One of the technologies that should be making a difference
is social media, particularly LinkedIn. It includes industry-specific forums
that offer the chance to seek advice and discuss issues of common interest.
Unfortunately, it isn’t working within the meetings and
events industries.
There are many forums on LinkedIn serving meetings and
events. The difficulty appears to be that forum owners have a choice: open the
system to everybody with no checks and annoy users with blatant sales pitches
or devote time to moderating contributions.
Some of the leading industry associations have gone down the
second route but then seem to have difficulty devoting the necessary time to
reviewing comments. The result is annoyance for genuine contributors who feel
that they are not trusted and that their comments are being censored.
As a result, useful contributors will be driven off in
frustration with consequent damage to the relevant association’s image.
But this points to one of the long-term difficulties of
social media: it was originally promoted as a no-cost medium. That was always
misleading because, although there’s no direct cost, as there is with
advertising, there’s a hidden cost because any organisation wanting to use it
has to devote time to managing it.
If they don’t there’s a danger the whole thing will
backfire.
Originally published in Conference News
