Pathable: Leveraging Social Software for Improved Social Networking and Community Development at Events

Leveraging Social Software for Social Networking and Community Development at Events
Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D.
Founder, Research Consultant
Waggle Labs / Pathable
Communities and Technologies, 2009
Partners and coauthors: Peter T. Brown, Jordan Schwartz

Core Problem
People go to events to meet others
Professional events are increasingly technology enabled
How to best leverage advances in social software to improve face-to-face networking at professional events

Agenda
Background
Pathable
Questionnaire field study
Lessons learned over 17 deployments at events

Why Professional Networking Matters
“networking is an important career management strategy in the era of the boundaryless careers [6, p. 283].”
Forret and Dougherty (2001)

Increases access to valuable information, resources and opportunities – in other words increases social capital
Correlated with finding jobs, promotions, salary

Professional Networking Online
Access to people over time, over distance, all at once
Increased access to diverse and weak social ties
62% of employed Americans “networked” workers
73% of managers/professional use Internet or email constantly or several times a day
35% of “networked” workers use online networks
Pew Internet and American Life
150 million in online networks, 15 million on LinkedIn

Social Networking at Events
World wide over 1.2 million professional events each year, adding up to a hundred billion dollar industry
Why?
Learning
Meeting people!
Forming connections with clients and colleagues
Face-to-face for developing trust
face-to-face for informal idea and knowledge sharing via conversation

Building Community at Events
In early interviews with conference organizers, they listed building community as a primary goal
Why do event attendees and event hosts at professional events care about building community?

What is Community
Cupcake Society
"I define "community" as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity.”

Barry Wellman (2001)

Why do event attendees care about community?
Hey, I’m a member of the Cupcake Society too!
Can I borrow some sugar?
Take my recipe, too!
Sure!
Sure!

Community groups enable transitive relationships
Powerfully increase social capital through simple act of joining community
Communities of practice: group of people interested in content domain, shared practices increase effectiveness of members

Designing Pathable: Leveraging Social Media for Face to Face Professional Social Networking
Whom do I most want to meet, in the limited time available to me?
How do I meet them?
How do we become a “social tie”?
How do we become a community?

Who is here? Who do I want to meet?

Social Networks
Social Scientist
Media Startup
Research
SocialTech
Community
RealityAllStar
BlogHer
Blogger
startup
community
social technology
blogger

Creating Semantic Layer to Social Space
Our Approach: minimal profiles, based on tagging
Add tags or keywords to self
E.g. “research, social computing, art”
Optimize design for converging on terms
Across people, important terms emerge
Tags used as search and browse pivots
Tags used as conversation groups
Clustering, abstraction, and match-making based on co-occurrence
Tagging provides semantic layer to social space!

Early Exploration at Seattle Mind Camp 3
75 people provided tags for self, organization, related people, related events

Pathable
Community and social networking tools for conferences
Community Dashboard 
Profiles
Attendee directory
Match-making
Messaging
Feeds (blog, twitter)
Wiki
Schedule

Attendee Directory

Profile

Edit Profile

Host Manager -- Dashboard

Host Manager -- Attendees

Face to Face Integration
Using existing technologies:
Mobile
Badges
Printable calendar
Visualization

Personalized Badge

Match-making
Best matches possible, with minimal effort in profiles
Based on predictors of successful matches:
Common interests
Same roles
Job title
Host provided categories
Co-location
By geography
By events
Existing shared groups and communities
Weighted sum to produce ordered list

Design Themes
The event host is a connector and community moderator
Coauthor profiles
Communication broker, event defining access
Social tags are used as pivots of awareness, connection, and communication
Professional match matching based on tags for improved people finding
Incorporate communication back channels
Face to face integration

Related Work

Crowdvine, Eventvue
Online networks for events, less emphasis on face to face integration, no recommendations
IntroNetworks
Online network for event, recommendations, extremely heavy weight
Ntag,Spotme
Mobile devices, expensive, no pre- and post- online network
Proactive displays, e.g. Neighborhood Window
Expensive equipment, required proximity to screen
Pathable:
Online directory/community, host as community moderator
Online and face to face integration, for pre- during and post- networking
Practical, inexpensive, using day-to-day technologies

BarCamp Seattle Questionnaire Study
Research questions:
how important is social networking and community development at events
can Pathable help?
Procedure:
BarCamp Seattle is a free, two-day conference held for people in Web 2.0
280 people registered for the event using Pathable
78 people total (76% male and 24% female) completed the questionnaire, 18 at the event and 60 afterwards online

Self-report Measurements
Networking behaviors
Goal in coming to event
How many new people met
Number of friends and colleagues
Perceived professional social support received from people at event
Pathable usage
Psychological sense of community [Wilkinson, 2007] adapted for events
“A feeling of fellowship runs deep between me and others at BarCamp”
“I feel loyal to the people at BarCamp”
“My friendships and associations with others at BarCamp mean a lot”
Event attachment
Satisfaction with event

Measurement Cont’d
Event attachment
Adapted from Rosenbaum et al. study of a suburban diner
People who experienced social support and community through diner, developed place attachment – bond between person and place
Expected similar transfer of affect for events:
Three factors: dependency, commitment, identification
Sense of Community
Place Attachment
Sense of Community
Event Attachment

Primary Goal in Coming to Event

Correlations between Event Features and Intention to Return
Sense of community and event attachment highly correlation r = .81
Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

Pathable Usage
Everyone registered through Pathable, about half actively used the system
60% actively browsed directory
47% actively browsed messages
19% actively sent messages
43% intended to use directory after event
55% intended to use communication features after event
If they said they came to event only to learn, less likely to use Pathable(t = 2.6, p < .02)
The higher the usage, the more they said it helped them meet people (r = .65, p < .001)
No correlation between usage and count of people met
Usage correlated with count of professional friends at event (r = .36, p < .01)
**percentages for those who indicated at least somewhat or quite a bit

Impact on Professional Network

Impact on Attachment and Sense of Community

Impact of Usage by Feature
Pathablehelped attendees meet others
the more they browsed the attendee directory
(r = .37, p < .005)
the more they browsed attendee messages
(r = .43, p < .005)
the more they sent messages
(r =.54, p < .005)
the more they used the match-making feature
(r = .66, p < .005)

Lessons Learned Across Events
Seventeen deployments over five months
Evening mixers
One to three day conferences
Review of what worked, what did not

Figure 9. Life cycle of Pathable activity before, during and after event
Life Cycle of a Pathable-enabled Event

Gnomedex
Can create an active community with minimal effort
Two emails
Seeded initial profiles
Seeded conversations

Adoption Rates
Higher for conferences vs. mixers
Higher for smaller events (200-600 vs. 2000)
Higher if seamless with registration

Pathable Group Messages

Searching Attendee Directory
Average total number of directory searches per event: 6882

Seeding the Community
Ensure the community feels full from the start
Model the desired behavior
Invite the organizers, speakers, volunteers to complete a profile first
Author the speaker/high status profiles
Seed representative tags
Seed type of conversation hoped for
Send personal invitations

Leveraging Match-making Features
Nurturing tags
Use badges
Use color coded categories
Provides overview
Easy point of conversation
Examples
Job types: developer, designer, marketer
Interests: blogging, podcasting, and mobile
Person types: creative vs. geek
Personality: introvert, extrovert
Integrate with face to face
Introductions
Birds of a feather meetings

People Loved Badges
and blogged about them!

Conclusions
Networking and community development primary goal
Professional networking and sense of community strong predictors of event satisfaction, event attachment, and intention to return
Pathable helped
Features helped attendees meet others, especially use of match-making feature
Usage had positive impact on sense of community, event attachment
It is quality, not quantity, that matters
counts of people met had little impact on satisfaction
quality of conversation, usage of matching-making tool, and count of professional connections had an impact

Issues
Requirements for success of Pathable
Event organizers must actively adopt role of community organizers
Important to seed community profiles and conversation
Important to have seamless integration with registration system
Event duration must be long enough, and desire to meet others strong enough to motivate people to complete profiles
Study issues
Correlation is not causation
Perhaps people with stronger sense of community more likely to use Pathable
Did find usage is correlated with desire to meet new people, and users reportedit helped them meet new people
Generalizability to other types of events
Features
Tagging still a new idea for many people
Profile fatigue

Next Steps
Personalized scheduling
Twitter integration
Matching based on complementary interests
Custom profile questions

Twitter