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 each other. 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.
We analyzed our data from thousands of events and tens of thousands of business interactions, combined it with other publicly available data, and 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.
