Planning

For a while, I gave up pre-planning almost entirely and relied on serendipity or conversations with other attendees to guide my way to sessions. While this works to some extent, I found myself missing too many interesting sessions. So now, I’ve started pre-planning sessions that I want to attend, and for large conferences, like SXSW, I identify two or three at every time slot, which allows me to pick the one I’m in the mood to see, and also gives me a backup in case my first choice was a dud or too crowded.

I also try to pick a variety of types of sessions so that I can get a broad range of knowledge with some more technical talks and others leaning toward community or business topics. I also try to pick speakers who have done amazing things to get more insight into the stories behind their success.

Finally, I’m always prepared to deviate from my plan to see sessions based on recommendations from other attendees or to take advantage of other interesting opportunities at the event. If I’m in a session that turns out to be a snooze, I’ll do a quick check on Twitter to see if friends are raving about another session that I might want to catch instead.

Conversations

Don’t underestimate the value of the “hallway track” where you can have interesting conversations with amazing people outside of the traditional conference format. This is an especially important side-effect of conferences for those of us who regularly work remotely or who work in a job with few peers within our own company. I’m not saying that you should spend all your time chatting with friends, but it is important to balance sessions with time spent talking to other people in your field. This is an opportunity to build lasting personal and professional relationships with smart people working in similar roles.

Make sure you attend the parties or meet up with other people for meals. While this might feels like goofing off, it’s really one of the easiest ways to get to know other people in your field. Resist the urge to go back to your hotel early and be careful not to hang out with the same few people during the entire conference. Take advantage of all of these opportunities to talk to new and interesting people, and make an active effort to renew relationships with people you’ve met before while making sure that you also spend time meeting new people.

Ditch Work

I know, you are incredibly important, and you can’t possibly ignore your work for more than a few minutes at a time. However, if you spend all of your time at the conference on email and calling into meetings, you might as well have saved some money and stayed at home to work. If you really want to get the most value out of the conference, you’ll put off what you can and delegate the rest to someone else for a few days.

Follow Up

Most of us leave a conference with a big pile of notes that we never look at again. You really need to do something with all of that information. I usually try to get a few blog posts out of each conference, or at least one post with something interesting that I learned. If you work with a team of people, a short trip report to share what you learned with your team might also be a good idea.

I also try to come up with at least five things that require some additional work on my part, and I add them to my task list. These might include an idea for a new project I want to start, something I want to implement in my current job, an interesting technology that I want to learn or someone that I want to follow up with on a specific topic. By getting these out of the huge pile of notes and onto my task list, I’ve drastically increased the chances that I will actually do something rather than forget all about it when I return home.

What are your favorite tips for getting the most value from attending a conference?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Kenneth Yeung

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Maybe you can’t hire a famous cartoonist or Lady Gaga, but you could work with your employer or clients to incorporate something fun into an event. Cartoonists, artists, musicians and other talented people can help make an event fun. If you don’t have money to hire people to perform, you could hold a contest where people can perform and win prizes. This could be anything from a battle of the bands with real instruments to Rock Band competitions, talent contests, arm wrestling, juggling or any other fun and crazy scheme you can come up with to add a little excitement. Toys can also help make an event more fun: a few hula hoops, video games, puzzles, puppets or other toys or cool tech gadgets can help introduce some fun.

Most of us have some conferences that we are obligated to attend or that we feel that we should attend because they will have some benefit in the future, but many of them just aren’t fun. Spend some time thinking about which conferences you enjoy attending and try to find excuses to attend more conferences like those. We all have different interests and get enjoyment from different types of conferences. When I was consulting full-time and doing online community strategy, I attended a few community and social media conferences, but most were too marketing-oriented for me, and I didn’t really enjoy them. I prefer to attend conferences filled with geeky developer types and smart people building really interesting things out of cutting edge technologies, so I like to attend open source / Linux developer conferences, SXSW and various unconferences. Budget is always an issue with going to conferences, but you can often attend them for free by speaking or volunteering to work at a conference if money is tight.

You can even make your own event. We often forget to celebrate our work achievements, but having something to celebrate, even a small accomplishment, can make a great excuse for a little party. For the big things, it can be really fun to have a huge party with a nice budget. However, we can also throw little mini parties to celebrate the smaller accomplishments without breaking the bank. On the low end, you can do a team lunch, happy hour at a local pub or a celebration in the office with a few snacks. If you have a little budget, find something fun for the team to do together and throw a bigger party. Either way, you can make work into a fun event.

What is your favorite way to make work events fun?

Photo by Flickr user Dana Tuszke used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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What’s social event discovery, you ask? Chances are good that you’ve attended an event in the recent past that used an event registration system called Eventbrite. Eventbrite provides an easy-to-use event registration system for organizers that handles both paid and free events. Eventbrite also provides social media integration tools to allow attendees to quickly broadcast their event plans to their friends, fans and followers as soon as they’ve registered for an event.

Because Eventbrite has been providing event-booking services with social media integration for several years, it can now add new features to help attendees who have previously registered for an event through the system find new, relevant events to attend. If you have bought a ticket or registered for an event using Eventbrite and linked the site with Facebook through Facebook Connect, Eventbrite canl now give event recommendations pulled together from data about your Facebook friends and the events they’re attending. When you click on the “Facebook Recommendations” tab, you are experiencing the power of social event discovery. If you are looking for new events that you can attend, where better to look for information than those with whom you’re connected on the social graph? Eventbrite also hopes to add more recommendation streams from other popular social networks such as LinkedIn sometime in the future.

Another tool that is gaining popularity is Plancast, a site entirely based on the act of sharing the events you are planning on attending. You can follow others to see what plans they broadcast, and others can follow you. You can add yourself to an informal attendee list for an event by clicking the “count me in” button, which all help to create an engine for social event discovery. While the travel site Tripit also has a similar plan-sharing aspect to it, it doesn’t get as granular as identifying the specific events you’re attending; it only shares planned trips based on cities where you’re traveling.

On Plancast, conversations ensue once people start connecting to event plans and posting messages about the upcoming event and related activities. For example, right now there is a great deal of chatter around Blogworld and New Media Expo happening in Las Vegas later this week. You can discover new events by seeing announcements of the plans of people you follow, and also through a list of related events on every event page. For example, from the Blogworld plan page you can link to Scott Stratten’s pre-Blogworld Tweetup.

I’m finding social event discovery to be useful to tool learn about new events that I may not hear about otherwise, particularly regional events and events in industries different from my own. And I appreciate the intelligent recommendations that come from mashing up event attendance and event plans with one’s social graph.

Disclosure: Plancast is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The event is open to the public and free. PIE PDX can be found at 1227 NW Davis, on the corner of Davis and 12th in The Pearl. You can RSVP for the event at Upcoming.

If you’re hosting a free event like this, let us know! Email :tips <at> webworkerdaily <dot> com.

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Part of the beauty of When is Good is its absolute simplicity. At no point do you have to even register for an account, which is great because I’ve registered for so many sites that I lost track of them long ago. In fact, at this point, lack of registration alone is a feature I look for in a web app. On the other hand, if you are the registering type, you can create an account to track your events and meetings history.

All you really need to do to access When is Good’s main functionality is click the “Get Started” button on the web site’s homepage. From there, you’ll be taken to a default calendar with the next 21 days displayed, with each day broken down into 1-hour blocks  from 6 AM to 8 PM. All of this is customizable, including the number of days displayed, as well as which times and which days of the week are shown. For those of us working with multiple timezones, you can check the “Use timezones” box, and everyone can work in their own local time.

Once the grid is set up to your liking, you simply click on times that you would like to schedule the event, type in a name for the event in the field designated for that purpose, and click “Create Event.” Write down or copy the code displayed on the next page, and then you’ll be given a link that you can send to people you want to attend. They can then mark which of the times you’ve selected is good for them. You can opt to be notified of responses by email, or just periodically visit the public link provided  to see what time invitees are choosing.

You can also edit the event using another customized URL provided by the site. And, if you’re feeling really fancy, When is Good offers the ability to sync your event with an iCal file or URL. Not a bad list of features for a free service that requires no sign-up or sharing of personal information.

Obviously, this service is better for smaller events, since it could quickly become unwieldy with a long list of invitees, but there’s not limit to the type of event to which it could apply. A business meeting, a meeting with clients, teleconference, sales call, promotional event, tweetup or party would all benefit from When is Good’s help, and best of all, if your invitees can use email and a browser, they can use this app.

Have any good tips for scheduling meetings? Share them in the comments!

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So how do you host simultaneous online/virtual events? Very carefully, of course, but here are a few tips to help you straddle both worlds and pull off both events without a hitch.

1. Get Virtual Help

Before you delve into virtual world event planning, make sure you have established a talented team who are active in the virtual world, but also who you know and trust. I work mostly with people who I have met not only virtually but also in the real world, because there is an added accountability aspect to contacts you’ve met face to face. That said, I also have worked extensively with folks who I only know through the virtual world – in this case, Second Life. I don’t even know their real names and pay them either with Linden (Second Life’s currency) or on PayPal. My virtual world team includes designer Liadona Rau (whom I met in person after we had met in Second Life), multimedia developer KrisBott Gears (who used to work for me at Cybergrrl, Inc. in real life back in the 90s), and designer Chepooka Laval (whom I work with in real life in Alaska and whom I encouraged to get “inworld”).

2. Know the Lay of the Land

Not only am I personally familiar with the ins and outs of Second Life, just from rolling up my sleeves and trying things out, but I also co-own a virtual island so have a sandbox in which to develop things. This also means that I have a location to hold events when clients don’t have their own land. Because I’m so familiar with the potential of Second Life, the minute I’m approached to do a virtual event to complement a live event, I immediately know at least a dozen things that we can and should do for the Second Life version.

3. Think 3-D and Interactive

While it is a given that there should be branded and information-oriented posters at your virtual world event, you can easily go beyond the flat billboard-style signage. For my virtual events, some of the posters are also “notecard givers”,  meaning that avatars can obtain a notecard with background information about the company, organization or event, just by clicking on them. Other posters immediately launch a browser window, which opens on the web site of the party host. Notecard givers can also be set up to automatically email you the name of each avatar clicking on your object to receive items.

4. Think Promo Items (Freebies)

Nothing makes an avatar happier than receiving free gifts. I learned early on how to make t-shirts in Second Life and have a side virtual business making branded, promotional t-shirts for events, companies and organizations. For a recent event I held on Athena Island (the one I co-own) for Quaker Oatmeal, I turned to a virtual friend, MincedMedia Clip, to make an enormous virtual steaming bowl of oatmeal, complete with a spoon. To top it off, if an avatar clicked on the big bowl, they received an individual, small bowl of oatmeal with a virtual spoon that had an “eat” animation in it to animate the avatar scooping out oatmeal and eating it.

5. Show the Virtual Event in Real Life

At the Quaker Oatmeal live event, we had several laptops logged into Second Life, and some of us participated both in the real world and the virtual event at the same time. We were able to let others who were not familiar with Second Life look over our shoulders to demonstrate what was happening. At a previous event for Rasmuson Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska, the simultaneous Second Life event was projected onto a big screen in a performing arts center theatre. Having the virtual world component during a real-world event can build excitement and leave a lasting impression on the attendees.

6. Stay on Message Virtually

Because the Second Life aspect of a real world event can easily become the “main attraction,” make sure what you do virtually is in line with what is happening in the real world. Make sure the messaging is clear, the branding consistent, and the discussion relevant. It is too easy to get sidetracked in a virtual world, however, having “hosts” at events can keep the conversations running smoothly and key messages communicated frequently.

7. Hire Security

While your real world event probably doesn’t need a security detail, in Second Life, for example, security at events is smart. It is so easy to build and create objects in Second Life, and it is just as easy for a troublemaker – or “griefer” – to do the same at your event. There are folks in Second Life who make good Linden as security guards. Give them the permissions they need to boot out (eject) any pesky griefers and to remove obnoxious objects from your land. Before I started hiring security, I had several great events disrupted by griefers,  but now that I have them, not a single event has been attacked.

8. Spread the Virtual Word

Holding an event in Second Life doesn’t only enhance the real world event itself, but it also enhances the promotions and buzz factor of your event. There is an entire strata of Second Life bloggers, Second Life Facebookers, Second Lifers on MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, and more. Almost everyone who blogs their Second Life does so exclusively, so they will only write about things they experience or hear about inworld. When you provide interesting events in Second Life that add value to the world and provide value to the avatar, chances are you’ll get a good deal of extra ink and mentions in the social mediasphere because of your Second Life initiatives.

Overall, holding a virtual event at the same time as a real world event takes careful coordination and strategic attention to detail. Don’t skimp on your Second Life event or treat it as an afterthought. Virtual world events are valuable to, and attended by, people from  all over the world. You can expand your reach quickly and exponentially when you hold a virtual world event.

Have you organized real world/virtual world events? What has worked for you? What hasn’t?

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Conference organizer Stephanie Booth has recently announced that she’ll be touring the conference globally, with the next event landing in the UK on 12th September in the city of Leeds.

Like the Lausanne event, Going Solo Leeds will focus on practical and theoretical sessions for freelancing professionals, independent workers, the self-employed, remote workers and those who are considering ‘going solo’.

Though there’s a bias towards internet and media professionals, most of the sessions are appropriate for traditional independent workers too. Here’s a taster of the planned programme…

• Laura Fitton: You Only Get What You Give (Marketing and taking care of one’s social capital)

• Dennis Howlett: The Joys of Tax and Finance

• Panel moderated by Suw Charman: Setting Rates and Negotiating with Clients (Martin Roell, Stowe Boyd, Dennis Howlett)

• Suw Charman: When Passion Becomes Profession (Balancing Work and Life)

• Martin Roell: Self-Organisation for Effectiveness: Tools and Methods to Get Things Done

• Panel moderated by Stephanie Booth: Solo in a Networked World (Laura Fitton, Linda Broughton)

• Stowe Boyd: From The Far Side To The Dark Side: A Crash Course In Business Realities For Soloists

The Lausanne sessions are available online at DailyMotion and registrations for Going Solo Leeds are currently about halfway through the ‘early bird’ discount phase of £150 ($300/€190) with only a few such passes now available…so hurry!

Going Solo will be taking place at Leeds’ Old Broadcasting House on Friday 12th September, so it’s a great excuse to spend the weekend exploring one of the UK’s most exciting cities as well as skilling up on best practices in freelancing.

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