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Next Entries »The Tempest Over MPI’s Virtual Access Pass
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009There’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 charge [...]
The Green Meetings Portal Goes Live
Thursday, April 16th, 2009The 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 coverage of [...]
Solutions in the Eye of the Storm
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009An 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 in [...]
The Green Meetings Portal: A World First
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009PITTSBURGH - 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 of [...]
First, Do No Harm
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Some of the most transcendent moments I’ve seen onsite have taken place in carefully controlled settings, where every aspect of a meeting was engineered to get people talking to each other. And listening across the boundaries of language, culture, agenda, and organizational loyalties.
As meeting professionals, we don’t often talk about the incredible convening power that [...]
Friends in High Places
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009You know your arguments—in this case, your industry’s arguments—are beginning to take when they pop up in unexpected places.
So it was a nice antidote to some of the scarier news bites pervading the industry when two different colleagues pointed me to Don’t Cancel That Meeting, a blog post by leadership consultant John Baldoni that appeared [...]
Downturn? What Downturn?
Thursday, January 8th, 2009As a meeting professional, how would you have felt if you’d received the following RFP?
Meeting dates: December 15-31
Scope: Nation-wide (United States only)
Estimated participants: 50,400
Room nights: None
Venues: 4,200
Average participants per venue: 12
Food and beverage: Provided
Audio-visual requirements: None
Air travel: None
Carbon footprint: Local ground transportation; public transit and carpools encouraged
Mythical client: US Department of Health and Human Services
As [...]
World AIDS Day and the Ultimate ROI
Monday, December 1st, 2008When it comes to assessing the return on investment (ROI) in large, face-to-face meetings, it’s hard to think of a more basic measure than 3.8 million years of life.
With the approach of World AIDS Day December 1, the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative issued a verdict of sorts on the AIDS policies pursued [...]
A Virtual (R)Evolution-Part 2
Monday, November 24th, 2008Part 2: Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
There’s a tremendous opportunity brewing for meeting professionals and the organizations they serve. Some parts of it trace back to recent U.S. election campaigns that have become a proving ground for an unprecedented mix of live and online learning, persuasion, and mobilization.
It’ll be a while before we [...]
A Virtual (R)Evolution-Part 1
Friday, November 14th, 2008Part 1: A Recipe for Disaster
Start out with a well-rounded, well-founded measure of enthusiasm for the latest virtual meeting technologies.
Add a healthy dose of concern about climate change, with a dollop of unintended greenwashing.
Factor in a preoccupation with cutting meeting costs to the bone, without pausing to consider what may be lost along the way.
Subtract [...]