Scott Klososky The technology expertwould do anything meeting plan-
ners askof him—including wearing a Speedo on stage. Barring that, he’d be happy if they started ‘taking revo- lutionary steps’ to involve him and all of their other speak- ers in their social-media efforts.
BY CHRISTOPHER DURSO
In this,the second decade of the thirdmillennium, what is left to say about social media and meet-
ings? Except, perhaps, “Okay, get to it”? Scott Klososky is a good person to ask. An expert speaker
on technology and leadership who presented a PCMA Mas- ters Series session on “Exploring Socially Augmented Events,” Klososky thinks there’s a lot that planners have yet to do when it comes to integrating social media into their meetings. Recently we talked to him about social-media concepts that are here to stay, revolutionary versus evolutionary change, and what else he’d do for organizations that employ him as a speaker.
On_the_Web
To watch Scott Klososky’s and Sheena Iyengar’s Masters Series presentations at PCMA 2011 ConveningLeaders, visit “On-Demand Sessions” in the Auditorium of PCMA365, atwww .pcma.org/PCMA365.htm. For more informa- tion about Klososky, visitwww.klososky.com. To view Iyengar’s TEDTalk, visit http:// bit.ly/9aAwdZ.
friends list or our electronic networkis going to improve over time. In otherwords, I have friends onTwitter, I have friends on Facebook, I’ve got connections on LinkedIn, I’ve got different people connected to me on my blog. And those things will all get standardized, where you’ll just have one list. It will become very platform-independent. That’s a great example of where the concept is always going to be with us now, which is the elec- tronic ability to network, which we didn’t used to have. Online reputation management clearly is something that’s
going to be with us forever. The fact that I can get online and search your name, find out what people thinkof you, lookat what you’ve published, you’ll be able to rate how relevant you are in the world—that is going to be with us from now on. I think the concept of crowdsourcing is clearly going to be
with us forever, and is probably going to have much more of an impact than anybody really understands right now.We prob- ably do a very poor job of crowdsourcing our attendees.We poll them on different things—what did you think of this speaker, or what kinds of subjects do you want next year?—and that’s about as sophisticated as we get. What has been given very lit- tle thought is, how can I harness this crowd of attendees to cre- ate content? The concept of crowdsourcing is in its very earliest stages, and everything that goes with crowdsourcing — for instance, this concept ofhowyou use a crowd to accelerate ideas and innovation, the wisdom of crowds, the ability of crowds to punish organizations through ratings systems—there are all kinds of interesting crowd dynamics we’re starting to see.
What social technologies are here for the long term, and which ones are transitional applications? Clearly there are some concepts that are with us from now on. The concept of being able to connect to people in some form of community—the electronic rolodex, as it were—is with us forever. Now, whether Facebook or LinkedIn is the appli- cation that does that, I don’t know. That’s probably going to change over time. I have a strong suspicion that howwe perceive our electronic
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When people talk about social technologies, do theytend to make a mistake byfocusing on specific applications as opposed to functions? Absolutely. Here’s the simplest example of that. One of the dumbest things that comes out of somebody’s mouth is when they say to me, “I don’t know about Twitter. I don’t think they have a revenue model. I’m not sure they’re going to be around very long.” That is one of the stupidest things that you could possibly say, because, first of all, they’ve got 175 million users. They can make money any time they feel like it. But besides that,