Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Organizing events is complex and inherently risky but most unpleasant surprises can be anticipated and avoided. With experience most people can see where things are likely to go wrong, but there are also three techniques that make this easier: 1. SEE IT FOR YOURSELF . People who work in hotels, conference centers and other venues are probably not going to lie to you deliberately, but when you ask if they have something their answer might be inaccurate simply because they don't remember and don't check. The only way to be sure is to check for yourself or send someone who you trust to do this reconnaissance for you. Want to know if there is easy parking? Go look. Want to know if there is cell phone coverage in a basement room  Go try for yourself. Want to know if there is a projection screen? Go look, and try the button that makes the screen come down to make sure it does. 2. TALK TO THE PEOPLE WHO DO THINGS . Very often you will be talking to a r...

According to news reports Syrian President Bashar al Assad has apparently unplugged his country from The Internet. If you are a desperate despot I can see why you might be tempted to reach for that OFF switch when you get a few dislikes on Facebook. But as a communication consultant I don't recommend this for five reasons. 1 . MORE NEGATIVE PRESS.  Turning off The Internet gets you some seriously bad press. I don't recall anyone ever writing a neutral-to-positive piece about this. You are probably getting some negative coverage anyway for other unpleasant things, but you don't mess with The Internet and get away with it. 2. DRIVES ANGER TO THE STREETS . Turning off The Internet can have the entirely unintended effect of encouraging more direct action. People are still angry and maybe they were venting their anger online, posting negative content on social media. Without this outlet they have little choice but to turn off the computer, hit the streets and thro...

 In December 2009 four Eurostar trains were trapped in the tunnel under the English Channel for many hours after melting snow caused electrical failures. Passengers trapped in the trains looked to the @Eurostar Twitter account for information but soon discovered that this account belonged to a student in Shanghai. According to a Techcrunch article at the time the only Twitter account controlled by the company was @LittleBreak, a promotional account.  Eurostar has learnt from this experience. They now own the @eurostar account and use it to engage with passengers, but it seems that many other businesses have still not learnt this lesson. Few companies today would ignore Twitter, Facebook or YouTube completely, but many have a confusing presence with multiple official and semi-official accounts. It can be hard for consumers to distinguish between these and fan sites. On second tier sites like Pinterest many brands are completely absent. Maybe you are thinking that y...

One of the best ways to follow a conference or meeting you can't attend in person is through Twitter. You can find out who is there, what they are saying and what people think about it. For the people at home this gives near real-time to the highlights  for organizers it raises the profile of the event and maybe attracts a few more physical visitors to the next session. It also provides valuable feedback. But the Twitter experience of any event can depend very much on how effectively the organizers and attendees use hashtags. If everyone uses the same hashtag then it is easy to find relevant tweets and much easier to monitor the activity, but to make that happen there are a few practical things you need to think about. FOR EVENT ORGANIZERS: A HASHTAG FOR EVERY EVENT . You should define a conveniently short hashtag for every public event or meeting that you organize. It doesn't need to be a different hashtag every time. For major events like an international conference...

In some cultures consensus decision making is the norm. Others prefer the majority wins approach. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle, accepting majority decisions but at least trying to make this decision more acceptable to the others. Proponents of the majority rule argue that it is the fastest way to reach a decision. Indeed it is. Yet there is a significant drawback: a decision taken quickly that is opposed by many will not be so quick to implement. The people who never agreed in the first place can delay and obstruct the implementation in every way possible, at least by a lack of enthusiasm. This is one of the reasons I always preferred a consensus approach to decision making..Then I realized that it also has the advantage of being effective in a wider range of cultures making it especially useful for global organizations. Now I learn  that there is another very compelling reason to prefer consensus decision making. Recent research at Brigham Young Univ...

One of the cornerstones of an influencing strategy is to establish your credibility in some area of competence; you have to convince people that you are an expert, or at least competent in the field.  Once you are recognized in this way people will listen when you talk about that topic. This sounds challenging but is actually much easier than you might imagine. First of all you need to actually develop above-average knowledge of your chosen field  This is easier now that it has ever been thanks to the easier access to knowledge the world-wide web provides, but it takes some skill and experience to do this without spending an excessive amount of time on it. Luckily there are some techniques for keeping up to date in any field that require only a modest effort. First of all you need to manage news sources efficiently so that you are always the first to know about new developments. Google'...

Recently Hitachi demonstrated a technology that allows data to be stored in blocks of glass that could last 100 million years. The concept was appealing and the demo very impressive. Up to a point. What undermined the entire event was the choice of sample data for the public technology demonstration. The data they chose to preserve for 100 million years was the entire series of Police Academy movies, in all their 1080p high-definition magnificence. You might think that this choice might lead to some ridicule in the media and you would be right. Even the pro-business magazine Business Week mocked the choice in  Live Blogging Hitachi's 100 Million Year Data Test  in the 26 September 2012 issue. Having worked in large organizations I can see how this could happen. First of all the people who arranged the demo might be technical experts who have a deep understanding of the technologies involved but understandably don't know how the media and other observers m...