How I Used ClubHouse to Make Connections at an Online Conference

SEEKING CONNECTIONS

I spent all week attending a conference I had heard about but never attended: MuseumNext. It is designed to “bring together a passionate community of museum leaders, makers and innovators to ask ‘what’s next for museums?’” I wanted to join a community fully engaged with that question, but it left me with one of my own: How can I immerse myself in a new community if it was meeting online?

Last fall I went to a fully remote conference – MCN – and, yes, I participated in the related Slack community, but I had already been to and presented at MCN. I was already part of that community. They knew me and I knew them. Jumping into MCN’s ever-on back-channel felt like a coming home.

At MuseumNext, however, I did not expect anyone would know me. I had submitted to present – one of my go-tos for introducing myself to a conference crowd – but I was turned down (no hard feelings). And while I knew listening to presenters would teach me a lot, what I REALLY wanted was to make some new connections, with museum professionals and digital designers around the world. And as much as I love back-channels, I knew I would be missing the hallway conversations between sessions, the person I’d meet before a session, the strangers I would meet over lunch. How could I participate in those sort of informal, often serendipitous, conversations that often become the highlight of any conference?

I decided I might just have to make something myself. And to do that, I turned to ClubHouse.

CLUBHOUSE 101

ClubHouse is the new social media tool blowing up. It is exclusive right now – just as Facebook and Gmail started out – requiring an introduction by a current member to enter and, for now, an iPhone. It is often described as a cross between a podcast, a call-in radio show, and a 1980s style phone-based party chat.

If people you follow start a conversation, or if a topic you track has a new event, your phone will get a notification ping. Click to enter and you’ll be in a “room”, with a vertical style; at the top is the podium, where each presenter has a microphone, followed by people they know who are in the audience, followed by people they do not know in the audience. Anyone can put up their hand if they’d like to get on the podium; the moderators can bring people up and send them back. That’s pretty much it. Fairly simple.

People drop in and out all the time, and speakers get a feel for the room and each other, exploring their topic any way they like, all over live audio.

MY OFFER

So a few weeks before the Summit, I contacted its founder, Jim Richardson. I wrote:

So I wonder – how shall we incorporate Clubhouse? 🙂 Perfect new tool to support networking – e.g. end-of-day virtual cocktail hour. Happy to explore leading that if of interest. 

He replied:

I think it’s too early for us to do anything official on Clubhouse, but more than happy for you to suggest it in our online community and see if people are interested. I really like the platform and think is could be great for virtual events in the future.

That sounded great to me. Very welcoming, to someone he had never met. A few days later he wrote me:

Just a quick note to e-introduce you to Mar Dixon.
She’s been doing lots on clubhouse, so you might find that the two of you want to collaborate on something together in that space.

Mar and I connected, hit it off, and we were off and running.

DESIGNING THE CLUBHOUSE EVENTS

Using ClubHouse to chat 1:1, and later WhatsApp, we soon learned we both came into this from very different places. Mar has been going to these Summits almost from the beginning and is close to Jim. She was fiercely loyal and very protective of his brand and did not want some newcomer to mess anything up. And what excited her the most was to have something over the course of 5 days which provided a recap of the previous day’s events, and perhaps excite new people to join in. And she was VERY experienced with ClubHouse.

Meanwhile, yes, I was totally new to the community. I was focused on the future, to get people excited about the day’s events that were about to unfold. I wanted something looser, live in the moment, engaging the voices of Summit participants. And to make new connections. I was a total ClubHouse newbie and needed to be mentored.

In other words, we were a perfect pair to pull this offer. We decided that the hour before the start of each day we would hold a 30-45 minute long open session, with two-thirds reflecting back on the previous day and ome-third reviewing what we were about to experience. We promoted it on the Summit web-based community, offering invites to any who needed to join ClubHouse, and promoted it on Twitter and in the live Summit chat.

WHAT WE DID

Each day Mar and I would welcome the room, introduce new people (who sport party hats) to the basics (how to raise their hand, how to virtually clap) then walk through the previous day’s session, one at a time. We would summarize the topic and then a panelist would reflect. We’d encourage audience members to raise their hand, get called up, and contribute their own experience. Sometimes one of the presenters would be there, and we’d call them up as well. Even Jim came a few times, and I’d ask him questions to help us understand the design behind the curated experience. Eventually, we’d shift gears and talk about the coming events then remind everyone to return the next day.

On the back-end, Mar and I would coordinate via WhatsApp – both during and between sessions – to make the experience as tight and lively as we could. Each day we averaged around 40 participants, and many were coming not from MuseumNext but discovered us on ClubHouse, which was great.

DID IT WORK?

On Monday, just five days ago, I had never been to a MuseumNext summit. I had no idea what people were like to attended, nor the norms and strengths of the community. Equally, they did not know me, nor my work. I had motivations beyond the strictly transactional, but looking at the data I tripled my followers on Clubhouse (from 40 to 124), made many new connections on LinkedIn, and spoke 1:1 by text and then by phone with a number of fellow conference attendees.

So did informally integrating ClubHouse into the Summit help me make the connections I was looking for? Absolutely!

But more importantly, did it help the COMMUNITY make connections with each other, strengthening our network and providing an opportunity to reflect upon and dig deeper into presenter topics? I would like to say yes, but I don’t think its for me to say. Jim did post at one point on the web-based forum:

I like that – that ClubHouse helped to counter something missing in being solely virtual.

Dave Patten, Head of New Media at the Science Museum, London, posted that he enjoyed it for two reasons: 1 – it helped him to catch-up on missed sessions to identify which videos he’d want to watch, and 2 – it helped him feel more connected to the MuseumNext community (“It was great to hear the voices of other attendees, especially ones I had not met before.”)

One person shared from the ClubHouse podium how she has been too busy to attend all the sessions so, instead, all week, she had just been attending out recaps.

Clearly, with the requirement to have an invitation, and the lack of Android access, ClubHouse is still too exclusive to be the sole source for any community to form connections. But both of those will change soon, as it did with Gmail.

Until then ClubHouse is modelling a new way to bring people together in an informal and ephemeral way (no digital footprints here – at least yet) to deepen their connections with ideas and with each other. I hope to see you there soon! (and if you need one, as long I have them, please hit me up on LinkedIn privately for an invitation -and see what I did there? Still using ClubHouse to network…).