Next Generation Event

Twitter Event Chat Tonight - #eventprofs

Just a quick post to point you to the Eventprofs Twitter Chat, an initiative started by Ready2Spark. She's started a weekly chat (Mondays, 9pm EST), the agenda will be driven by you, and it's shaping up to be great.

Instructions for participating are here.

Off to Pittsburgh for the GMIC Conference

I'll be heading to Pittsburgh tomorrow morning for the Green Meeting Industry Council Conference in Pittsburgh. I'll try to blog, but I'll be without internet connectivity in the conference room, so the best place to get updates will be my Twitter feed (as long as my phone battery holds). You may also want to run a search for #GMIC09, as there may be others twittering, as well. I'm looking forward to learning quite a bit!

FYI - MPI's Meeting Industry Crisis Center

I just saw that MPI has put up a Meeting Industry Crisis Center page to give planners information about things like TARP, jobs, and actions they can take to help.

I haven't taken a close look yet, but it seems relatively new (I ran into a couple links that weren't up and running yet).

If you have time to browse through it, please let us know what you think!

[Hat tip: @GregRuby]

Are Attendees and Individuals Redefining the "Virtual Event" As We Know It?

I've been preparing to moderate a panel on virtual technology for the Green Meeting Industry Council's annual conference at the end of this month, so I've been thinking a lot about virtual events. Watching a couple of conferences online over the last couple of weeks (MeetDifferent and Legal Tech NY) got me thinking about a very basic question: What is a virtual event?

At first glance, the answer is obvious. There are any number of virtual event providers we can look to. Companies like Unisfair and ON24 give us the platforms that house the events we've come to know as virtual events. They give us modern day chat rooms and online exhibit halls in an attempt to replicate the experience of a live conference or tradeshow.

But as more and more individuals begin building their own online communities through blogs, Twitter, and other tools, we're also seeing the creation of informal virtual events. Attendees are tweeting, blogging, and engaging each other and non-attendees in a new way. They're meeting fellow attendees before the conference, spreading the word and talking amongst themselves during the conference, and continuing to share information long after the conference ends. Things they only had time to Twitter during the conference become blog posts. Those blog posts are shared and commented on and act as catalysts for new posts.

This raises challenges for organizers (from what I've seen, people are far more willing to tweet or blog discontent than to voice it in the conference room), but it also opens up a lot of opportunities.

And don't think it's not coming your way. I work in an industry known for its late adopters, but we have an ever-growing group of exceptionally savvy lawyers leading the charge. The recent Legal Tech conference I mentioned above was all over Twitter and has inspired countless blog posts and videos. It's not the norm yet, but I did meet up with a fellow Twitterer at a recent in-house family law conference we did (he sent out a tweet that he was at the conference so I tweeted back that he should stop by my office if he had a moment). It's coming.

What do you think? Are these informal, events-focused online communities that are cropping up around live events becoming "virtual events" in their own right?

Didn't Make It to MeetDifferent this Year? You Don't Have to Miss All the Fun.

There are still ways to keep real-time pace with the discussions they'll be having this year.

1. Tune in to the opening general session today at 10:00 am EST (information on Meet Different's website).
2. Follow it on Twitter. Several attendees are talking about it and you can easily track their comments because they mark them #meetdifferent (take a look at the screen shot below). If you're on Twitter, consider following people like @mcallen and @jkhewett who are really pumping out the updates.

If I come across other ways I'm tracking the event as it proceeds, I'll be sure to update you.