Event Foie Gras - Force-feeding social media into everything.

Nope, not that Goose...the flying go...forget it.

While living in Chicago a few years back, there was some local controversy regarding the city’s (now overturned) ban on foie gras.  At the time, I had only a cursory knowledge of what foie gras was, and seeing as how I was neck-deep in a particularly brutal summer concert season, my interest in following city politics (especially those concerning foodstuffs) was minimal at best. The issue quickly fell from my radar.

I had all but forgotten about this french...ummm...delicacy until I began reading Anthony Bourdain’s recent (and highly entertaining) book "Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook ". This mysterious substance called foie gras is mentioned several times throughout, so in an effort to understand exactly what all the fuss was about, I finally embarked on a bit of internet research. Part of me wishes I was still blissfully ignorant.

For those of you who don’t know, foie gras is basically hyper-fattened duck or goose liver, served whole or in the form of a pate. The problem (as seen by animal rights experts) is that the birds are essentially force-fed through manual or machine based methods so that their livers become...well... fatty. Some view this practice as cruel and humane, while others contend that the birds don’t suffer. (Editors note - As tempted as I am to add my thoughts to the practice, it’s irrelevant to this discussion. Go here if you care to know how I feel).

After a fair amount of heaving, I began to see a parallel between foie gras and the current state of event production. That is, this new-found need to force feed social media tools into events which, in all reality, benefits little from them.

As technology evolves rapidly, the options available to event producers to integrate social media into their program are virtually limitless - Twitter feeds, large-scale video conferencing, dedicated websites and Facebook pages...if you can think of it, there’s likely an app for that. But few seem to be asking the obvious question of whether including such items serves any practical purpose, or is it simply a shiny new (billable) toy to dangle in front of clients who don’t know any better. I often single out live video Twitter feeds as being the epitome of this argument.  If there’s a speaker on stage, shouldn't your production efforts be directed at augmenting that, rather than distracting from it? And given that anyone with the ability to send a tweet to screen would have to have some manner of doing so in the first place (i.e. a phone of some type), aren't we simply duplicating our efforts, as they already have a personal means to follow the conversation were they inclined to do so?

Look, I’m not against the use of social media in events. In fact, I find myself including some aspect of SM in virtually all of my packages lately. But their inclusion MUST make sense for the event and the client. I fear that this obsession the event world has with social media may be distracting us from our true purpose - which is identifying and utilizing the most EFFECTIVE methods and technologies to support our clients message. Not necessarily the newest, shiniest, or most expensive. As event producers, our own professional ethics should dictate that we not take advantage of our clients ignorance of the impact (or lack of) of social media, and sell them on something that just doesn't make sense. After all, they come to us because we’re experts. Time to stop force-feeding our fowl.