Simon on: Facebook

The people who tell us that the only meeting planners not using social media are either stupid or incompetent are fond of quoting Facebook statistics. 

You know the sort of thing. If Facebook was a country it would be the third biggest on the planet and so on.

It has always struck me that these figures are irrelevant if you’re organising a medical congress in Birmingham but that doesn’t stop them appearing.

But I wonder how they are reacting to some recent statistics from Pew Research Center in the USA?

The figures confirm that the Facebook population is massive but the really interesting figures come further down the paper. 

Only 12 per cent of Facebook users say that it has become more important to them over the past year while 28 per cent say it is less important. The bulk of them say there is no change.

And in the category that has always been regarded as the backbone of Facebook users – those aged between 18 to 29 years, more than a third now spend less time on Facebook than they did a year ago.

Could this mean that users are tiring of Facebook? 

Originally published in Conference News

It’s not what you’re selling – it’s how you sell it!

I had to go to the tip (which I guess is a colloquial term for the local council's waste disposal site or municipal dump) recently – nothing particularly exciting about that but what I found when I got there interested me a lot.

I've been to the tip plenty of times before. We used to live near a tip that which I never really liked going to as it felt disorganised and messy although there was nothing wrong with it from a functional point of view. 

It’s a small site with a load of skips around. Because the site is small, there’s often people queuing out onto the road waiting to get into the site. The skips are large industrial skips with large metal steps at the side of them so you can get high enough to throw your stuff in. There is a “General Waste” skip and a couple of others for garden waste or wood but that’s about it.

Whenever I went to this site I always felt concerned about getting a puncture there because the floor seems to be have debris on it. Generally, it wasn't a great waste site and as such I tried to avoid going there as much as possible. Unfortunately for my long suffering wife this meant that she would wait until she was bored of waiting for stuff to be taken to the tip and do it herself!

Then we moved house and there was a different tip that was much nearer to us so we started using that. The two facilities perform exactly the same function but its amazing how different they are. 

The new tip is a really modern site with about 16 skips plus a couple of other areas. The site has a huge concrete ramp that goes up and around in an oval with one side of the oval being at road level and the other side being at the level of the top of the skips. This makes it amazingly simple to dump stuff into them. 

Added to that, the large number of skips are all labelled for different types of waste and the one where you put anything that doesn't fit into another skip is labelled “Waste for Land Fill”. 

This one simple fact – that it was going to land fill – really made me think about what I was throwing away and it made me spend much more time separating the stuff I was taking to the tip into different categories so as much as possible could be recycled. 

On the way out of the tip there is a large sign telling you how much of the waste that was taken to the tip each month was recycled. Normally it seems to be about 75% which is amazing. I would imagine the amount of recycling at the older tip was more like 10%. 

Given that both facilities are performing exactly the same function, it’s amazing what a difference presentation makes. How many other areas of daily life could be transformed with a bit of thought?