How to Keep Meeting Attendees Off Their Smartphones
Photo Credit: TED Senior Fellows Workshop at TED2019: Bigger Than Us. Flickr / TED Conference
Skift Take
In the era of smartphones, the traditional meeting format of a presenter with a slide deck is no longer acceptable. Meeting organizers are deploying various strategies to keep attendees focused.
What’s small, sometimes silent but super noisy at other times, and jam-packed with information?
The answer, of course, is a cell phone, and that tool—along with smart mobile devices generally—is a big competitor for meeting planners when they’re trying to capture the attention of attendees.
By 2015, 64 percent of adults around the country, or nearly two-thirds of Americans, owned smartphones, according to the American Trends Panel survey, a 2015 study of cell phone usage by the Pew Research Center. Even more telling, that amount is nearly double the 35 percent of smartphone owners that existed in the United States just four years earlier, in 2011.
“Smartphones serve as an access point for navigating a wide array o
