The New Normal: 16 Meeting Takeaways and a Couple of Predictions
This guest post is excerpted from Midcourse Corrections, the meetings blog produced by Jeff Hurt, director of education and events with the Dallas-based National Association of Dental Plans. It appeared shortly after Jeff returned from his association’s 2009 annual meeting in September. Reprinted with Jeff’s permission. In 15+ years of planning conferences and events, this [...]
Recycle Your Conference for Fun and Profit
A few years ago, archaeologists found a small Bronze Age spear point in England. I can’t remember exactly where they found it, but I do remember that they determined the bronze in the spear point had originated in Italy. In fact, an original larger spear point had broken, and then been melted down to make [...]
A Dynamic Dozen: The Making of a “Killer App”
Everywhere you turn these days, meeting professionals are searching for the “killer app” that will make social media and virtual technologies more an opportunity and less a threat for face-to-face events. The language of hybrid meetings, virtually unknown a year ago, is quickly gaining currency. MPI experimented with a Virtual Access Pass at its 2009 [...]
Control Your Content—or Someone Else Will
A friend of mine who is an experienced meeting planner told me of a recurring nightmare she’s been having lately. In her nightmare, she is standing in a 5,000+ auditorium, with a very expensive band playing under an elaborate light and laser show, but only about 100 other people are there, including her and the [...]
The Next Level of ROI
Meeting professionals have made great strides over the last few years in measuring the return on investment (ROI) that clients and participants receive from some types of meetings. But solid as that work has been, the limited scope of the analysis is coming back to haunt the industry, at a time when any meeting might [...]
Can a Value-Add be Free?
Recently a lot fingers have been doing a lot of typing regarding the Virtual Access Pass as proposed by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) for the upcoming World Education Congress (WEC). The dedication and earnest concern of the various bloggers should be commended, for this debate about using the Internet to extend the reach of conferences [...]
The Tempest Over MPI’s Virtual Access Pass
There’s quite a tempest brewing over the Virtual Access Pass that our professional association, Meeting Professionals International (MPI), has introduced for its 2009 World Education Congress (WEC), which gets under way this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conversation is an echo of a wider debate about when it’s legitimate—or whether it’s ever legitimate—to [...]
The Green Meetings Portal Goes Live
The Green Meetings Portal went live earlier this week. Earlier this year, we announced that The Conference Publishers was joining with the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) to launch the world’s first conference content portal. I’m tremendously pleased and proud to announce that the promise is now, finally, a reality. The Portal begins life with [...]
Solutions in the Eye of the Storm
An interesting thing is happening on the way to the economic recovery. We certainly aren’t there yet—in the economy as a whole, or in meetings and events. The sheer, accumulating weight of cancellations is setting off alarm bells across the industry, and the U.S. Center for Exhibition Industry Research has just reported the first decline [...]
The Green Meetings Portal: A World First
PITTSBURGH – This week, our company marks an important and very exciting milestone. The Edge is a blog about conferences and content, not a promotional page for The Conference Publishers. But this is a moment when we’re generating industry news. And it has everything to do with the power of face-to-face meetings, the transcendent importance [...]
