Meeting professionals, meet your future audience.
Last week, amid the hype and humour that greeted the release of the Apple iPad, some of the most pithy assessments of tablet technology came from a group of keen observers who will probably begin attending conferences in the next 10 to 15 years.
By the time they start arriving in our plenary halls and breakout sessions, we’ll probably want to be ready.
The analysis came from Portable Radio, a podcast series produced by Grade 5 students at South March and A. Lorne Cassidy Public Schools in suburban Ottawa. In the iPad episode, students from South March considered whether tablet devices will be the end of printed books.
“I think books will exist in the future, because lots of people don’t like computers or can’t afford them,” said one student. “Sometimes the screen hurts my eyes, and looking at a screen all day is bad for you.”
“I think books will always be wanted, even if technology invents other ways to read,” agreed one of her classmates. “When I go to bed, reading on a computer or BlackBerry is not as comforting as reading with a good book.”
“Books will not exist in the future because books are made of paper, paper comes from trees, and trees help circulate the air,” a student countered. “I bet that by the time we’re 30, we will each have a PDA, a cell phone, or a BlackBerry, and we will forget what a book is,” said one of the other children.
The Portable Radio podcast left me with a sense of hope for the future of meetings and events, tempered by the challenge of meeting the demands of a sophisticated new audience.
The children behind Portable Radio are a whole lot more articulate than I can remember being in elementary school. They quite obviously scripted their audio segments before they began recording. But it’s clear that they’re thinking in full paragraphs, not the sound bites that pass for business strategy or the monosyllables that substitute for political debate in adult circles.
At age 10, they’re learning to explore an issue from multiple angles, cut through the spin, and dig into the issues behind a news story or a press release.
And when they begin attending conferences, they’ll bring their high expectations and higher mental firepower along with them.
This generation of participants won’t much care whether the lunch menu calls for chicken or beef (though they may ask tougher, more informed questions about whether they’re eating a 100-mile diet). They won’t sit still for presentations that are long on motivational language but short on substance. They’ll expect to be heard and participate, whether their meeting is live or virtual. They’ll see close integration between conferences and social media as a given, not a nifty new innovation. And they may not be satisfied if the conversation onsite ends with the closing plenary, rather than continuing on into productive action when they get home.
It’s hard to draw wide inferences from a short audio segment. There are a dozen reasons to think I’m over-interpreting, a dozen more to see Portable Radio as the leading edge of a brilliant new audience trend.
Either way, if meeting planners and designers decided to drive that trend, rather than waiting for it, imagine how much more powerful the average meeting would be.