An outgrowth of the #EventProfs Twitter group, the inaugural Event Camp Twin Cities (ECTW) was conceived of as a meetings-industry labo- ratory, with new ideas percolating throughout the two-day conference. “First, we replaced two-thirds of the conference chairs with exercise
balls and couches,” said event-technology consultant and ECTW organizer Samuel Smith. Both new options proved popular. “Late in the day,” he said, “you could see that the people in the chairs were slumping, the people on the balls were bouncing, and that the peo- ple on the couches were happy.” Second, ECTWwebcast its conference sessions, usinga virtual
studio specially built on site, and hired a virtual emcee, Emilie Barta, to represent the voice of the virtual audience in the room. Barta also hosted three 20-minute “behind-the-sessions” programs designed especially for remote attendees, and acted as the virtual
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participants’ group leader during group projects. “Emilie did a great job of connectingwith the remote attendees—talkingdirectly to them, respondingto their comments and questions via Twitter,” Smith said. “It was a real dialogue.” Plus, the behind-the-sessions shows kept vir- tual attendees connected while face-to-face attendees were on a break. The results were “unbelievable,” Smith said. ECTW’s webcast statis-
tics showed that some attendees tuned in to the event for six hours or more. “We hoped to keep people for two hours at most,” he said. There were 75 in-person attendees in Minneapolis—plus 10 people
in Dallas and 15 in Basel, Switzerland, gathered together to participate virtually, joining 135 more virtual attendees who were registered as the event began. “When we got the final statistics, we had more than 550 online participants live duringthe event,” Smith said. “And we had more than 500 people watch the event [on ECTW’s website] after- ward.”—Barbara Palmer
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researcher Juliet Shorr, if you’re employed, you’re putting in 163 hours more each year (an extra month) than a sim- ilar person in the work- force 30 years ago. Clearly, “doing more with less” often means “doing more with fewer people.” You and I are besieged with day-to- day, minute-to-minute demands and pressures like never before: The typical manager
in a large organization now receives in excess of 150 e-mails a day, according to Gallup. According to the
American Management Association, employees spend almost two hours reading and responding to these messages. Knowledge workers
get interrupted, on aver- age, every three min- utes, according to research by the Univer- sity of California, Irvine.