Check this out: the first-ever Association Social Media Unconference will take place on Tuesday, June 5 at ASAE & The Center’s Marriott Learning Complex in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. This is your opportunity to not only experience an unconference—which is a very cool concept I’m dying to try, having just gotten a taste of the similar open space technology format at a recent meeting—but you also can learn all about how you can use social media to jazz up your meeting, and of course your membership.

You can sign up for this free conference here, as well as learn more about it and even get involved in organizing it, should you so desire.

I won’t be able to make it due to a prior travel commitment, which is beyond depressing. If you can go (did I mention that it’s FREE?), please let me know how it goes.

If you want to blow your mind, check out this little video, called Shift Happens:

We do indeed live in exponential times.

While I am one of the few who haven’t fallen head over heels for Twitter, a fairly new service that lets you let everyone you know know exactly what you’re doing, moment to moment, via text message, cell phone, or Web, Ben Martin has a good idea for ways it could be used at conferences. On ASAE
s Acronym blog, he says:

Use it during conferences to update attendees about changes in the schedule or room locations. Communicating with attendees in the hours following the fire at ASAE & The Center’s most recent Great Ideas Conference could have been greatly facilitated with text messages.

Like virtual world Second Life, photo-sharing site Flickr, not to mention blogs and wikis, I get the feeling that this usage probably will be a long time coming for many meeting planners—mostly because their attendees still aren’t up on the latest and greatest techie gizmos. Though some are getting on the upper edge of the learning curve. For example, check out what what some associations are doing with social media.

Sooner or later, we’ll all have to get our feet wet in this new tech stuff. I’d say, sooner is better than later—why wait until attendees demand it?