Taking Care of Newbies at User Conferences

Here's some proof that first-time attendees need help getting socially integrated at events, and a few suggestions about how to provide it.  The following two  social network diagrams are from a user conference using nTAGs that is completing its first day as I write this.  For those who haven't seen a social network diagram, all you need to know is:

1. Each circle is a person, each line connects two people who have spoken to each other
2. The graph algorithm draws people who have interacted closer to each other
3. The attendees that serve as the hubs/connectors of the event wind up getting drawn toward the center of the graph.

The following graph highlights the alumni -- those who have attended this event before -- in red.  So you can see that the alumni are relatively "central" at this event:

Contrast this with the first-timers,aka the newbies, shown in red below   Rather than clustering in the center of the graph, many of them are out on the periphery of the the social network, no doubt feeling disconnected.  If you want a more quantitative comparison, the alumni have an average  betweenness centrality of 43, while the newbies average is 28.

Based on this analysis, there are a few different things I'll recommend this client do ASAP at their event. 

1. Feed these results back to the attendees using a  "Community Mirror".  Often, just making a community's networking patterns public in real time is enough to gently shift them.  In this case, helping the alumni  see -- and see that others can see -- that they're marginalizing the newbies might be enough to get them to reach out to them more
2. Reward alumni for seeking out newbies,  for example, by giving them extra points with the nTAG Incent application.

Comments

[Maarten Vanneste]

Dear Rick,

This is amazing stuff!
Some of that is curriculum material for a degree in Meeting Architecture.

We need to get it out into the Meeting industry. "Community mirror", what a concept. Also the thesis is great and I hope you are willing to share contribute to our channels at the Meeting support Institute. We need thinkers and writers like you to champion sections of activity, in this case the networking, at meetings. Not to sell more of our product (that will happen anyways) but to help the whole meetings industry, that is stuck in puberty, to develop to adulthood.

I look forward to see more of your work.

Maarten Vanneste, CMM
the Meeting Support Institute