Julius Solaris (twitter, web) is the editor of the excellent Event Manager Blog and a social media strategist. In the video below both of his passions -events and social media- meet to give an important advice to conference organizers:

You don’t need more social media tools, you just need to use those that really matter [for your audience].

Many organizers try to be on every possible service available without verifying where their audience is already present (and active) and meeting them there. Sometimes organizers even open several accounts/pages (I’m thinking Twitter and Facebook mainly) but later don’t have enough [human] resources to manage them and keep them fresh and interactive. You’re not TED, who for example has several twitter accounts for different scopes (with quite an amount of followers on each like @TEDtalks, @TEDnews, TEDactive, TEDfellow, TEDchris…).

Some of the most abused tools by events are:

• Twitter (I’ve been to several “top management” events where less than 1% of the audience used Twitter)
• Facebook (are you just broadcasting or do your followers interact with your event?)
• Blog/Tumblr/Posterous/etc (are you willing to publish INTERESTING content frequently?)
• Instagram (yeah, you launched a creative-photo competition but most of your participants don’t know about it and besides they use mostly BlackBerries)
• Storify (do you have time to curate a great story of your event with tweets, photos and all?)
• Flickr (flickr is sliding down but apart from that, what’s the point in uploading 1,500 photos that no one will ever look at?)
• Slideshare (most often uploading just the slides is useless as they should be a visual aid to the presentation and not contain all the information)
• YouTube/Vimeo/etc (at least make the audio quality good!)
• FriendFeed (does someone still use that?)
• Google+ (ehm… yeah, nice… but is your audience there?)
• Linkedin groups (two words: spam + boooooring….)
• Livestream (you go through the hassle of live-streaming your event but you feed it with poor audio/video quality and you have only 3 viewers online)

Why waste time in all of the above if it’s really not working?

Julius suggests to:

1. Make your Social Media Strategy clear (are you doing it for marketing, customer service, PR, traffic?)
2. Avoid Social Media Overload by concentrating in what works for you
3. Focus on the tools that really make a difference
4. Use less fancy tools (faxes, sms, direct mail) if those nail your goals
5. Integrate services (eg. print a QR code with a to your event’s Facebook page on your direct mail)

Bonus: most startups concentrate on services that are nice but not REALLY useful to conference organizers. Concentrate on the basics, look for the pain points. For some tips on how to disrupt the conference experience, checkout this video by Luke Williams, author of Disrupt.

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!

T-shirts from Frontiers of Interaction '10, SXSW '11, La Red Innova '10 and PICNIC '10

I came across this interesting article (extracts below) on why T-shirts matter to high tech start-ups employees. Curiously enough, the same applies to attendees of [tech, internet and innovation oriented] conferences. From my position as both a conference organizer and an attendee I’ve often find T-shirts to be the most memorable kind of swag I want to take home… a sort of show-off that says “I was there”.

While many conferences, barcamps and other events give away T-shirts for free,  you don’t necessarily have to do so… just make them available at a reasonable price. For example SXSW sells their T-shirts (unique to each year) both during the online registration process (you’re already buying your ticket so you might as well spend those extra 20 bucks to reserve your T-shirt) and at the venue during the festival.

Follows a short extract from the original article highlighting the key reasons why T-shirts matter:

Empowerment.  In some ways, engineers delight in having found a profession where their intellect and passion for technology have enabled them to earn a great living and work at a company where – yes, you guessed it – they can wear t-shirts to work.  [...]  You hire only the best, and the best can wear whatever they want.  It says you know that you value merit over appearance [...]

Incentives.  Over the past decade, behavioral finance has taught us that people don’t value money rationally – it varies depending on form and context.  [...] free t-shirts evoke some sort of primal response at a high tech company.  [...]  You’d be shocked at what a $200 per person per year budget for t-shirts will do for employee morale comparatively.

Tribal Cohesion. [...] common dress signals who is “part of the tribe” and belongs to the corporate family.  Uniforms are incompatible with the “empowerment” aspect of how people want to dress, but t-shirts can represent a form of “voluntary uniform” if produced in sufficient variety and quantity.   This effect can be had at a team level, when a t-shirt is made just to celebrate a new product, or at the company level.

Tenure Based Seniority. [...]  T-Shirts, in an innocuous way, implicitly do this by almost always becoming “limited editions”.  Want the t-shirt from the 2007 company picnic?  You had to be there to get one.  [...] In a socially acceptable way, t-shirts subtlely communicate a form of tenure that is warm, and yet structured.

Branding.  As discussed under “Tribal Cohesion”, people want to wear the brand of their tribe.  [...] make shirts for your developers, your fans, your early adopters.  Long before they become vocal advocates for your brand, they will gladly showcase it if you let them.  [...]  Of course, this assumes that you make shirts that don’t suck.

It’s clear that Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have righteously created what’s the “Number 1 Internet Conference in Europe”. If there is one particular characteristic to define Le Web (web, twitter, facebook, youtube) is that it is a huge networking machine, with the 2010 edition attracting around 3,000 attendees from 60 countries (mostly European but with a good dose of Americans and a few Asians and Middle-Easterns).

Loic Le Meur, founder of Le Web

Le Web is less about what happens on stage–with its ongoing parade of entrepreneurs, managers and web-stars–and more about the networking and deal-making that takes place elsewhere around the venue (this year dislocated in 3 buildings of the Les Docks center).

It’s not that the “show” is boring. Rather most speakers won’t share any real news to those already following online the happenings of web world. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch asked interesting questions but top Google exec Marissa Mayer doesn’t give off any unexpected news and does not engage in the controversies that Arrington is trying to spark. Dave McClure gave useful tips for startups and Gary Vaynerchuk made a powerful closing of the event. Yet, Le Web is not a place to discover new technologies and companies like at, say, South by Southwest (though there was a startup competition).

The killer feature of this conference is the networking. If you ask around you’ll hear things like “everyone that matters in my industry is here” or “I come here to do business. It’s no longer cold and food is abundant unlike before [citing a situation that happened in 2008] and I occasionally listen to an interesting speaker”. In fact I spent most of the second day at the Nespresso Lounge in a series of back-to-back meetings that I had organized using the networking tool Presdo Match (more on it in an upcoming article).

Three thousand attendees, most of them paying for a ticket somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 euro, is an amazing result if you consider that Le Web is managed mostly from San Francisco by Geraldine, the producer, and a small team in Paris. In fact, I know of several full-time conference organizers that envy those results badly.

A packed conference room during Marissa Mayer's interview

But at times this high attendance also felt overwhelming. It’s a lot of people. Forget about intimacy. I knew very well at least 50 other attendees and we never even bumped into each other.

A few tips to improve the odds of meeting people would be:

Make the meeting-points VERY obvious

While Presdo Match was like manna from the skies to set up meetings, the meeting-points were not clearly indicated. It would have been great to know beforehand that there were 3 predetermined meeting points, for example by including a reference to them in the pre-event email “Prepare your Agenda for LeWeb” that was sent on November 25.

An official meeting-point

The meeting-point hidden behind a few people, imagine when there were hundres of them

The ideal meeting-point (not kidding!) - Photo by Roswellsgirl on flickr

Make the names on the badges HUGE

The badges had a clever disposition, with a pocket to hold the name tag, the program booklet and a two point lanyard. But the names were small, small, small… it was very difficult to read them even at close distance. Sometimes, when you’re trying to meet someone for the first time, being able to read the name on the badge from a few meters apart is extremely useful.

The Le Web badge - practical but name is impossible to read, even from a short distance

Don’t seclude speakers in a VIP area

As I said, Le Web brings a high number of speakers, most of them current actors of the Internet world. In most cases it’s difficult to meet them or make an appointment to talk business as when they are not on stage they are gathered in a VIP area where “regular” attendees cannot access. Positive exceptions were people like Dennis Crowley, Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble that decided to stay amongst the attendees, something that was widely appreciated. After all, they are enabling new business opportunities for themselves too.

All in all, Le Web was very positive for my professional activities: shared time with old friends, maid new acquaintances and opened several paths for new projects. Thanks Loic and Geraldine, see you next year!

Famous conference photographer Duncan Davidson (TED, Web 2.0 Summit, etc) shared the following tip for conference organizers: Don’t use plasma screens on stage because they will come awful on photo.

Big screens are really great for use on stage. You can display big graphics, change them at a whim, and reuse them for the next show. There’s just one thing you have to be careful of when putting a big screen on stage. Never, ever, evar put a plasma screen on stage if you want to make a photograph with it in the background.

Why? Because when you take a sequence of photos at a reasonable shutter speed (1/250th in this case), you’ll end up with a series of photos that look like this:

Photo from Duncan Davidson's blog (click on image for link to original article)

Go on reading the original article to find out Duncan’s recommendations to avoid this problem. To find out more photo-tips from Duncan Davidson, watch this video-interview I made during TED Global 2010.

From the TEDx Posterous page, a series of practical tips for TEDx organizers which are actually valid for any other conference.

Images are powerful, and they tell a powerful story about your event.

Taking high-quality photographs at your event is as important as filming great quality video — invest some time and effort into finding really good photographers with professional cameras.

Photo by Bruno Fernandes at TEDxUSP (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

The article gives details on three tips:

• Reach out to professional, amateur and student photographers in your community.
• Have more than one photographer at your event
• Photo diversity

Let your photographs carry on the inspiration and energy that you experience during the event.  Because once your event is over, it is the images that will speak for it.

Read the full article

You shouldn’t call or text an event organizer during the few hours before his conference starts, or either a few hours after it has started… not even the evening before! Why? Well, because she’ll be terribly busy and probably stressed, already answering to tons of phone calls and emails. Most probably the first thing that she’ll think is “And now what?”.

At least that’s true for me. Fortunately my closest friends and relatives know this and usually send me their good wishes several days before my conferences take place (e.g. my mother wished me good luck already one week before PICNIC ’10).

If not before the event, I prefer to get a text message some hours after it has already started or during the evening, when it’s all over.

Am I the only one that feels like this?

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.

Duncan Davidson in action at TED Global 2010

Conferences are a totally different beast when it comes to photography. Duncan Davidson (LinkedIn, journal, twitter), the photographer that -amongst other things- has covered the last six major TED events, shares some practical tips that matter when reporting what happens at conference. From equipment that can handle high ISO or high shutter speeds to setting correctly your white balance right from the start, these tricks will help you improve the photos of your next event.

Duncan’s goal as a photographer is to “catch the speakers on the stage and try to communicate a little bit of the emotion in place at the event to those who may not seen it and even for those that have seen it to try to communicate a different viewpoint than they might have had”.

At TED Global 2010 he also used a special camera case to reduce the shutter sound (see photo). This is particularly relevant in events where the sound of the camera’s shutter might become really disturbing, especially during moments of silence.

Duncan Davidson showing his Nikon Ds with a special case to reduce the noise of the shutter

My friend and South African technology journalist & writer Simon Dingle (web, twitter, facebook) recently tweeted the following:

“Thanks for coming to our event. Here, have a bag of rubbish.” (original tweet here)

How many times have you participated to an expensive or so called high-profile event and during/after it you got a cheap congress bag full of meaningless advertising brochures, mediocre event-branded ball-pen and a non-fancy notebook?

Why ruin your event’s experience by giving away cheap stuff that most probably has a strong environmental footprint? If you want to give something out, make it memorable or worth keeping/using everyday. Isn’t it better to spend the same total amount of money (just a few cents/bucks per unit) in just one giveaway? One nice notebook (with your conference logo on it) or a small good quality booklet with information from your conference, sponsors and some original content are much more memorable. Even a [good quality] sticker is always more appreciated than mediocre swag.

Often sponsors expect/demand you to include their promotional material in the congress bag: the next time it happens, explain them that it works against them if the attendees will end up throwing it away in front of their own noses. Demand that they make a quality piece in line with the experience you are trying to create for your audience (it could even be a small brochure but with some real content that adds value to the reader, not the typical marketing yada yada).

BTW [almost] nobody needs another cheap pen… get over it and move on!