At a restaurant last night in Washington, D.C.—for a SIPA Chapter meetup which I hope you can make it to sometime—the waitress was serious about getting us to fill out a customer survey. She brought out extra portions for us to take home. She circled the url on the check and wrote her name. She promised a coupon if we filled it out there, then just gave us the coupons, asking if we could fill it out before midnight. (Maybe her car would turn into a pumpkin if we did not do this.)

"Each audience is different, so their [survey] preferences will be different," wrote Nate Duea of MedLearn Media, in response to a question on the SIPA Forum last week about best event surveying methods. "The goal should be to make the survey as easy to access as possible... Why not have both formats [paper and online]? See which one people use more and go from there."

We just finished our SIPA Annual 2017 Conference, and now we’re looking over surveys to see what we can do better, what attendees liked and didn’t like. But in a couple years such a process may be “so early 2000s”—the act of having attendees fill out the surveys, then our gathering and compiling them, and determining if they’re timely enough, etc. What if we could know on-site at our events how people are feeling and be able to make immediate adjustments that could increase the value of their experience? That time may soon be here. According to a post on EventManagerBlog, Facebook has recently been granted a patent that, if realized, would allow them to track the emotion of its users and modify message content based on that emotional input. “The resulting modifications could range from choosing an appropriate emoticon to adjusting text size. The patent application lists methods of predicting emotion using relativ ...