It’s been five weeks since Marriott hosted its General Managers Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington. Yet the event’s app provider, Bonfyre, says attendees are still accessing the conference app about 600 times a day. Those attendees, about 3,300 general managers and corporate leaders representing six of the company’s hotel brands, are using the app’s private chat and photo features primarily to share ideas about common work issues.
“We’re seeing that they are using Bonfyre to discuss how they are implementing things that were discussed at the conference. They are posting pictures showing how they are doing it,” says Eric Jensen, Marriott’s director of events for brand, marketing, sales, and consumer services. Jensen says brand leaders are also continuing to use the app to send out announcements and gather feedback. “In the past, with blogs or websites we might have more of a one-way communication—we are sending things out and are hoping people will see it. They might make comments but there’s no conversation. In this situation we can send out announcements … and then it may lead to conversation among everyone,” he says.
That’s exactly the type of networking Jensen has been hoping to create. For past events, he says Marriott experimented with building its own app and encouraging attendees to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to share ideas from the event. But Jensen says it became clear attendees didn’t want to overload their general social networks with conference content. Bonfyre creates a private social network, what it calls a “bonfyre,” where users can post photos and videos and chat with one another.
The Marriott conference was actually six simultaneous, co-located events—one for each of the brands—so there were six separate bonfyres. As guests downloaded the app, they were invited to join the one connected to their brand, but they also had the option to join the others. Organizers launched the app two weeks before the conference and hosted a photo contest to encourage guests to begin using it. From February 5 to February 18, the day the conference began, users posted more than 2,700 chats, photos, and videos.
“The good thing about that was when it came time for the conference and we wanted them to use it for some business purposes, it was really easy for them because they had already been using it leading up to the conference," Jensen says. "You get people to want to use it. Get people to enjoy using it. Get people to trust it. And then they’re going to use it for everything." Along with standard app features such as personalized schedules, speaker information, interactive maps, and surveys, Marriott used one a gamification feature to drive traffic to sponsors at the event. Each time an attendee scanned a sponsor’s QR code at its booth, the app would reveal a puzzle piece. Everyone who completed the puzzle was entered into a drawing for prizes.
Hosts can keep the chat and photo sharing features of Bonfyre active indefinitely after an event at no charge, but other administrative options, such as the ability to moderate posts, require a monthly fee.
