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#Eventtable: A New Twitter Chat on Innovation in Meetings and Events

By Mitchell Beer | February 3, 2012

We’re thrilled to be launching #Eventtable, a new hour-long Twitter chat for meeting and event professionals interested in innovation. The chats will take place every Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, beginning February 6.

The chat, sponsored by The Conference Publishers and moderated by meetings and social media specialist Jenise Fryatt, will become an online home for discussions of some of the burning issues in the industry, including:

• State-of-the-art social media strategies for events
• New formats to make face-to-face events more effective and participant-friendly
• Content creation and capture for events
• Virtual and hybrid events
• Sustainable meetings
…and much, much more.

Each week’s chat will feature a top innovator or thought leader whose work is making a difference in meetings and events. This Monday, February 6, our first guest will be Liz King, founder of PlannerTech, discussing New Tech Finds for Events.

To join the chat, just follow the #eventtable hashtag beginning at 3 pm. To participate in the chat without having to add the hashtag to all your tweets, try using Tweet Chat.

Topics: #eventtable chat, Meetings Technology, The Conference Publishers | No Comments »

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

By Mitchell Beer | January 24, 2012

When I first worked with Adrian Segar at Event Camp East Coast in 2010, I knew I’d met one of the most insightful, skilled, genuine meeting facilitators in the industry.

So after The Conference Publishers began working with the International Association of Conference Centers to host the Bright Ideas for Conference Centers webinar series, I was excited when IACC asked us to organize a program on learning design techniques for small meetings. The webinar takes place:

Thursday, February 2
1 PM to 2 PM Eastern
Registration here

Late last year, Segar talked about the power of onsite participation in an interview with MeetingsNet Editor Sue Hatch. The interview pointed to some of the surprisingly simple, incredibly powerful concepts that make Segar’s Conferences That Work approach a huge asset for small meeting design.

“Participant-driven event designs create meetings that become what attendees want and need them to be,” Segar said in the interview. “You think about your attendees not as customers, but as resources, which is a very different way of thinking.”

He attributed fast-growing demand for participant-driven events to the fact that “the world has changed. Six years ago there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no online TED Talks. If you wanted to hear someone speak, you had to go physically and listen. Now, broadcast-style content is widely available online.”

The result is that today’s participants—the people formerly known as the “audience”—need and demand more networking. Participant-driven events build it into the program.

“Thirty years ago, most of what you needed to know to do your job you learned in the classroom, or at company trainings,” Segar said. “Today, research says that you learn most of what you need to know for your job from your peers. Our conferences need to reflect that.”

These are ideas that are already beginning to reshape small meetings and events—just ask anyone who attended ECEC10, or has taken part in any of the other Conferences That Work sessions that Segar has organized over the last two decades.

One of the very interesting to-do items if you organize a webinar series (really, you should try it sometime!) is that you’re supposed to review the slides beforehand, and yesterday, Segar and I began reviewing his. So I can already tell you from first-hand experience that you don’t want to miss this webinar.

Topics: Future of Meetings, Meeting Design, Onsite Learning, Value of Meetings | 1 Comment »

Content Strategy in a Newly Connected World: Free, Fee or Hybrid?

By Iana Ciatti | December 22, 2011

Should content be free or offered for a fee?
There could be a lot of revenue and visibility riding on the answer.
As content capture specialists, we spend a lot of time talking to clients about the objectives behind their meetings and the specific format and level of detail that will help them achieve those ends. To do our job properly, we want to understand what will happen to that content and how it will be made available to different audiences. When it comes to selling content or providing it for free, association executives are split:

But it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. A hybrid content strategy can provide free content “teasers” to boost an organization’s messaging and attract potential members, then deliver additional detail or multiple formats for anyone who signs up. The other option is a staggered release schedule, so that immediate access to the latest knowledge becomes a special benefit of membership.
Knowledge: Your most precious asset
Whether you’re an association communicating with members or a business trying to connect with customers and prospects, it’s crucial to get this question of access to knowledge right. Your conference content is one of your most precious assets, and in an increasingly networked world of RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the old models of business and education are breaking. The organizations that use their latest and best content as a catalyst for education, conversation, and collaboration are the ones that will deliver value, stay relevant, and continue to thrive into the future.
To choose between a free, for-fee, or hybrid content model, you have to consider the community you serve and how you can best support different audiences. But don’t take too long to decide. If your organization isn’t already having this conversation, the linkages may soon happen around you (much like a fixed rock in a stream). By tackling these questions and starting your content strategy now, you begin to chart your future course, adapting along the way and using experience and member feedback to guide you.
One solution: A nested approach to content
A hybrid strategy for conference content may be the best place to start. You can draw an initial audience by offering free content from past events, or shorter capsules of your latest premium content. The more detailed premium content can go to your members free, or at a discounted rate, and any attendees who aren’t already members should have access to that content for a set time period. By charging an access fee for non-members, you can generate direct revenue while encouraging non-members to sign up for next year’s conference, join the organization, or both.
There is no one right solution for every association, or even for every event. What role does content/knowledge/news play in your organization? Where do your members go for professional development? How can you make better use of your conference content in our newly connected world? Here are some additional resources, and let us know what you think.
Resources and further discussion
1. On the Brink Video
2. Map Out Your Content Strategy
3. Most Content Should Be for Members Only
4. More on Content Strategy

Topics: Carbon Footprint, Conference Content, Emergency Preparedness, Onsite Learning, Social Media, The Conference Publishers, Virtual Meetings | No Comments »

Four Tough Challenges that Make Sustainability Easier

By Mitchell Beer | July 16, 2011

Earlier this month, a colleague shook up my thinking about green meetings with an idea that could shift any organization’s sustainability program in a more practical direction.
And here’s the twist: the surest way to simplify our industry’s approach to sustainability might be to sharpen our focus on the toughest sustainability issues we face.
Thanks for this blazing insight go to Babs Nijdam, president of GMIC’s Netherlands Chapter and business development manager at Amsterdam RAI. Over coffee during World Conference on Lung Cancer, where we produced the onsite daily, Nijdam talked about the ins and outs of building the facility’s sustainability program.
At first, the challenges sounded familiar. When most meeting professionals first focused on sustainability, we did what we do whenever an onsite problem arises: we built checklists. Like most facilities and planners, the RAI started with visible, tactical improvements that looked relatively easy and cost-effective, measures like onsite recycling to reduce waste volumes. They still ran into practical problems, like the large number of attendees who comingle their waste, and found pushback in surprising places.
To their credit, they carried on. But what will happen if the RAI ever gets to the last item on the last checklist? That’s when they’ll find, like all the rest of us, that they missed the four biggest issues we face:
1. Our carbon footprint
2. Our draw on severely endangered ocean resources
3. A growing global food shortage
4. Our potential to leverage meeting supply chains and economic impact to drive deeper green practices.
It isn’t that the checklist items that form the guts and the glory of North America’s newly approved APEX/ASTM standards will make no difference on the big-picture issues. The fundamental problem, after all these years, is that we still have no clear idea of what success looks like. For example, how will the standards bring us to the 80% carbon reduction we must achieve by 2050?
And meanwhile, if the lists are never-ending and open a facility or meeting to constant, picky criticism, the mix of customer impatience and in-house frustration will become a sure recipe for sustainability fatigue.
Here’s where a more complicated approach can simplify your life. What carbon, oceans, food security, and supply chains have in common is that we can address them behind the proverbial curtain, without changing the participant experience, unless it’s by improving it.
Most clients won’t mind whether a good wine is sourced locally or flown in from Argentina, but the local supplier might offer a lower carbon footprint and leave more of your dollar in the host community. And who would object to travelling by rail and bypassing the joys of air travel?
These are changes that will delight the vast majority of our clients once they’re in place. But they’re far enough behind the front lines that they mostly require no prior approval—you wouldn’t consult them on the purchase of a new dishwasher or laundry machine, whether or not it was the most efficient one on the market. Which means we can just get on with making our operations vastly more sustainable, rather than tying ourselves down in endless explanations, justifications, and negotiations.
When sustainable meeting initiatives come from the PR office, rather than the engineering department, they have to be visible to clients from the start because the press release is the point of the exercise. But if the easy wins achieve less and generate more resistance, maybe it’s time to look at what we can achieve by shifting our gaze to the changes that matter most.

Topics: Airlines, Business Issues, Carbon Footprint, Economic Impact, Green Meeting Industry Council, Green Meetings, Greenwashing | No Comments »

Remembering What Matters

By Mitchell Beer | June 16, 2011

Memo to Vancouver hockey rioters: Get a grip.
Last night, the Boston Bruins broke millions of Canadians’ hardened hockey hearts with what really was a well-deserved win in the Stanley Cup final. The street riots in downtown Vancouver began within minutes, making headlines as far away as India and Australia and gaining prominent play on the New York Times and CNN websites. The Washington Post carried a photo of a fan waving a Canadian flag beside a burning pickup truck.
The riots occurred 17 years and a day after 50,000 to 70,000 fans trashed parts of their city in response to the Canucks’ last near-miss.
This is not the Vancouver I know. To say that it’s time to get a few things in perspective doesn’t begin to cut it.
Everyone in our office wanted to see Lord Stanley’s cup come home to Canada. But losing the Stanley Cup, or even winning it, was not the most important thing that happened in Vancouver in the last 10 to 30 years.
Vancouver is where researchers formally unveiled the medical advances that led to the first treatments for HIV/AIDS. Some delegates to the 11th International Conference on AIDS in 1996 had been told long before the meeting that they only had weeks or months to live. By the time they got onsite, the drugs were working and the virus could no longer be detected in their bloodstreams.
Vancouver hosted the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, one of the first international meetings to take a close look at the economic, environmental, and social impacts of rapid urbanization. Thirty years later, the World Urban Forum drew attention to the “social time bomb” of a billion people living in slums around the world.
Vancouver has set itself the audacious goal of becoming the world’s greenest city by 2020 and wowed the global meetings industry by opening a breathtaking, LEED Platinum convention centre in 2010.
Vancouver is home to the incomparable Wosk Centre for Dialogue, a facility whose very design and atmosphere pretty much demand that participants conduct themselves with respect and dignity, make good use of their time onsite, and generate lasting results afterwards.
This is not to suggest that Vancouverites should riot for the billion people who live in slums or the tens of millions of orphans who’ve lost both parents to AIDS. Much better for them to take the content and urgency of any number of events their city has hosted, add the tone of their local conference or convention centre, and get a life.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious (repeat after me, now)…the Canucks had a great season, but it’s a game. How can we be moved to senseless action by a sports score, but remain blissfully silent about problems that are huge, scary, and utterly preventable?

Topics: Green Meetings, Onsite Learning | 4 Comments »

Building a Better Platform

By Mitchell Beer | June 14, 2011

Our son, Adrian, is a software developer, and frequently brings us his observations on the IT business. Sometimes, those observations hit closer to home.
A conversation a few months ago had to do with a hardware manufacturer that may be nearing its sunset. It’s a company that once shone brightly, but is being overtaken by more nimble competitors.
For a while, the firm could make up the difference with clever marketing—but just for a while. Adrian’s succinct assessment: great marketing won’t make up for a lousy platform.
The conversation made me realize how important it is that we’ve spent the last year building a better platform.
When our company began going onsite 25 years ago, we opened with an offer the world had never seen before: in an era long before Internet and email, we would put finished conference content in participants’ hands as they left the closing plenary of an event. The alternative was to wait weeks or months for printing and mailing. Sometimes, faster turnaround was a key deciding factor in whether a conference met its goals.
Conference content is at least as important today as it was in the mid-1980s, and summary content is still a unique niche for our company. But in a struggling economy and a changing industry, capturing and reporting that content is just the first step. We’ve spent much of the last year learning how to help our clients
• Widen the audience for a conference and its content
• Extend the conversation from before to during to after the actual event
• Combine live and virtual audiences, in a way that serves them both and binds them together
• Understand and cope with emerging sustainability issues like decarbonization and rising oil prices
By the time we heard Adrian’s observations on that unfortunate hardware manufacturer, we were already most of our way through a website overhaul that we completed in early spring and officially announced last week. This is an overhaul, not just an update, because we have so much more to say, with ideas and opportunities we could hardly have imagined a couple of years ago.
Looking back, Adrian’s comment made me very grateful. Over the last several months, it hasn’t been easy balancing my time (or even the space in my head) between immediate projects and long-term strategy. But we’re still lucky that we’re a service business, not a manufacturer. We don’t have to carry huge inventory or overhead, and it doesn’t cost us tens or hundreds of millions of dollars when we realize we need to change platforms.
I’m pretty sure our ability to shift (relatively) quickly will bring added value and some intensely interesting conversations to many of our clients, and to the industry as a whole. Watch this space, because I haven’t noticed that the pace of change is slowing down.

Topics: Business Issues, Conference Content, Green Meetings, Virtual Meetings | No Comments »

The Conference Your Conference Could Be

By Mitchell Beer | June 9, 2011

If you could reach a wider audience with your next conference and deliver a far more engaging, immersive experience onsite, would you want to?
How you answer that question—and the steps you’re prepared to take to set a new plan in motion—may not be as obvious as you might think. Your response will tell you how ready you are to embrace a new meetings economy that is less about hotel bookings and food service, and much more about the ideas, contacts, momentum, and results that participants take home from the meetings they attend.
This week, our firm is co-publishing case studies of two recent conferences that pushed the boundaries on what planners and participants can achieve onsite.
• Event Camp Twin Cities 2010 (ECTC) was a hybrid meeting last fall that brought together 75 face-to-face participants in Minneapolis with about 20 in Dallas, 10 in Basel, Switzerland, and about 550 online. The conference proved that an affordable hybrid can keep online audiences fully engaged, and the combination of one central conference with a couple of remote nodes showed how participants can get the benefit of a live meeting without buying an air ticket (and incurring far too high a carbon footprint) to get there. After the conference, organizers used session summaries and a very smart distribution strategy to generate more than 68,000 page views in three months.
• At its 2011 Sustainable Meetings Conference in February, the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) became the first meetings industry association to build the intensity and teamwork of online gaming into a face-to-face event. Participants divided into teams to complete case studies that captured some of the challenges involved in organizing a sustainable meeting. To complete their case studies, the teams had to assess different destinations and distill key information from conference sessions.
Neither event was perfect, and the case studies document the lessons organizers learned along the way. But we went out of our way to be involved with both meetings—we produced post-conference summaries for both, and I served on GMIC’s program committee—because we saw the opportunity to make meetings more resilient and deliver better results for participants.
None of this matters if you think the old style of programming is just what your next meeting needs. But if that’s your belief, you might want to check your assumptions. Meetings and events were hammered during the economic crash, partly because we hadn’t learned to tell our own story in a way that made the case for face-to-face meetings. Now we hear that the meetings economy is recovering, but there are risks around the corner that we ignore at our peril.
That’s not to say that the transition will be seamless, or that the path ahead will always be clearly marked. At ECTC, co-chair Samuel J. Smith made a comment that became a bit of a motto for the GMIC design team:

Experimentation is our get-out-of-jail-free card. If there aren’t a few tech glitches, we aren’t innovating.

That’s why both case studies talk about the lessons learned at each conference, as well as their considerable achievements.
With the release of the two case studies and the launch of our new website, we’re casting our lot with the new meetings economy. ECTC and GMIC’s Game ON! concept both point to meeting strategies that indirectly bolster an economic model built on room nights and registration numbers—but only because they deliver better results for participants. That audience-centric approach is the key ingredient that will turn your next program into the conference your conference could be.

Topics: Business Issues, Case Studies, Conference Content, Future of Meetings, Green Meeting Industry Council, Green Meetings, Meeting Design, Meetings Technology, Social Media, The Conference Publishers, Virtual Meetings | No Comments »

Closing the Loop on Social Sustainability

By Mitchell Beer | February 3, 2011

Of the three pillars of sustainability—economic, environmental, and social—the social dimension is often the toughest to define, measure, and translate into a realistic action plan.
But there might be a way for meetings to help solve that problem.
I’ve often heard engineers, technologists, and economists comment that it’s easy enough to see the links between the economy and the environment. More and more, they’re acknowledging that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
But all of this social stuff? It’s too soft, too fuzzy, too hard to define. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, they say, so don’t even try.
Meeting professionals often take a different route to a similar conclusion. We’re adept at measuring our economic impact when we go onsite, less so at linking our meetings back to the communities that host them.
Yes, we organize community service projects that deliver benefits to host cities, motivation for participants, and PR for our organizations. I’ve attended some of those programs, written about others, and they create glorious, triumphant, shining moments.
But those moments pass, everyone goes home, and the communities wake up the next morning to see that not much has really been achieved.
We may be able to do more.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading Confessions of a Radical Industrialist by Ray Anderson, founder and chair of Interface, Inc. He recounts a presentation by Majora Carter, an environmental justice consultant in the South Bronx, whose community had been on the short end of every economic and environmental decision: if there was a highway to be built, or a waste dump or power plant to be sited, the South Bronx bore the brunt.
When Anderson heard Carter’s talk, a connection crashed into place. “The South Bronx was surrounded by some of the biggest, richest markets for Interface’s products,” he wrote. “Where a lot of new carpets go in, a lot of old ones come out. A recycling facility located close to a resource like that ought to make pretty good business sense.”
With those words, Anderson used sustainability to connect business and community in a way that served both. The same line of thought can and should apply to meetings.
“Most community service programs at conferences are transactional, not transformational, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” says corporate social responsibility (CSR) specialist Elizabeth Henderson, chief sustainability strategist at Meeting Change. “It just means that what usually happens is a donation of time, money, or in-kind goods that can be measured very easily.”
However, “to create something that transforms both the organization and the community, it gets a little harder. This kind of strategic CSR program won’t likely be a one-off, like most conference activities are. To be transformational, there needs to be a give and take, where both organizations learn from each other and are better able meet their strategic objectives as a result.”
Linking a community service project to a meeting’s environmental, economic, and social footprint would mean understanding its local impact—based on the resources it consumes, as well as the business or association activity it supports. Closing that loop would bring our meetings closer to the communities that host them, while turning every meeting into an opportunity to learn better, more sustainable practices.

Topics: Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic Impact | 1 Comment »

The Building Your Building Can Be

By Mitchell Beer | January 18, 2011

When I stepped onto the construction site for the new Ottawa Convention Centre late last week, during an advance tour for members of the OCC Advisory Board, I saw the end of a 15-year campaign that burned through at least three generations of local industry volunteers.
The original Ottawa Congress Centre opened in 1984, and it wasn’t long before the demands of a modern meeting exceeded the available space. Local meeting professionals worked long and hard to make the economic case for a bigger facility, chronicling the meetings that had gone elsewhere and the jobs and tax revenues Ottawa had lost as a result. As early as 1999, MPI’s Ottawa chapter also urged OCC management to build the facility to a high green standard.
My MeetingsNet column this week looks at what the OCC is achieving through smart design—for the functionality that meeting planners expect, and the sustainable operations the industry needs. Both parts of that improvement will bring new business to the community for decades to come.
A new, sustainable product

has not just been a good thing to do to lessen our dependence on oil…It has drawn new customers to our company, companies who are as excited as we are about our ability to take back their old carpets and recycle them into new ones. [The same product] “has opened a door to some large corporate clients (some of whom had given their business to our competitors in the past).

That passage comes from Confessions of a Radical Industrialist by Ray Anderson, founder and chair of Interface, Inc., who described the “spear in the chest moment” that persuaded him to build a 100% sustainable company in one of the world’s least sustainable consumer industries. Anderson was talking about a now-famous brand of carpet that can be demanufactured and recycled to drastically reduce the environmental impact associated with conventional production.
The same business drivers apply to meetings. The industry carries a large environmental footprint that clients expect us to address, and we have the knowledge and resources to address it. Whether sustainability is still a competitive advantage for the convention centres that take the initiative, or simply the price of entry for all facilities, it’s about to begin bringing jobs and tax revenues to Ottawa.
Don’t let anyone convince you that the underlying principles are untried. As I put on my safety gear to begin the OCC tour, I imagined my dad looking over my shoulder. His 45-year career as a consulting engineer brought him to countless job sites, and his hardhat holds pride of place in my office.
Reuben specialized in heating and cooling systems, and dates his first serious attempt at energy conservation back to the 1950s. The OCC may be installing some newfangled components, but there’s nothing new in the idea that efficiency is smart and saves money. We’ve known for many decades how to reduce our energy, water, and waste. The only thing that has changed is the urgency of the effort.

Topics: Carbon Footprint, Case Studies, Economic Impact, Green Meetings | No Comments »

Sweating the Small Stuff on Sustainable Hotels

By Mitchell Beer | August 24, 2010

I’ve just recently returned from a month in Western Canada, about half of it spent onsite. It was a good trip, but I have a quibble with one of the hotels where I stayed.
It’s a small quibble, as quibbles go. You wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that if this was my only complaint, I actually had a pretty good stay.
But this is a small quibble with bigger implications. It’s something that should have been easy to correct, and the facility’s inability to solve it through most of a six-day booking speaks volumes about whether our industry is up to the bigger sustainability challenges.
The quibble is about…a newspaper. Three newspapers, actually, one delivered to my door each morning over the first half of my visit.
Sustainability in hotels and meeting facilities depends on a series of large issues like the design of the building, the efficiency of the equipment, whether lighting units have been fitted with compact fluorescent bulbs, whether electricity is supplied from renewable sources.
But there are dozens of smaller things that hotels can and should do to reduce their footprint. They can save water, energy, and money by taking guests at our word when we insist that we don’t need our linens changed every day. (Most major chains advertise towel reuse programs, but very few hotels actually deliver on them.) And they can stop wasting paper and ink, along with the toxic heavy metals the ink may contain, by making it easy to opt out of daily newspaper delivery.
When I arrived at this particular hotel, I went through the check-in routine that’s become my onsite standard. I instituted my own linen reuse program by putting out a Do Not Disturb sign, and after a stack of newsprint arrived on the first morning, I called the desk to unsubscribe. On Days 2 and 3, I brought the newspaper down to the desk and explained why I didn’t want it, and a very patient clerk promised to pass the information on to the outside contractor who does the deliveries. After Day 3, I started drafting this post. On Day 4, the deliveries stopped—but by then, most short-run travellers would already have left the building.
My objection was mainly about the environmental footprint of a printed format I haven’t used in years, though partly about the content of the publication itself. You see, the paper the hotel delivered most mornings was the National Post, a nasty piece of advocacy reporting that drives many Canadians to distraction with its deliberate political slant.
I didn’t want any newspaper delivered, but I certainly wasn’t happy to see a publication that has so little use for the principles of balance and fairness that I learned in journalism school. Every time a newspaper lands outside your guest room, it’s added to the circulation figures that help that publication justify its advertising rates. I don’t want to be deemed a part of the National Post’s audience base, not even for a few days.
(For readers south of the Canada-U.S. border, imagine if a media baron with a grudge built a major news outlet in your country for the express purpose of pushing public discourse in a particular political direction. Oh, wait…)
I’m not suggesting that a facility should boycott the Pest just because I do, or that hotels should suspend newspaper delivery for guests who want it. But at a time when personalized service is an industry mantra, it shouldn’t be so hard to accommodate a simple preference—without it having to be explained three times. Hotels can track the type of pillow a guest uses and whether they prefer a room on an upper or lower floor. If they expect to be taken seriously on sustainability, a good first step is to ask the right questions…and listen to the answers.
The problem is that this isn’t just about newspapers (or political screeds masquerading as newspapers). Getting the small stuff right—whether it’s newspapers, towel programs, or in-room recycling—is dead easy, and should have been standard industry practice a decade ago.
If we’re still having this conversation, do we really think hotels—or any other corner of the meetings industry—will be ready for an 80% cut in carbon emissions over the next 15 to 30 years? And if customers see us tripping up on even the most basic green initiatives, will they even believe us when we claim to be tackling the bigger issues? At the moment, I’m not so sure they should.

Topics: Carbon Footprint, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Meetings, Greenwashing | No Comments »


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