Most of these helpful folks are well-connected to a large network of people, but they don’t build this network by being selfish and difficult to work with. The people I know who fit this mold are usually generous and “pay it forward” in return for the help they’ve received from other people. Paying it forward is something I’ve tried to achieve in my professional life, and here are a few ways that I do it:

• Career mentoring. While formal mentoring programs work well for other people, they always seem a little forced to me. However, I’m often happy to sit down with people just starting their career or moving into a new one to provide suggestions and ideas for ways to improve. If nothing else, I can share what’s worked for me over the years and hope that they find something useful in it.
• Sounding board. I like to spend time talking to people who are working on interesting, innovative projects. In most cases, I learn something from them while also providing them with some feedback. Providing a fresh perspective and looking at something for the first time can often uncover things you miss when you’re very close to a subject.
• Spontaneous connections. Not everyone asks for help or even knows that they could use some assistance. When I see someone struggling with a project or activity, I’ll try to make a spontaneous connection to someone I think might be able to help. However, this only works if it’s unobtrusive and not too pushy. In these cases, I’ll usually point out that I know someone who has been through something similar, then offer to make an introduction. This leaves it up to them to decide if they want the introduction or want to continue on their own. I know that I’ve been grateful for similar connections in the past.
• Organize events. Organizing in-person events and meetups where people can connect and collaborate is another way to pay it forward. We’ve all attended events organized by other people and a good way to contribute back to the community is by organizing our own events, or helping someone else organize one. This gives other people a place to connect with like-minded people while giving you some additional visibility at the same time.
• Community participation. There are many existing online communities where you can contribute some expertise or be helpful as time permits. Answering questions or providing some other help as part of an online community is a great way for busy people to pay it forward and help others while making fewer commitments that they might not be able to fulfill when time is tight.

How do you pay it forward?

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I’ve been thinking about how community building and events fit together a lot lately, and I wanted to share some suggestions for both attendees and organizers.

Evening Activities

As an organizer, always try to make sure that we have some fun and interesting evening activities for attendees. Just in the past year at events, I’ve toured the Guinness Storehouse and attended a football game (that’s soccer for the Americans) in Dublin, gone on a river dinner cruise in Boston, had a casino night at a resort in Oregon and attended more parties than I can count at SXSW. Here are a few tips for event organizers to maximize community building at evening activities:

• Have food and drinks (free if possible). This encourages people to actually attend rather than skipping out to have dinner in small groups.
• Organize group transportation. This removes one more barrier to attend and encourages people to continue talking to people during the trip. I’ve seen this work as a group walking a few blocks to the event, or in waves of buses.
• Encourage mingling. You want to encourage people to move around and not sit in the same place with the same few people all evening. Some standing tables, activities (like casino nights) that encourage people to move around and having multiple rooms with different things to see and do can all encourage people to talk to more people.
• If budgets are tight, this isn’t the place the skimp. In most cases, you can find a company to sponsor the evening activities if you don’t have enough money in the regular event budget.

For attendees, you should resist the urge to skip the evening activities and go back to the hotel to do “real work.” Remember that meeting people is a goal of your event, and may be even more important than attending sessions; don’t short change yourself by going to the conference and then spending all of your time doing work that you could have done at home. Focus on the conference; you can always do your work on the plane. Here are few tips to help you make the most out of the evening activities as an attendee:

• Resist the urge to sit with people you already know well, or sit with one friend and invite a few people that you don’t know very well to join your table.
• Move around and talk to a few people that you don’t already know.
• If there aren’t any evening activities, make your own. Find something fun to do, and invite a group of people to join you.

Play Games

I’m not talking about those dorky team-building games. Organizers should resist the urge to attempt to force people to play stupid games under the guise of meeting new people. I’m talking about fun games, like Mafia and Werewolf, that can be played by large groups where attendees can meet new people while having a great time. Werewolf is a particularly good game for community building because it gives people something to do and something to talk about while putting everyone on the same level: celebrities, students and executives all play as equals. People who doesn’t know many attendees can play werewolf and meet some new people, and for others, it helps get them out of their little club of friends to meet someone new. I like to make additional decks of Werewolf cards to hand out on the first night to encourage people to play other ad hoc games of Werewolf on future evenings. It’s also a great activity for after some of the more official evening activities.

The beauty of these kinds of games is that anyone can organize a game, since they don’t really require any special equipment and can be easily played with scraps of paper in lieu of printed cards. You don’t need to be a conference organizer, and I encourage conference attendees to organize evening games. If you aren’t a fan of Werewolf, there are plenty of other, similar games.

Shared Spaces and Hacker Lounges

When I organize events, I try to make sure that we have some kind of shared space (or hacker lounge for the tech events) where people can hang out together to talk or collaborate on some projects. If there are a lot of people traveling to the event and staying in a hotel, I try to put this lounge in the hotel and keep it open 24 hours, which encourages late night games and people getting together to be social or work together. All you really need is a room and few tables and chairs at the minimum, but to really encourage people to use it, you can add some free snacks, ping pong tables, video games or other social activities. This is a great place for people to get together for late night games; I’ve played many Werewolf games until the wee hours of the morning in these lounges. For single day events or local conferences, a big room with tables and power strips that is dedicated to attendees (no sessions) can fill this need.

If the organizer hasn’t provided some kind of shared space, attendees should make one. Declare one of the hotel lounge areas, lobby or bar as the informal lounge, and encourage people to meet you there.

Interested in learning more about the intersection of real-world and virtual collaboration? Come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on December 9.

What are your favorite tips for encouraging community building at events?

Photo by Reggie Suplido 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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Conferences often come with very long days that start with breakfast and move on to sessions, lunches, more sessions and then evening events and after-parties; all of which can leave you feeling exhausted and overworked, if you aren’t careful. Before you start thinking about how to approach the event, you need to think about your goals. Are you there to learn, to network, for press coverage or some other purpose? Most of us probably have overlapping goals for any event, but it really can help to understand what you want to get out of the event.

I’m here at OSCON partly to blog about some of the interesting sessions talking about the community that I manage and to network with other people in the industry. As a result, I needed to attend a few sessions and spend time talking to people, while still finding time to keep up with work and blog about the event. The trade-off is that I spent most of the breaks talking to people while doing my work during times when there weren’t any sessions that I needed to attend.

The key to attending events and getting the most out of them is to stay focused on what is important: Your goals and the purpose for attending in the first place. It can be easy to spend the whole time multitasking — trying to attend sessions and work simultaneously — while not managing to do well at either task. When I attend sessions, I try to ignore or even shut off my email and the social networking streams on my laptop, while leaving a note-taking window open so that I can jot down any key points from the presentation. Admittedly, I’m not perfect, and I find myself checking or responding to email sometimes, but whenever I do that, I become much less engaged in the presentation. On the other hand, I skip some sessions entirely and use that time to catch up on work or blogging. This helps me make sure that I carve out enough time for event activities and my regular work while accomplishing both of them relatively efficiently.

One common mistake I see is when people try to do all of their regular work and attend the conference at the same time. Usually this means neglecting the conference or falling short on sleep. I’ve seen colleagues and friends who fly to a conference in another city and then spend most of their time sitting in on conference calls. If you are going to be spending all of your time attending your regular meetings and doing your regular work you might as well save the company some money and stay home to work. When I attend a conference, I cancel every meeting that I don’t absolutely have to attend and limit the number of non-event meetings. This gives me a break from the regular routine and lets me focus more on the conference. I also try not to work late into the night so that I can get a reasonable amount of sleep to avoid being a zombie during the day. So far this week, I’ve been pretty good, but I’ll admit to pulling a couple of late nights despite my best efforts to get my work done during the day.

What are your favorite tips for staying productive while still getting most out of your conference?

Photo by Flickr user wesleynitsckie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic 2.0 license.

Some of the tactics people use to generate online buzz are understandable enough. There’s the Twitter contest, which has become very popular of late, in which a company will give away a free product or service everyday to one random person who’s tweeted their message. And then there’s the virtual Facebook event, usually at launch or in celebration of some other milestone, like a certain number of units sold.

I’ve been invited to a number of Facebook events in my time, the majority of which I couldn’t actually “attend” per se, short of just marking the time on my clock at home and being done with it. I’ve attended a few, too, but mostly when I was already quite excited about the product or service in question, and more than willing to buy it when it became available.

A case in point was the Asus Eee PC 1000HE (the first netbook with all-day battery life) Facebook launch event. I attended it, but I was going to buy that machine on launch day anyway, so I only signed up for the event in order to get updated about release date information. The event didn’t sell me the product, but it did ensure that I was as informed as possible about when and where I could buy it.

I’ve used events myself before to launch publications, but again, the value of the virtual event as a sales tool was questionable. In all cases, almost anyone who RSVP’d to the event did so either because they had contributed to the publication in question, or because they were being good friends. The problem with a virtual event is that you can RSVP without consequence: no one is making appetizers or arranging seating based on your promise to come or stay home.

So as a sales tool and as a gauge of consumer anticipation, Facebook events aren’t ideal. But even if they aren’t ideal, are they worth the effort? And how much effort is required? On the surface, making an event seems like an easy enough thing. Just set a time and date, choose an image and enter a description and you’re done, after you invite some people and encourage them to invite others.

But that’s not really all there is to it. You have to encourage discussion on the site in order to keep people interested, which is one of the hardest tasks anyone working on the web can do. You also should consider sending out updates to draw people back to the event page, and to keep everyone up-to-date. The problem is that if you do this too frequently, you can quickly become a pest, and the threshold of what constitutes annoyance will vary person to person.

In the end, I’ve decided not to continue trying to use Facebook virtual events to help with my marketing efforts. It’s true that they have some advantages over Twitter marketing (they are stable, non-repetitive and discoverable), but the effort required doesn’t seem to justify the payoff. Better, I think, to just wait until something launches and send out a notice then, although you won’t generate any kind of buzz ahead of launch using that method. But it might depend on the level of anticipation to begin with; my experience has mostly been with extremely niche products, where it’s hard to generate much fervor outside of a core demographic anyway. Maybe Facebook marketing is best left to the big boys.

What’s your experience with Facebook virtual events, both as an administrator and as an invitee/guest? Do you think they are an effective marketing tool?

Sprouter, like many web apps these days, takes some significant cues from Twitter. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be pretty much Twitter designed for a specific target audience: entrepreneurs.

Unlike Twitter, at Sprouter you have a dedicated profile page. It still keeps things short and sweet, rather than presenting a wealth of info like you might find on Facebook or LinkedIn, but you have enough space to let other entrepreneurs know a bit about you. You also get access to a follower/following count, just like you have with Twitter.

Also borrowed from Twitter is the 140-character limit for your posts, for which Sprouter provides the slightly more business-oriented prompt “What are you working on?” You can use hashmarks to flag posts with specific tags, and this is where Sprouter really starts blooming. Hashtagged terms automatically appear as tags at the bottom of your post composer, and they form the basis for two things: topics and events.

Clicking on any hashtag will automatically return a page for that term, which will tell you what it signifies, who its owner or creator is, and whether it’s an event or just a general topic. You’ll also see a list of posts containing that hashtag, and have the option to follow the tag itself, right from within the app, which is something you definitely can’t do from the basic Twitter app.

If you’re a fan of tweet-ups, industry-specific chats and online conferences, Sprouter is for you. It also has great promise for people looking for real-time collaboration and feedback from other entrepreneurs and web workers, without the static, background noise and spam that comes along with Twitter.

While Sprouter is in private beta for the time being, its creators are aiming for a launch in the fall, and the service seems to be pretty solid in its current state, so I wouldn’t anticipate a long wait before it goes public. The people behind Sprouter are also planning on integrating the service with desktop applications and outside services, so it stands to become even more useful down the road.

Have you tried Sprouter? Let us know how you think it compares to Twitter in the comments.

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Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.

Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.

Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more.

I wanted to get a second opinion on the content, so I asked Selena Deckelmann, an unconference organizer currently working on a community-organized, open-source event in Portland, about the future of community-organized events vs. more traditional conferences. Here’s her take on the differences:

“I think community-organized/grassroots events are the only way effective conferences focused on learning and getting work done will be organized in the future. I don’t think companies dedicated to conference management can keep up with and offer the technical depth and 1:1 networking opportunities that a focused, community-driven event can.

Photo by Kirrily Robert

The smaller, more focused and more local you can make events, the better educational, personal and professional development opportunities people get.

There’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to a 10k-person event. Sure, it’s exciting to be with that many people, and interesting to see what kinds of entertaining spectacles companies come up with to draw in a crowd in an expo. But, for me, I get way more out of a 1:1, a 10-15 person group discussion. If the goal is education and learning, you need smaller, focused groups.”

Many people underestimate the value of small group discussions as an opportunity to learn about new ideas. Being able to participate in a small group discussion where each person can ask more questions and interact on a personal basis, rather than the traditional presentation and panel model at most commercial conferences, can be a great learning experience.

What types of conferences do you prefer? What are your experiences with the content differences between traditional conferences and community-organized events?

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In previous posts, I’ve talked about attending local events and meetups or scheduling new ones if you can’t find any that meet your needs. In this post, I wanted to talk about something bigger than the typical meetup: community-organized events. BarCamps, unconferences, and similar events have been popping up all over the world in increasing frequency. I’m an organizer for the local BarCamp in Portland, and I have attended many of these types of events. I’m planning to attend BarCampAustin this weekend, which is running in parallel with SXSW.

The organization of these events is very different from typical commercial events. While commercial events tend to be organized by professional organizers who are being paid to produce the conference, community organized events are often organized by unpaid volunteers from the community who are passionate about the topic. Both types of events have their strengths and weaknesses and their place in the industry, but both are also very different in both organization and attendance.

Attendance

I have noticed that many organizers and a high percentage of attendees of BarCamps tend to be web workers. Maybe web workers tend to enjoy the self-organizing format and are passionate enough about their work to attend these events, many of which are held on weekends. Since many of us are self-employed, the free or very low cost nature of unconferences may appeal to those of us who don’t have a big company’s training budget to pay for the more expensive events.

Organization

Community organized events come with a special set of challenges for organizers, including:

• Putting together a really solid team of people who can meet deliverables and commit the time to organize the event without getting paid.
• Dealing with sponsorships and other monetary contributions by partnering with or forming a legal entity to handle the money.
• Finding sponsors or other contributions to fund event expenses.
• Budgeting for the event and dealing with unexpected costs.
• Estimating attendance and finding an affordable venue with a space that works well for your needs (unconferences have different needs than traditional conferences).
• Promoting the event to make sure that the right people know about it.

I frequently attend both “traditional” commercial conferences and community events, and my preference is starting to drift toward community events. I feel like I get a broader perspective, and I seem to learn more at community events. I would love to hear more about your experiences with community events, including advantages and disadvantages, and challenges and opportunities.

What is your experience with attending or organizing community organized events?

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Many of us are social beings who enjoy interacting with other people, and until you leave an office environment, you probably don’t realize how much contact you have with other human beings throughout the day. In an office, you run into people in the hallways, in the lunchroom, and at meetings. It can be easier to have social conversations or even to bounce ideas off of someone when you run into them unexpectedly. When you work remotely, whether you are a telecommuter or a freelancer, it is possible to go the entire day without ever seeing or speaking to anyone. However there are also plenty of ways to replace those interactions with new ones.

Use technology to have conversations with other people. Instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the primary ways that I talk to people online throughout the day. I regularly chat with clients, friends, and peers in my industry using several of these tools. I’ll admit to not being much of a phone person, since I prefer to talk to people online or in person, but giving people a quick call to chat about work or anything else can help provide some additional contact with other people.

Have lunch with old friends, peers, clients or other web workers. I spend too many lunches dropping crumbs onto my keyboard because it is just too easy to work through lunch when you work remotely. I make myself schedule a couple of lunches a week. It gets me out of the house, and I always end up having interesting conversations with people.

Join or start a group exercise program. This could be as simple as planning a walk several days a week with someone you know in the neighborhood or joining an exercise class at the gym. Combine physical activity to get your butt out of the chair and social interactions!

Take your work out of the house. I like to spend some time working in coffee shops with other people to break up the time working in my home office. I usually save up some work that can easily be done with some distractions (email, administrative tasks, etc.) while saving the client work that requires focused concentration for my home office.

Attend local industry meetups. Find a couple of groups of people working in your industry and attend a few regular events. As Pamela noted, it’s a great way to meet new people with common work interests. You can also use these events to bounce ideas off of people or get feedback on some of your ideas.

How do you connect with other people while working remotely?

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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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