Two great posts caught my eye this week. The first was from Jeff Hurt, a much re-tweeted and Facebook-posted blog on Thinking About How Conference Meeting Design Impacts the Brain. In this post, Jeff argues that people go to conferences for two main things: education and networking. To positively impact attendee experiences, he proposes 3 things:
- Get beyond the perception that meeting professionals don't know about the brain and how to create learning experiences. His theory is that we need to pay more attention to what works, how to engage people, what stimulates their emotions and their minds. You only have had to go to one boring conference too many to realize that this is true.
- Realize that the meetings industry needs to reach out beyond its own borders to see improved results. I completely agree with this one; the meetings industry is extremely incestuous. Sometimes its like trying to have an argument with people who all agree intensely with each other.
- Need to translate biological thought into conference design. Again, I am a big proponent of this, and am designing a conference for an industry association in 2011 that uses some of these premises...along with some others, including gaming..stay tuned!
I had just read this blog and was probably still nodding my head in agreement when another article crossed my virtual desk, this one from Fast Company, called Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love. For those of you wondering, this is where the drugs come in; the article explored the ability of social networking to produce oxytocin and the subsequent effects on the person generating it. TO BE CLEAR, oxytocin is the "cuddle hormone" (the "hug drug" is my term, given the natural propensities of the events world) not oxycontin, which is the painkiller.
Social networking apparently produces a lot of oxytocin. In fact, in this (it should be pointed out) very unscientific study, it produced the same amount of hormone as is produced by face-to-face interaction. This makes people feel good. Going back to Jeff Hurt's blog, social media may then have a greater impact on conference design than just marketing; it creates a real sense of "family", or network, one of the major reasons people go to conferences. The question for event professionals is how to design an event that uses this ability of social networking to create emotional connection to the event. Emotional connection then builds trust, and trust enables the creation of what my MBA professor Daphne Taras (now the Dean of the Business School at The University of Saskatchewan) calls social capital. (I think of this like a bank account for personal interaction; as more people trust you, the more personal integrity you display, your account balance goes up.)
Interestingly for event professionals, not only social networking creates oxytocin to be produced. So does massage...making a "whole person" concept at conferences even more important to develop (once again..stay tuned for this industry conference in 2011 I am helping to design. Again, more later). This fits in nicely with the concept of sustainable events and corporate social responsibility.
To Jeff Hurt's point, the process of designing conferences needs to take a giant step forward to incorporate fields like biology and psychology. While many event professionals are exceedingly good at what they do, what they do needs to change to become more effective. Perhaps in the future conference programs will have sessions on Using Biology to Create Effective Experiences and not just Networking 101.
