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More Than Remotely Successful #EVENTPROFS

Event Camp Twin Cities 2010 — Sept. 8–9, Minneapolis http://eventcamptwincities.com

Robert B. Tucker

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

Innovation Is Everybody’s Business: How to Make Yourself Indispensable in Today’s HypercompetitiveWorld By Robert B. Tucker

In his just-published book, Innovation Is Everybody’s Business, speaker, consultant, and bestselling author Robert B. Tucker explores four principles about innovation: 1. Innovation isn’t something you do after you get your work done. It’s how you do your work.

2. Innovation is about more than inventing new products. It’s about figuring out how to add value where you are.

3. You can innovate in any job, any depart- ment, or any organi- zation.

4. Innovation is about taking action.

To those who think that they don’t have time to innovate, Tucker has this to say: According to Harvard

ECTW’s virtual emcee, Emilie Barta, represented the voice ofthe virtual audience, improving engagement.

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

74 pcmaconvene December 2010

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.

continued on page 76 www.pcma.org

PHOTOS COURTESY SAMUEL J. SMITH, UPPER LEFT; NOAH WOLF, CENTER