The fact that actor Ashton Kutcher has two million followers on Twitter isn't the kind of thing that impresses Alan Danenberg, director of marketing for the trade-show registration company CompuSystems Inc. Q What has made the Chicago-area executive sit up and take notice are the online networking and other practical business applications emerging from the Twittersphere - such as the ability to send "tweets," which are real-time messages limited to 140 characters, directly from the exhibit floor. Elsewhere in the world of Web 2.0, Danenberg was struck by the fact that more than 1,000 people joined a LinkedIn group created for the EXHIBITOR 2009 conference, which was held in Las Vegas in March. Two months later, Danenberg said, "And I'm still getting messages."

Lately, the buzz around social media has grown to a roar. Facebook, with more than 200 million users, is still the heavyweight in this arena, but in May LinkedIn passed the 40-million-user mark - 10 million more users than just seven months prior. With an estimated six million registered users, Twitter lags behind in sheer volume - but, according to the "social media guide" Mashable.com, Twitter has been growing at the ferocious rate of 2,500 percent a year.

That's how social media works, said Clara Shih, the author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. The more people who use a network, Shih said, "the more exponentially valuable it becomes."

Nobody really knows for sure what's happening with - or even what to do with - Twitter, according to social-networking strategist David Nour, the author of Relationship Economics: Transform Your Most Valuable Business Contacts Into Personal and Professional Success. "But it is dramatically evolving how we do business," Nour said. And one thing is certain: Social media "is not a trend, and it's not a fad. It is not going away."

The question then becomes, what are you going to do with it? Social media is really a platform for collaboration. So, Nour said, "What are you doing to harness its power and promise?"

‘Meet Me by the Twitterfall'
One place where you can glimpse a potential future for meetings-oriented social media is at Museums and the Web, an annual conference devoted to the online presentation of content by museums and other cultural institutions. By the very nature of their occupation, nearly all of Museums and the Web's attendees are early adopters of technology, already adept at creating Facebook pages and using other online tools for their organizations.

For this audience, the Twitter explosion is so last year - literally. A sizable contingent used the micro-blogging tool at Museums and the Web 2008 (MW2008), said Jennifer Trant, a partner in Archives & Museum Informatics, the Toronto-based firm that founded and organizes the conference. At that show, Trant projected a "Twitterfall" - a constantly updated real-time display of conference-related tweets - on a large monitor near the lobby registration desk, to demonstrate how the tool could be used. At MW2009, held in April at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the monitor was so popular, it morphed into a landmark: "People were saying, ‘Meet me by the Twitterfall,'" Trant said.

Trant begins proactively establishing an online presence for Museums and the Web up to a year in advance of the conference, setting up a group on LinkedIn, creating identifying "tags" for the photo-sharing site Flickr, and listing the conference in Yahoo's event guide (http://upcoming.yahoo.com). "We want to make sure our stake is in the ground," she said.

Trant added: "At this point, if the backchannel isn't actively created, it will form itself." In this context, the backchannel refers to the online comments and conversations conducted via computers or Web-enabled phones. Twitter employs "hashtags" as a way of labeling and organizing such chatter into topics; Trant circulated the Twitter hashtag "#mw2009" to the Museums and the Web community as soon as this year's call for papers went out.

A Harvest of Blogs
Actively promoting uniform tags for online information related to the conference allows Trant also to use them to identify and "harvest" blog posts, tweets, photographs, and other content relevant to the conference community. In addition, a Yahoo "Pipe" allows her to aggregate the digital information into an integrated feed, which is displayed on a conference Web site, at http://conference.archimuse .com. And then, "I watch all of those things, answer questions, or toss out things that might be useful in the discussion," Trant said. "I monitor, I orchestrate - but I don't manage, in the traditional sense of the word. It's really important to realize that groups are forming in spaces we don't control anymore."

Under Trant's direction, the Web site is organic and multi-faceted. She contributes posts, as does partner David Bearman, but their digital voices don't dominate other online contributors. For some, opening the digital space to such a degree might be kind of threatening, she said. "But I look on it as a window into what delegates actually need."

Keeping Up With the Backchannel
Heeding backchannel conversation can provide specific direction for improvements. For example, by reading online comments made during MW2008, Trant discovered that attendees were dissatisfied with the formal structure of the first day. So this year, she changed the format, scheduling an unconference in place of more traditional presentations. It was successful, Trant said, "because people were really prepped for it. [Organizers] talked about it online, members of the planning committee promoted it online, people were tweeting about it. That percolated the idea about what the unconference session was going to be, and got some themes going" even before attendees arrived at the meeting.

Social media has blurred both the physical and temporal boundaries of the conference, Trant said. The MW2009 Web site buzzed for months before the event, as prospective attendees discussed such topics as how to convince their managers to allow them to attend. Presentation slides from conference sessions appeared on the Web site during the meeting, so even individuals who weren't present could ask questions and participate in conversations around hot topics.

And, more than a month after the conference ended, well, it hadn't ended at all. Attendees who lived in and around London met in June at the British Museum to share their takeaways from the Indianapolis conference in a Pecha Kucha-style format - each participant displayed a maximum of 20 slides, spending no more than 20 seconds on each slide.

In Trant's view, the online community provides a scaffold for the face-to-face meeting. "The online community allows the conference to start at a higher level," she said, "because attendees know people before they've met them - which sounds really weird. But I've studied architectural history, I know places before I get to them. I go with an idea of something I want to explore." Similarly, attendees come to conferences prepared with a list of shared interests and people they want to connect with, Trant said, "and that makes the meeting a lot more productive."

A Layered Strategy
Unlike Museums and the Web attendees, members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) as a group aren't particularly tech-savvy - their research specialties lean toward laboratory science, rather than computer science. But the organization has embraced social media. In November 2007, Margaret Core, BIO's vice president for marketing and member communications, launched a BIO International Convention LinkedIn group; within three months, the group had 500 members, and today there are nearly 6,000. At BIO's 2009 meeting, held in Atlanta in late May, staff and volunteers used a mosaic of tools, including LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, video, and Flickr. "LinkedIn is a definite success story," said Susan Cato, BIO's director of Web and new media strategy.

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the growth of the LinkedIn group solely to the power of the application itself, Cato said. The group only started growing "by leaps and bounds" when BIO took an organic approach and began looking at the LinkedIn group and all of its social-networking activities as a whole. "We don't look at social-networking and social-media platforms as silos," Cato said. "They all work to connect the dots in this very messy web, to each other and to our main Web site."

Cato "layers" BIO's communications, broadcasting content using a variety of media to send messages, including Twitter, blog posts, links to podcasts, and the organization's main Web site. "Obviously, a tweet, at 140 characters, is going to be a different level of sharing than a blog post or an HTML e-mail," Cato said. "All of them may be communicating about the same thing, but we will just be connecting the dots using different tools." That approach makes it possible to create and deliver content in ways customized to how each person wants to receive it - increasing each individual's engagement. Cato's goal is to make the experience seamless, integrating social-networking tools to the point where the Web site is "a social network with content, rather than a Web site with social networking around it."
BIO's role, in Cato's view, is "to provide the tools, venues, and the opportunities to connect."

That means relinquishing control, to some degree: Cato recruits guest bloggers, both BIO members and non-members, to contribute to the main BIO Web site. "These are knowledge experts, and they are excited and passionate about what we do," she said. "We reach out to them, invite them to participate." Through their posts and the discussions many of them spark, the BIO community has begun to "peel apart the layers" surrounding biotechnology issues.

Cato said: "They start actually having conversations.... Creating conversations is the essence of what social media is all about." That's when you learn what people are really looking for and how they want to connect. "You take those ideas," she said, "and build on them."

Deploying ‘Strategery'
Cato provides structure - which she playfully called "strategery" - to make sure that messages that are important to BIO are addressed prior to and during the annual conference. A few months before this year's meeting, she and others at BIO sat down and plotted their key messages on a spreadsheet. Some were no-brainers, like conference registration deadlines.

But the team also identified topics and issues that they really wanted to see "gel" online, such as sustainability, Cato said. For those topics, BIO reached out to its blogger network and identified relevant sessions and other events. "We brainstormed those ideas around the topics and messages that were very important to us, and planned it out week by week," she said. "[We said,] ‘Okay, we're going to tweet this, we're going to podcast this, we're going to reach out to this person here.'" Then, during the conference, staff and volunteers blogged and tweeted from key sessions. Cato said: "And the conversations definitely increased around those topics."

Outside of the annual meeting, BIO's online communities debate issues, including controversial ones. They ask questions and advance arguments and counterarguments. What Cato finds exciting is how conversation increases engagement. "People are beginning to get even more engaged in what biotech is all about," Cato said, "in terms of how we really are working toward treatments and cures, working on food-supply challenges and environmental issues."

BIO can say all those things in canned messages, "but when information is communicated through conversation, in a human context," she said, "it is much more likely to resonate, be remembered, and to engage people than information that flashed across either a TV screen or a newspaper, or in an HTML e-mail."

Associations need to leverage social media more than other organizations, "because it is right up our alley," Cato said. Associations "already have created opportunities for people to organize and connect and make what they do stronger. If associations take what they are already doing, and make it make sense in a social-media world, it will be really, really powerful." But she adds a note of warning: If associations don't act, if they simply ignore social media, they're going to lose out. "And if they miss the boat," Cato said, "they are going to really miss the boat, because other self-organizing groups are going to pop up."

Power to the Tweeple
Even when social media is proactively integrated into a conference session, it can change communication in challenging and unpredictable ways. As an experiment at the Museums and the Web conference this year, Indianapolis Museum of Art Director Maxwell Anderson agreed to share the stage with Twitter. The room where Anderson spoke was set up with two large screens: Anderson projected his slides on one, while the other screen displayed tweets about his talk.

"It was as if there were two halves of me being cleaved, because I was in control of one screen, while the other screen was out of my control," Anderson said. A frequent lecturer at some of the world's top museums and universities, he said that in three decades of giving talks, "I've never had that experience of knowing that things could be happening up on the other screen that were in some way tangential to what I was trying to do, or might reflect a perspective that would seize the floor." While Anderson, the former director of New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, said he doesn't "despair of it," he did find it "disorienting" to watch "hundreds of faces as they flicked over to the other screen."

"It's a new era of zero-attention spans," speaker Jim Carroll, a futurist and trends and innovation expert, has written on his blog. Carroll was describing the experience of being "Twittermobbed" while speaking at a recent conference; one member of the audience, in particular, repeatedly questioned the focus of Carroll's talk as well as its content. "It's a little bit like having a bully in the room," Carroll said in an interview with Convene. "Like there's a bunch of kids who aren't paying attention, and they indicate when they're not happy if you're not doing what they want you to do. They really play into this thing that ‘we've got the power now.'"

During his presentation, Carroll stopped and read the comments aloud, challenging the online assertions. "I said, ‘Whoa, we've got some folks in the room who aren't too happy with what I'm suggesting here.' And I then told a whole other story, which sort of took them apart. And you could sort of see in the room that things began to turn around. They were happy because I acknowledged their existence and their power. So it's a really weird thing. It's a fascinating thing, and it's both a good and a bad thing."

Issues over the use of Twitter aren't only about power. The speed at which tweeting audiences blast conclusions and comments can be at odds with the amount of time it takes for a good story to unfold. "I think what a lot of speakers do on stage is tell a story," Carroll said. "It takes a little bit of time to build a story that emphasizes a key point. You've got to be a storyteller, because you have to engage the room and add some humor. And I think with Twitter, they're so immersed in their screens and reading each other's posts back and forth, they don't hear the story anymore. I think as a speaker, you've got to acknowledge them at the start and you don't let them drive the agenda."

Embracing the Shift
But other speakers, including David Nour, think that letting the audience respond and help drive the agenda is exactly what makes social media so valuable. "Speakers need to change their formats to encompass the new real-time feedback," Nour said. "This isn't just about you listening to me pontificate for an hour."

Nour monitors Twitter comments during his presentations, and plans ahead to take time to address online feedback."The content has to get shorter and more concise," he said, "but the interactivity level goes up exponentially."

On_the_Web

Read David Nour's insights and research about social networking at www.relationshipeconomics.net.

The Museums and the Web online conference Web site can be found at http://conference.archimuse.com.

Check out the Biotechnology Industry Organization's Web site at www.bio.org. Read Susan Cato's blog on using social media, Virtually Anything Is Possible, at http://susancato.com.

Jim Carroll blogs at www.jimcarroll.com/blog/index.html.

Follow Convene on Twitter. Our handle is pcmaconvene.

Five to Start

Marketing executive David Nour, author of Relationship Economics, has researched 400 social-networking sites, and maintains a presence on 100 of those. For the rest of us, Nour recommends committing to the top five tools. "Really learn how to use them," Nour said, "not just as a Web site or a destination, but as a platform for networking."

1. LinkedIn - LinkedIn is by far the most prevalent social-networking site for business professionals, Nour said. Get on it, but don't just sign up and sit there. "Build a content-rich profile that fully describes you," Nour said. "Invite your most trusted relationships. Recommend those you would in the real world, and get recommended by those you've done good work for."

2. Facebook for business - Again, getting engaged is key. "Build fan pages, build groups, proactively participate on your wall. Post articles, post videos," Nour said. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. "Get to know them, and learn how to use them for business purposes."

3. Twitter - "There are 32 million people on Twitter - and most of it is garbage," Nour said. But Twitter can be incrediblyinsightful and useful when used as a real-time conversation and research tool. Nour once engaged in expensive and time-consuming focus groups and surveys for clients - but now he gets the same result in a fraction of the time and cost with Twitter.

4. Slideshare.net - This is the "YouTube" for presentations, Nour said. Enough said.

5. Jigsaw - Jigsaw has compiled more than 12 million business contacts, complete with direct phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Users earn points for uploading their own contacts, and then "spend" those points to search and download other contacts. "The beautiful thing is that the community is updating the contacts constantly," Nour said.

To his top-five list, Nour adds two "bonus" tools: ping.fm, which allows users to simultaneously update their presence on 40 different social-networking sites, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook pages; and introNetworks, which can be used to create private social networks. The first introNetworks social network was built to connect Technology, Entertainment, and Design - TED - conference attendees. This is the only tool Nour recommends that isn't free, but its advantage is that "it's behind a firewall, so it's much more secure. And you have enormous control over who you invite and who gets accepted into a network."

Blessed Aren't the Noisemakers

Technology is an important element of social networking - but it's only a sliver of what social networking is all about, according to social-media strategist David Nour.
"Social networking is about listening," he said. "Social networking is about conversation."
Nour offers the following tips to separate you and your organization from the chattering masses:

Define your audience. "First and foremost," Nour said, "you have to get very succinct about who you are trying to date. Personally or professionally, you cannot date everybody. So who are you trying to engage?"

Know what your audience cares about. "Ask yourself, ‘What do they deem of interest or value?'" Nour said. "One of the fundamental challenges of social networking is that people are too focused on writing about themselves: ‘You just sit there and be quiet, and let me tell you about me.' Well, I don't care about you!" Instead, understand what your audience cares about and what is going to evoke a response.

Tease with insight - and provide value. Twitter's 140-character limit means you have to get to the point. But tease with something of value. "People on the Web are browsers, not readers - anytime you provide something on a social-network site, it needs to be short, pragmatic, poignant," Nour said. "Give me the option to learn more if I am interested
in what you just said. Provide a link."

Don't sell. "That will unequivocally turn people off," Nour said. "Nobody likes to be sold. Everybody loves to buy. Lead them down the path they are dying to go, which is to
buy from you. To buy your ideas, buy your unique perspectives, buy your products and services."