April 2005
Best Practices: Social networking
Birds of a feather take wing with wearable computers that hookup like-minded professionals
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
How do you initiate conversation among people who don’t know each other? Try asking a silly question: “Who’s your favorite character on Gilligan’s Island?”
Posed by the interactive nTAG name badge, that query, among others, prompted more social networking than ever among the 1,300 attendees at the PTC/User World Event, held June 13–16, 2004, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN.
“Initial greetings can be stiff and sometimes don’t take place. nTAG offered a novel way to address that,” says Kevin Johnson, Executive Director of PTC/USER Inc. (www.ptcuser.org), a Hull, MA-based independent user group for Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC) products. “We had a significant increase in interaction among people who don’t know each other.”
Developed by nTAG Interactive (www.ntag.com) to take the place of traditional badges, the nTAG device is roughly the size of a personal digital assistant and weighs about six ounces. It has an LCD screen and three buttons (“yes,” “no” and “scroll”). Attendees wear nTAGs suspended from a lanyard, and the devices communicate with each other using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
When people come within two to five feet of each other, the nTAGs display three tidbits of information that they have in common, drawn from a pre-populated database. From the universities they attended to the software products that interest them, attendees can use these conversation starters to introduce themselves. If they want to exchange contact information, they scroll to the command and press “yes.”
PTC/User adopted the nTAG technology to improve networking at the annual meeting, as well as to provide personalized agendas, surveys, and lead capture and traffic building. A $7,500 IBM sponsorship partially covered the added cost — about 2–2.5 times that of a barcode nametag. Unlike a paper badge, the devices transmit, receive and store data, such as agenda updates and survey questions. RFID receivers placed in public areas and at the five conference session entrances communicate with the nTAGs and transmit saved data to a Web server.
Attendees were invited to fill out an online questionnaire, which took about five minutes. Pre-show participation was low — about 30–40 percent — because people hesitated to give personal information. But once they saw how nTAG worked, fully 100 percent completed the questionnaires at on-site kiosks. They could update their information through a personalized Web page, which also displayed the names and contact information of the people they’d met.
PTC/User used the nTAGs to push information to attendees, such as schedule changes and session evaluation questions. Attendees could store personalized agendas on the nTAGs instead of carrying a paper schedule. After each conference session, PTC/User beamed three or four evaluation questions to the nTAGs. Attendees responded by pushing “yes” or “no” buttons, and their answers were automatically beamed to RFID receivers when they exited the sessions. These instant surveys generated an 80 percent response rate.
In the exhibit hall, the 70 exhibiting companies used nTAGs to record attendee contact information and annotate the records with answers to four or five pre-set questions, such as what type of follow-up the attendee preferred. nTAGs also recorded points for visiting booths, and attendees with the most points were eligible to win prizes in a raffle on the last day.
The only complaint about nTAG was its weight. “After three and a half days, they were heavy around the neck,” Johnson says.
Nonetheless, about 80 percent of attendees and 60 percent of exhibitors said they’d like to use nTAGs in the future. Johnson attributes the exhibitors’ less enthusiastic response to a lack of understanding about nTAG’s capabilities. “They’d missed the training session and didn’t understand that they could annotate the data,” he says.
PTC/User plans to bring nTAG back in 2006, after the developers release the next generation software. In the meantime, they’ll have to find another way to discover who’s the most popular character on Gilligan’s Island.
Last year, it was Ginger.
Cathy Chatfield-Taylor is a freelance writer/ editor. E-mail cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.
Goal: Improve networking and information exchange.
Objective: Provide data collection and retrieval through an electronic name tag.
Strategy: Implement nTAG Interactive’s nTAG in combination with personalized Web pages.
Tactics: Use radio frequency identification technology to transmit and receive data, such as contact information, session evaluations, exhibitor leads and personalized agendas.
Results: 100 percent of attendees used nTAG’s networking feature. |
