Etiquette and the Perfect Lunch Spot

There is a great bookstore off of Dupont Circle in DC called Kramerbooks & Afterwords. They have a special brunch on the weekends and a knowledgeable staff in their bookstore. When Monica Lewinsky's receipt from the store came to light during the most heated portion of the Clinton-intern scandal, Kramerbooks refused to share the details of her purchase.  They are that solid in their commitment to their patrons.

I may be slightly exaggerating when I say Kramerbooks stands for the last bastion of respect for the intelligentsia in DC. But, I am in no way overstating it when I say, Kramerbooks has a great lunch menu and drink specials.

Because they do.

In fact, if their lunch menu was less inviting, I may not have ventured there  today for my business meeting with a couple of colleagues. If their atmosphere were less inviting, I may not have entered into a fascinating dialogue with a few patrons about social media and etiquette.

Our conversation centered around the pervasive use of smart phones and the way people use them in social settings. Each person shared their own experiences with people answering phones or texting away during otherwise intimate moments with friends.

And the conversation got me to thinking...:

• I hadn't taken my smart phone out during our conversation
• Would it one day be acceptable to interrupt the current conversation for phone or text (except in emergency?)
• Was it already acceptable and I didn't know it?
• What does this mean for meeting attendees?
• We really need an etiquette guide/baseline for meeting attendees and speakers
• Oh yeah, I've been working on this very issue with a few association people...better get back to it!

A few weeks ago on the weekly #assnchat Twitter conversation (facilitated by Jeff De Cagna), a group of us discussed putting one of these etiquette guides together. The idea was to create something as a guideline for attendees and speakers to reference for social media use during a meeting.

My conversation with the patrons at Kramerbooks today reminded me that people were still looking for guidance with this kind of behaviour...and that we need to start working on this project again as a community.

Issues we will address:

• acknowledging the meeting's social media policy
• acknowledging the speaker's social media policy
• public disclosure about using SM during a session
• your rights, rules, and risks when using SM during a meeting
• what to include in a meeting program about social media

If anyone is interested in working with a group of us on an association social media etiquette guide for meetings, please email me at klitalien@delcor.com.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Kramerbooks' drink specials, check out their online menu. :)

Social Media Show & Tell

Happy (New) Media Monday!
Association professionals are buzzing about their latest forays into social media and it is high time we gather together and share our stories, don’t you agree?

You are invited to call in to the “Social Media Show & Tell” this Wednesday at noon ET for this month’s CRP Virtual Lunch. Just have your latest example on hand and we will share our stories and answer questions for others on the call. If you would like to share your story, please email me before Wednesday and I will be sure to introduce you to the group!

Bring your coolest social media success or just listen to everyone else's for ideas! We will have examples in specific areas, such as:

- Social Media for Member Engagement

- Social Media for Events

- Social Media for Project Collaboration

- Social Media for Fundraising

The Twitter hashtag for the CRP calls is #CRPLunch.

Register at http://bit.ly/2Ap2EN.

Dial in number: 218-936-7979

Passcode: 189780

You can earn 1 CAE point by registering and participating in this event.

The Day After

My flight landed at the BWI airport around 11:20 last night and this morning I am debating whether to continue writing this very sentence or to jump back into bed for at least 20 more minutes of shut eye.

Friends, this could be a very short post.

After every big conference I attend, I like to sit and go through a digital brain dump, whereby I look at all my notes from the conference - all the business cards I've collected - and try to save it all in some kind of meaningful way that will help me or someone else in the future. Reason being, my mind starts letting go of the context for my notes very quickly after writing them.

Here is a random Top 10 List of things I learned during this recent trip to the OSA Frontiers in Optics Annual Meeting in San Jose, California:

1. Fly Virgin every time you can when flying to the West Coast. I was able to comfortably work away online with my very own outlet under my seat powering up my laptop and cell phone during the entire flight. The wifi worked great and my seat was super comfortable. The ability to work during the long flight from DC to California was fantastic! Plus, the food you can order at your seat is the best airplane food I've eaten so far.

2. Always make sure you have the appropriate adapter for the LCD projector when using a Mac laptop. I ended up locating mine in the bottom of my laptop bag, but I panicked for a little bit.

3. The official Twitter hashtag for a conference is a necessity for organizing large groups of people for social events (or any other events) on the fly.  Make things easy for conference attendees by having large monitors displaying the hashtag feed in appealing way (using Twitterfall or Visible Tweets) so that even the Luddites in the crowd can be informed of the latest conversation about the conference.

4. Free drink tickets make you everybody's friend. :)

5. Attendees are expecting wifi to be available everywhere. They will miss it if you don't have it.

6. Protein bars and Starbucks Via instant coffee: Must-haves for the conference suitcase!

7. Use the Bump application if you have an iPhone. Anyone who has an iPhone can easily transfer contact information with another iPhone user just by using this free application. So much easier than trying to hold on to business cards all evening long. I wish they had this available across all smart phones and with an easy way to organize new contacts by tagging, but maybe in a couple years...

8. Conference organizers: Have a few free registrations that you give out to members who agree to blog about the conference daily. You will not be sorry. These bloggers will not only help archive the member-experience for your conference, but will also add to the overall buzz. At this conference, bloggers had identifying ribbons and the association promoted the blogs before and during the conference. This should be something you offer for every conference - the promotion pays for the registration.

9. Looking for a good giveaway idea? Multi USB ports. Thumb drives. Laser pointers. And yes, hand sanitizer. These things stick around and people love them.


10. Idea: Have a "photobooth" kiosk in which people can either add their comments about the conference and have it automatically tagged with your hashtag and added to the Twitter stream displayed on your Twitter monitors, and/or record a short 2 minute video with their thoughts about the conference that is posted to the conference's official broadcasting site. I haven't seen this done yet, but it would be amazing to have on site and is totally doable.