General Session Design 3.0: Keys to Your Organizational and Personal Success
Fusion Productions collaborated with Meeting Professionals International (MPI) to produce the general sessions for the 2010 World Education Congress (WEC 2010). To demonstrate its “meeting of the future” design strategy, Fusion brought in a team of world-class partners and continued to co-create through the entire production process—before, during and after the WEC. During a Monday [...]
Audience Profile Drives Technology Choices
Before deciding dates, location and venue for a conference, meeting planners and suppliers must understand who should attend, why they would want to and what they’re most concerned about, social media specialist Paul Salinger told participants in a Sunday morning breakout session. Salinger, vice president of marketing at Oracle Corporation, described a plethora of technologies [...]
Meetings that Change the World
All this month, The Edge will carry advance and onsite coverage of MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress, July 24-27, 2010 in Vancouver. Posts are linked to an online community produced for MPI by Fusion Productions in partnership with The Conference Publishers, Clever Zebra, and master of ceremonies Glenn Thayer. Join the discussion today! At any [...]
Social Media Metaphors and the Death of Print
Editor’s Note: This guest post is excerpted from the “oblogatory blig” produced by Vancouver writer Lynne Melcombe, a former associate and longtime friend of our firm. It flags some of the unexpected twists that knowledge producers—including meeting professionals—can expect to run into on the road to new media and “free” content. According to Gillian Shaw, [...]
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 [...]
Is a “Good Enough” Meeting Good Enough?
What would happen if meetings were scaled back to the barest of essentials, on the principle that the best event is the one that is just good enough? It isn’t an idle question. There’s an emerging trend that is reshaping everything from long distance telephone to video cameras, from the design of military aircraft to [...]
A Hybrid in Your Future
By now, they’re a familiar sight: hybrid vehicles that combine two separate power sources to squeeze maximum energy out of every drop of gasoline they use. Once considered an environmentalist’s fantasy, hybrids have made it into the mainstream, and for good reason—they’re a great, practical way to make your gas dollar stretch further, at a [...]
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 [...]
