Saturday we deployed Pathable for the first time at a professional event, BizJam 2007, organized by BizNik! BizNik is a group of independent professionals for whom networking is an important aspect of finding clients and building collaborative relationships. The tag line for BizNik is "business networking that doesn't suck". They were very receptive to our experimenting with integrating Pathable's social matching service into the event badge.
Almost 200 people completed the profile, breaking down into about six meaningful clusters. We did some interviews during the event to better understand how people were experiencing the badges (with the help of Ben Lidgus). People on the whole really liked it. They reported largely paying attention to the list of similar and opposite names on each badge, somehow this was much more compelling than the tags themselves or the color clusters. Randy Engstrom, director of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, said it was great the way it took all that "online social networking stuff" and brought it back into face to face interactions. We heard some interesting stories about how it helped folks meet each other. From Brian Dorsey, creator of Noonhat:
I think the badges worked very well. I saw a lot of people talking about them, and trying to figure out their similarities or differences. Fun, fun!
Personally, I started several conversations when I saw my name on other people's badges.
Also, I met two people on my most similar list, and one opposite. One of the similar people I already knew from Mind Camp, and we just chatted for a bit. The other guy is also a local Python programmer working in Django (what I wrote the Noonhat site in) and he's on the mailing list for my user group meeting. ;) Certainly similar. When I met the lady who was my opposite, it was like oil & water. Wasn't even able to have a minimal conversation to figure out what she does. Maybe she was just busy right then?
Special thanks to Dan and Lara who were brave enough to let us try out our new technology at their event, Brian Dorsey, who helped us get people registered onsite, and Nadja Haldimann, an independent designer who works with BizNik, who did the badge design!
It's always a lot of fun when you first see one of your ideas actually become real!
The badges were not only a great conversation piece that helped connect conference attendees – they looked awesome. The signups and printing happened really smoothly and quickly – we could hardly have asked for a better experience. Great job you guys!
It sounds like a lot of fun. Any plans to get this into any other events soon?
Very, very cool idea, Shelly! It would be great to figure out how to integrate pathable nametags at our Netsquared conference. Do you have any materials you can pass me to help me sell my board on the concept?