Case Study: NMC 2009

Background

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international not-for-profit consortium of learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. Its membership includes hundreds of the most highly regarded colleges and universities (e.g., Harvard, Stanford, Yale), as well as leading museums, key research centers, and some of the world’s most forward-thinking companies (e.g., Adobe, Apple, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

NMC’s Summer Conference is their flagship event, spanning four days and dozens of educational sessions. Hundreds of representatives from member organizations convene to explore and promote innovative applications of technology to teaching, learning, and creative expression.

NMC Goals

• Encourage communication among attendees prior to the event
• Connect attendees with their peers in their industry
• Build a lasting sense of community among attendees
• Educate attendees in the use of social media tools
• Help attendees plan their session schedule attendance

Solution and Results

Pathable provided an on-line community for NMC 2009 that fit into the entire ecosystem of social media the conference planners envisioned, from start to finish.

To ensure maximum adoption, NMC built a custom interface into the registration system using Pathable’s publicly available API, so that attendees would automatically become a part of the NMC Pathable community as they registered (Note: this is a standard part of many Pathable communities, depending on the ticketing and registration provider being used).

The look and feel of the Pathable community matched the existing web site exactly, including the navigation bar and a rotating set of photos in the banner, so that the site “felt” like a part of the site with which attendees were already familiar.

The site hosted attendees’ profiles, including professional information, such as their career focus, corporate and institutional web sites, and LinkedIn profiles, as well as background information useful for “getting to know each other”, such as their interests and hobbies

NMC aggressively promoted the use of a Twitter hash tag (#nmc09) to their attendees, and Pathable was able to automatically aggregate these so that they were displayed in the context of the community, both on the home page of the event and within the profiles of the attendees who sent them. In all, over 1,800 “tweets” from attendees were collected, and a data file with the entire Twitter conversation was provided to the meeting organizers at the conclusion of the event for evaluation and analysis.

In addition to the tweets, attendees sent hundreds of messages to each other within the Pathable system, on topics as varied as coordinating meet-ups in Second Life and real life, Facebook’s impact on academic life, and what to do around town prior to and during the event.

The site continued to be a means for attendees to connect and share information for months after the conclusion of the “in-person” event.