POKEN FACE: “We had something like over 17,000 Poken exchanges [at CHI 2011],” said Janeé Pelletier. “For some people, it got to be a contest.When you exchange some- thing, they call it pok- ing—likewhen you poke someone on Facebook—and sev- eral peoplewere competing [for the top spot] because Poken posts statis- tics on its site.”
Poking Around With a high-tech group, it’s hard to know if a tool offered for use during a con- ference will be cut- ting-edge enough to meet its members’ standards. One tool —Poken—given to attendees at the ACM CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems made its planner, Conference & Logistics Consultants’ Janeé Pelletier, CMP, a little nervous. A USB stick that
get up and leave during one session to go to another“if somethingmore interesting is goingon inanother room,”Pelletier said.“Alotof themwill be sitting there,maybe reading theTwitter feed on their phone, and if 10 people in the next room tweet, ‘This presentation is really great, you’ve got togethere,’ theymay actually getupandleave that session to go to the other—andwithin their cul- ture, that’s perfectly acceptable. It encourages the presenters tomake sure thatwhat they’re present- ing is engaging and lively.”
CuttingThrough Social-Media‘Clutter’ Not surprisingly,CHI is anideal incubator for start- up tech companies.This year’s conference served as a“sortof a test subject,”Pelletier said, forEvent- Burn, a social-media aggregator.EventBurn took all of the different social-media streams thatwere going on related to the conference—Facebook feed, Twitter account, Twitter hashtag, Flickr stream,LinkedIn group—and put themtogether in one place. “We’ve had an aggregator before,” Pelletier
said, “which is sort of an ongoing list of the things that arehappening rightnow—this iswhat so and so said on Twitter, this is what so and so
40 pcma convene September 2011
posted on Flickr.”What EventBurn does beyond that“is take all the informationthat’sout there and look at howoften things are used, and bubble the ones that aremore popular to the surface.” For example, during CHI 2011, there were
12,000 bits of social media — that is, people mentioned the conference or used its hashtag 12,000 times. “EventBurn took all of those bits,” Pelletier said, “and said, ‘Okay, these are themost recent, these are themost interesting,basedonhow many times they are being used,’” and brought those items up top. Big plasma screens at the registration area and
at an Internet café displayed theEventBurn page, or attendees couldaccess itontheirowndevices via theweb. “What theEventBurn guys tell people is that it
cuts through the clutter,” Pelletier said. It’s a tool “that helps people understand social media by showing themthe best ofwhat’s going on, rather thanwhat’s themost recent. It takes the addition- al step and says of the things that are happening right now—these are the things that we think you’ll findmost interesting.” Which sounds like a most human way to process information.
you plug into your computer to upload your contact informa- tion, Poken is like a digital business card. “They’re about the size of a quarter, and when you touch them together, they light up to indicate that you’ve ex- changed informa- tion,” Pelletier said. “I wasn’t really sure if this group would go for it because it seemed a little old- school to me—I mean, they’re not really business-card kind of people—but everyone loved it.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.
Innovative Meetings is sponsored by the Irving, Texas, Convention and Visitors Bureau, www.irvingtexas.com.