Beyond Credits A Blog About What Continuing Legal Education Should Be

29Jan/100

From the Archives: EventVue, Twitter, Kevin O’Keefe and #ACLEA

I don't have time to be writing this post right now. I should be packing up for my trip to the ACLEA (Association of Continuing Legal Education Administrators) Conference in Orlando tomorrow.

But yesterday I set our conference hashtag (#ACLEA) on the recently relaunched EventVue platform (if you're going to or interested in the conference, be sure to check it out). And this reminded me of how great Twitter can be at events, which reminded me of a post I wrote in 2008 claiming that Twitter really hits its stride at events and conferences. I can't find that post to save my life, but I did find this one, which happens to be even more relevant.

First, it's the first write-up I ever did of EventVue (a company just down the road from me in Boulder) and I highlighted its Chatter function, which is now the focus of the relaunch I just mentioned.

Second, I talked about Twitter for legal conferences and yearned for the day we might get to put it to use:

I love the new features. Focusing on legal conferences, my first thought was that this would be a ways off for me. But then this from Kevin O'Keefe. If lawyers, perhaps the latest of the late-adopting crowd, are already starting to look to twitter as a serious business tool, we might not be as far off as I thought.

Finally (and this is the kicker), I got a comment from Kevin O'Keefe on lawyers and Twitter.  From Kevin:

Thanks for mentioning my take on Twitter Alli.
Though I think it’s going to take some time for a app like Twitter to make significant inroads in the legal field, I am seeing Twitter discussed more and more. Just this week at a Law Firm PR Conference in Chicago, Twitter came up on a number of occasions.

Why is all this relevant? Because Kevin will be the keynote speaker of a plenary topic on social media at the conference. And I'll be part of the follow-up panel discussing this very topic with him.

Twitter is almost nothing like it was in May 2008 when I wrote this post. Sure, the interface has changed only slightly, but its population has exploded, which has made it harder to manage and build relationships--at least for me. But its massive growth and popularity is also the reason we'll be talking about it this week and I can't complain about that.

To those heading to Orlando, I'll tweet (and see) you soon.

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1Mar/090

Considerations When Taking Education Programs Online

ASAE has posted a video recap of a session about online education from its recent Great Ideas Conference. In the recap, Howard Horwitz of the American College of Healthcare Executives talked about things to do when rolling out online education that has been repurposed from live content.

Some of the ideas he mentioned:

  1. Start with a market awareness campaign to get people familiar with the new medium.
  2. Offer giveaways or deals to help generate interest.
  3. Solicit feedback from your market by sending a free program and offering education credit to those who respond with feedback on the medium.
  4. Look at products with most appeal and lead with those to enable immediate success.
  5. Stress the benefits and counter resistance.
  6. Consider a blended platform. For example, offer the "hard content" as a typical online program, but then provide an opportunity to particiate in interactive exercises online with other attendees and speakers.

Side note: ASAE has come under recent attack about the ways it has chosen to interact (or, more accurately, not interact with its attendees on social media), and while it may have some things to learn from its members about Twitter, I continue to believe it is doing a great job of using tools like YouTube to inform and educate those who can't attend its conferences. This is especially critical in this economy for organizations like ASAE, which are seeing their members' budgets slashed (often to $0). The more people ASAE can reach during this tough time, the more members it will see when budgets start loosening up.

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23Feb/091

Twitter Event Chat Tonight – #eventprofs

Just a quick post to point you to the Eventprofs Twitter Chat, an initiative started by Ready2Spark. She's started a weekly chat (Mondays, 9pm EST), the agenda will be driven by you, and it's shaping up to be great.

Instructions for participating are here.

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8Feb/090

Didn't Make It to MeetDifferent this Year? You Don't Have to Miss All the Fun.

There are still ways to keep real-time pace with the discussions they'll be having this year.

  1. Tune in to the opening general session today at 10:00 am EST (information on Meet Different's website).
  2. Follow it on Twitter. Several attendees are talking about it and you can easily track their comments because they mark them #meetdifferent (take a look at the screen shot below). If you're on Twitter, consider following people like @mcallen and @jkhewett who are really pumping out the updates.

If I come across other ways I'm tracking the event as it proceeds, I'll be sure to update you.

Meetdifftwitter

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16Sep/081

Easy Ways to Track Your Event's Digital Brand on Twitter

Yesterday, I twittered the following (which is, by the way, continuing to be a true statement):

SixApart Twitter

Within the hour, I received a notice that SixApart, the maker of Typepad, is now following me on Twitter. Somehow, I don't think this was a coincidence.

More and more companies (and people) are tracking their Twitter reputations. If issues are going to come up, you may as well be on the front line to address them. If people hate (or love) your event, don't you want to know the specifics as soon as their online contacts do?

And don't worry--tracking what's being said is the easy part.

I've always tracked keywords (variations of my name, this site, CLE, event marketing, etc.) using RSS feeds based on searches I've run on Twitter's search engine (formerly Summize). These are easy to do. Simply go the search page, enter your terms, and copy the "feed for the query" into your reader.

But if you don't have a reader, or if you prefer to review the results in a different format, you have another option. TweetGrid allows you to view up to nine queries on one screen. Simply select the number of queries you want, enter your queries, and save the url so you can come back to it anytime. Here's an example of a three-cell TweetGrid.

So--what are people saying about you?

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14Sep/082

Live Twittering During Your Presentation

Paul Gillan, blogging at Pistachio (a great resource for microsharing applications like Twitter), recently talked about the pros and cons of the instant feedback that Twitter can give presenters during their presentations. (I've talked about this before, here.)

He cites the main positive as the ability to quickly tailor your presentation to the sophistication and preferences of the audience, but cautions that the major drawback is the possibility of caving to the demands of only the most vocal in your audience.

I think we have to deal with this problem even with our old-fashioned, paper evaluations. There are people who fill out evaluations and people who don't (and people who simply go through the motions of checking "good" for all presentations). When reviewing evaluations, we always keep in mind that we're only getting one piece of the picture. Of course, we have a little more time to review those evaluations with a discerning eye when they're not popping up on a screen behind us as we speak.

What do you think? Have any of you attempted to run an event or give a presentation with Twitter humming along in the background? To use it effectively, are you actually using a "Twitter moderator" who reviews (and responds to) the real-time tweets? What issues have you run into?
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27Aug/081

3 Annoying Things About DNC Twittering

I really like Twitter (I first talked about it here) and I love how it can be used during events to create a better experience for people at the event (and for people who wish they could be). Twitter seems to reach its full potential when being used in connection with events.

As a PR friend noted in her company blog yesterday, there is no shortage of twittering about the DNC. I have really enjoyed hearing from everyone and I think Twitter's role in the DNC is a success, but I have run into some things that I think should be improved upon next time around.

1. Companies or media groups (and the occasional individuals) who don't follow others.

It's OK if you don't follow me just because I follow you. I completely understand the drowning sensation that can come from following too many people and you really should just follow those you are interested in. But please--follow someone.

I have noticed that many companies (media or otherwise) have created new Twitter accounts for the DNC. Whoever recommended that these organizations start using Twitter should have explained that Twitter is best used as a conversation--not a megaphone. If you don't follow anyone, you are the equivalent of the loud jerk at the party who won't let anyone else get a word in. You're letting people know that you don't care about what they are saying. And if that is the case, you have no business dabbling in social media. Go back to printed news.

2. Hash tag chaos.

I am as responsible for this as anyone else. Someone--anyone--should have stood up and made the argument for specified, uniform hash tags for an event of this magnitude. For example, I would love to be able to differentiate between people tweeting from the Pepsi Center, people tweeting from Denver, and people tweeting from home. I'm not saying one post is more important than the other, but they do provide very different perspectives and their usefulness is increased if you can easily search based on these parameters.

Are there free drinks in some room at the Pepsi Center? I bet others in the Convention would love to know.

Is James Carville eating at the Wynkoop Brewery? If you're staying in Denver, you might want to try to stop by.

Did the Pennsylvania bar you were watching Hillary's speech in heckle her? That observation has a whole different type of intrigue.

You can still sort through the volumes of tweets with the #DNC08 tag, but it takes some work.

Of course, you can't force people to use hash tags (or to use the correct hash tags) and people can (and have been) abusing hash tags to get their tweets to appear in popular searches. But--if you get enough people to do it right, it will be a more pleasant Twitter experience for all of us.

3. Peripheral events not taking advantage of Twitter.

Yesterday, I attended the Emily's List Gala Reception, where Hillary Clinton, Barbara Mikulski, Michelle Obama, and others spoke. I sent out several tweets from the event, but could not easily find tweets from others there. Both the attendees and the organizers of DNC-related events would benefit from the interaction and publicity afforded by Twitter, but without some organized effort to pull the attendees together on Twitter (like a uniform hash code) you're left searching through the endless sea of #DNC08 tweets.

There are countless DNC-related events that are missing out on Twitter. Maybe I just missed it (if I did, someone please tell me), but I couldn't even identify a hash code for Monday's Rock the Vote event.

***

These three items aside, it is exciting to see Twitter playing such a role in the Convention. Even if you're in Denver (and while to those of us here it seems like everyone is, in reality most people aren't), it is impossible to see everything and it is great to get first-hand accounts in real time. Twitter is making that happen.

Want to follow me on Twitter? I'm @gerkmana.

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22May/084

Get a Jump Start on All that Networking with EventVue

A few years ago, I read Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone (NEA) and it forever changed my approach to conferences. Pre-NEA, I basically met whoever I sat by during the first session of the first day and my nights were spent reading the materials for the next day's sessions. I had just graduated from law school, so this seemed very normal. I learned a lot, but nothing that I could not have gotten by simply reading the materials at home and listening to a podcast.

NEA let me in on a secret that successful people already know: good face-to-face conferences aren't really about content.

Coming from a person who spends hours a day carefully crafting the content of conferences, that is a significant statement.

You do need good content to get people to a conference--especially a new conference--but you need good people to call the conference a success. If you have good people, conversation and connections will follow and, before you know it, your conference is memorable and meaningful.

My post-NEA conferences (as an attendee) have been an entirely different experience. I do all my research in advance, learning everything I can about the attendees and identifying the attendees I would really like to meet. This is a lot of work, but maybe it doesn't have to be.

EventVue, a service offering online social networking for events, has recently beefed up its offerings. The service already enabled conference-goers to create profiles, complete with pictures and tags to identify common interests.

Now, we get the Chatter function, which pulls in attendee-generated content from blogs, twitter, YouTube and more, and allows attendees to subscribe feeds to receive the updates.

As an attendee, you can get to know others in advance of the conference, have collaborative live-blogging/tweeting, and keep in touch when the conference is over.

As a conference provider, you get to steal a glimpse into the minds of your attendees to help you plan a better conference now and in the future.

I love the new features. Focusing on legal conferences, my first thought was that this would be a ways off for me. But then this from Kevin O'Keefe. If lawyers, perhaps the latest of the late-adopting crowd, are already starting to look to twitter as a serious business tool, we might not be as far off as I thought.

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