previously seen Ze talk at TED Global 2010 in Oxford and had found his presentation both entertaining and professionally interesting as he deals with creating online  experiences that generate powerful and intimate interactions with his audience (if you never heard about Ze Frank  or watched him speak, I suggest you watch these two of Ze Frank at TED Global 2010 and at TED 2004).

During our chat at the opening event of MAD we talked about public speaking, what makes a good presentation and some of the advice he gives to speakers while coaching them.

Ze Frank at TED Global 2010

Note: Although I tried to record Ze’s tips on my iPhone while we were talking, my love-hate relationship with technology once again came to surface when I discovered that the device had only recorded the first 3 seconds of it (my fault I guess). So what follows comes from my imperfect memories of that evening (it was late, noisy and I trusted my iPhone was getting in on tape so I could later write this article).

These are the two tips and an observation to improve your public speaking:

Rehearse alone in an empty room and don’t stop

There’s only one way of preparing a good talk and that is practice. Especially if you’re a new speaker, but not only, Ze suggests you try your speech in an empty room. You can have a mirror if you want, but that’s not the key. Ze Frank suggests you make your full talk several times non-stop. Just go the whole way through with your speech and don’t stop to write down improvement remarks like “I’m using too many ‘eehs’ and ‘aahs’, I should correct that”. People usually do that and what happens is that they rehearse very well the start of their talk instead of just going on in order to improve the whole delivery of the presentation.

Know that stuff can go wrong

You can prepare all that you can, but stuff might/will go wrong. So what do you do if your computer freezes, there is some kind of audio/video issue or the audience is not reacting as you expected? Plan for that,  think of possible scenarios and resolutions… and relax.

Isn’t this amazing?!

Talking about delivering an interesting live experience, Ze noted that if at a certain point of your presentation you cannot say “Isn’t this [stuff I'm showing you or telling you about] amazing?!”, then something is wrong with it. Apart of many exceptions we can both think about, if you’re not excited about your presentation yourself, why should people in the audience be? By the way, he does say that during his talks and what he’s talking about it usually is (amazing).

For sure will be thinking about this the next time I prepare for a talk… using it as a pondered editing criteria.

Hey Ze, if you’re reading and this is not what you said, just raise your hand!

Today Storify has opened to the public it’s service for creating stories by aggregating content published on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and others. It could prove a perfect tool for the daunting task of summarizing of curating the best tweets, photos, videos and articles produced by the audience (and organizers) of your conference.

Some time ago Google Wave offered a similar (though way more technical and unstable) way to do this by crowdsourcing the process (but Wave is now dead). The difference with Storify is that the curator is one (e.g. the conference organizer) but can pull resources from several different users and also from other Storify feeds.

Storify is very straightforward: you sign in with your Twitter account, you search for the desired content through keywords, users, etc and then just drag-and-drop the content into your story’s timeline.

At the end of the aggregation process you can embed your story, for example in the event’s website.

Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers. From Storift’s FAQ

To test the service, I created a [very] short story with content from the Lift Conference that took place last February in Geneva.

Follows a quite straightforward way to make conference badges out of Moo.com postcards. This product could be also added to Moo.com’s lineup to open a latent market.

Moo.com postcards are A6 in size and as you can see in the photo below, it matches the size of several standard conference badges. The idea is to skip the use of plastic holders to make your event a bit greener.

Specs

• Size: A6 or 105 mm x 148 mm
• Paper stock: 350gsm
• Finishing: front glossy laminate finish, back just slightly coated
• Perforations: here I have two alternatives – 2 holes for double hooked lanyards (so that the badge doesn’t flip over and the attendee’s name is always visible) or 1 central hole for regular lanyards
• Label area: 51 mm x 89 mm (see below)

A6 sized badges that could be replaced using Moo postcards

Labels and Label Printing

It’s always easier to have pre-printed badges and then stick on each of them the label with the participant’s name. To do so, the conference organizers could use just any label printer but Moo could simplify the process by making a promo-deal with label-maker giant Dymo, who’s also present worldwide (so you can order badges plus printer in one go).

One product in particular is rather versatile for conferences: the LabelWriter 450 or the LabelWriter 450 turbo (portable, fast, well priced and compatible with both Mac and PC)

Labels: the Dymo LabelWriter 450 can handle several sizes but the most practical for name tags is the 51 mmm x 89 mm one, allowing the name to be printed in big typeface plus company name plus other info like twitter handle, etc. This label size is perfect for the A6 badge size.

Dymo LabelWriter 450 Turbo

Who could use the Moo.com badges?

Small to medium events (100 to 400 attendees) including conferences, TEDx gatherings, barcamps, company gatherings, etc.

Cost-wise this would be a valid alternative to traditional printers (a pack of 480 postcards mailed to Spain -my current location- using DHL and including VAT is of 335.06 euro).

Designs

Conference organizers can upload their own designs, but it would be handy if -as with its other products- Moo.com offered some ready made design and downloadable Photoshop templates to simplify the design process. Remember that you need to upload both sides of the postcard. The front side can have several variations (like different colors to identify Attendees, Press, Speakers, Staff, etc) and the back will be common to all of them.

Integration with other Moo.com products

I used Moo.com stickers to differentiate between several kinds of badges. In the photo below you can see how a yellow sticker (typewriter) was used to identify a member of the press.

A Press badge from Frontiers of Interaction 2010 personalized using Moo stickers

So what’s the difference with Postcards?

Not much… actually, you could already make badges out of postcards if you find a neat way to drill one or two holes in them. It would surely help if they could be ordered with one or two holes by default.

The world of advertising is rapidly being transformed by new ways of engaging with consumers through novel storytelling over different platforms (on and off-line). I firmly believe that conferences should follow a similar trend in order to upgrade their experiences. To learn more about how to do this I met Dan Hon (blog, Twitter, Linkedin), a creative at the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy (previously co-founder of Six to Start) and a sought-after speaker on topics like “transmedia” and “play”.

Extending the conference experience

As an example on how to “explode” the conference experience out of the physical realm, Dan cites the SXSW Panel Picker, a tool created by the organizers of South by Southwest (SXSW) to manage the submission and selection of panels for the festival.

“This year definitely I’ve seen a lot more people campaigning in social media [...] what they’re doing is they’re extending the conference experience backwards in time [...] up to more than 6 months before [SXSW] actually starts”

The main value of the SXSW Panel Picker is that it anticipates the event experience of several months by allowing attendees (confirmed and potential) to see who is going to speak at the event and what the topics are. From the organizers point view,  they can see the reaction to topics through voting and its resonance on social media.

The “corridor track”

A recurrent comment about conferences that Dan and his friends attend is that very often “when you’re at a conference, you don’t really have that much free time” and that “sometimes the [...] corridor track is more interesting than the panels and keynotes”.

As a conference organizer you should be careful to leave enough “leisure” time for serendipitous encounters and other networking activities, sometimes stimulated by a well designed playful experience (see below).

How to add “play” to the experience

Dan Hon has been designing playful advertising experiences that encourage the users to participate without feeling forced and providing some kind of value to them. An example of this applied to the world of conferences could be the big “Lego Pit” at SXSW. It consists of a huge pile of Lego bricks scattered in one of the corridors where kids and adults can gather, either as a meeting point or for recreational purposes.

The "Lego Pit" at SXSW 2010

“The lego pit turns into a number of different things: a signpost for people to meet and they have something to do while waiting”

The secret in this case is that the experience was designed so at it was “ok” to do it (play with the Lego) at the same time as it was an opportunity to meet people (the Lego pit was used as a popular meeting point). Part of the success was also that the experience offered something tactile that people could do (thus stimulating another of our five senses), and presented itself as an interesting alternative to meeting at a bar.

People (adults and kids) playing in the Lego Pit during SXSW 2010

Improving the speaker’s experience

Regarding what can organizers do to improve the experience for speakers, Dan Hon highlighted two things that made his participation at conferences better:

1. Provide enough time at the end of the day or after a session for people to find the speakers and catch up with them
2. Plan a proper full-on rehearsal (including full speech on stage, lights/audio/video, familiarization with the room, technical setup, etc)

Discover more about Dan Hon’s work and ideas in the following presentations:

• PICNIC ’09 (September 2009) – Games people play (his presentation starts at 34:24)
• PSFK Conference London (September 2010) – Alternative reality games
• TEDxTransmedia (September 2010) – DareToPlay

A "Turk" chess machine that inspired the name Mechanical Turk

Compiling, completing and sharing all the relevant links (like twitter and linkedin profiles, personal & company websites, etc) of the speakers and attendees, or performing other long & mechanical tasks for your conference might seem as a particulary time-consuming burden of your event management activities… but not anymore thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk!

Marshall Kirkpatrick (Linkedin, twitter, web), Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb, shares how he recently did just that and much more for the Techonomy Conference while spending just one night and 50 usd. His tips are especially useful for conference organizers and event bloggers alike.

Let’s say you are going to, or hosting, a conference and you want to make a good impression with the attendees and organizers. One way to do that is to create useful and thoughtful original content and resources regarding the event.

Thanks to tools like Mechanical Turk, Google Custom Search and of course Twitter, you can now do incredible things around conferences that would have been very inefficient to do before.

With the aid of Mechanical Turk Marshall did the following:

• A Twitter list of all the conference attendees who use Twitter -  for keeping track of what people were saying during the event and stay in touch in the future
• A Twitter list of women and a list of people from outside the United States participating in the event – to create a special view into the conversations of some groups of people who can get lost in the noise of the [sometimes homogeneous] audience
• A Google Custom Search Engine that searches the archives of all the websites of the organizations the conference attendees work for – as reference for the blogging during the conference

Read the original article, including detailed how-to instructions, here.