I love a good infographic, especially when they are compelling. Alon at Bizzabo has created one that I am running “as is” because it is very well done, fun, and informative (and no, I was not paid to run this….LOL). “As is” means with the supporting text that came with it.
I met Alon (one of the founders of Bizzabo) in an online chat a few months ago when I was learning about their product and was impressed with their event app and what it can do for meetings and events (sessions, maps, social). While we were speaking, I thought they “got it.” I have a client using their app for an event in March. If you are looking for a mobile solution, check them out.
Without further ado, I give you a cool infographic about the power of Face 2 Face Meetings and Social
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks have revolutionized the way we interact with one another, deconstructed physical barriers and flattened our world. At the same time, smartphones with location based services have taken over; analysts project that by 2015 more people will access the internet from their mobile than from a PC. At first glance, these two phenomena seem to contradict each other. If we’re spending more of our time living in a virtual world, why are we investing so heavily in technology intended to improve our “real lives”?
The answer is to bring these two worlds together and make them compliment eachother. We can only benefit from using knowledge we gather in the virtual world in our real lives, and vice versa. Meeting people face to face has irreplaceable advantages, as does the speedy and limitless virtual web.
That’s why the event industry is far from dead – over 1.8 million meetings with 205 million attendees were held in 2011, accounting for $263 billion in direct spending. However, we do need to start thinking about how we incorporate technology into our “real-life” events in order to provide attendees with better experiences.
Bizzabo has analyzed its own data from thousands of events and tens of thousands of business interactions, combined it with other publicly available data, and has created an infographic that provides an in-depth look at why face to face meetings are so vital, even and in many ways because of today’s online world.
