Interactive Austin 2009

Yesterday I got to attend the morning sessions at the Interactive Austin conference. I was invited along with some other students at UT to blog and tweet about the conference, the theme of which was using social media tools and organization to improve enterprise profitability.

Because I had to leave early, I only had a chance to see the first two keynotes and one breakout session, but what I saw was interesting (here’s my tweetstream from the conference, via Twitter Search).

The highlight of my visit was Sam Lawrence’s keynote “No More Whip Cream on BS.” Although I don’t have much connection to enterprise business, I really enjoyed Lawrence’s presentation style. He presented a lot of what could have been really dry material quickly and entertainingly. I had my Flip cam with me and took some (shaky) video of the talk. Below is a clip from the first few minutes of his talk. The rest of my videos can be found here.

The badge-holder method for keeping track of conference contacts

One of the primary reasons cited for going to conferences is that they are great places for professionals to network. You can meet new people with similar interests, and those people can be valuable contacts in your field. This is particularly the case in academia, where contacts are important for collaboration and research.

The only problem with this system, is that it sometimes can be difficult to manage. If you’re like me and have a problem with names, it can be difficult to find a person’s contact info when all you can remember is what they looked like and what they study. I used to come home from conferences, take out all the business cards I collected, and studiously enter them into my address book one-by-one, adding keywords--like the name of the conference or what the person studies--to make it easier to find them later.

But then I found a better way. Now, whenever I get someone’s business card, I immediately write on the back of the card why the owner and I traded cards--if I was supposed to send them information about a presentation, for example, or plan to meet them for coffee--and then I stick the card in the pouch holding my conference badge. I then keep my badges in my office (see the photo) and I instantly have a filing system keeping track of my conference contacts by conference with notes about each individual.

Of course this system is limited. I can only access it at home, and eventually I’m going to run out of doorknob space and will need to find a new place to keep them. But despite these limitations this system has so far worked surprisingly well. If I need to contact someone, all I need to do is remember the conference I met them at, then access my filing system to find their info.