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 [...]
Why I Consider My Golf Club an Essential Business Tool
Call it an age thing. I realized the other day that I spend an inordinate amount of time playing golf, or attending golf tournaments, or talking about golf, or organizing my own golf tournament just so I can play golf. And I don’t even golf all that well! But when I look around at a [...]
Farewell Rick Redfern: A Revolution in Search of a Cash Flow
What would you do if Twitter stopped tweeting and YouTube suddenly went off the air? Particularly if you lived in a community where television outlets were consolidating, radio stations had cut local programming, and the venerable daily newspaper was on the verge of shutting down? No doubt, with Internet access and decent search skills, you [...]
A Virtual (R)Evolution-Part 2
Part 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 [...]
Leveraging Information
Much to the dismay of my significant other, I spent two hours on the phone yesterday with another woman—and the conversation was really good. Okay, okay, it wasn’t like that. I had a really interesting discussion with a market analyst from the Detroit area who had some pleasantly pointed things to say about knowledge transfer, [...]
Dinosaur Economics
The power of the Internet is partly about the unexpected connections that help people share knowledge and build community, often in ways that make services more affordable and environmentally friendly. In meetings, we’re just scratching the surface of what might be possible online. Not simply to try and replace live meetings with virtual ones, or [...]
‘People Will Still Have to Meet…’
The fact that he came over to chat had very little to do with me. I was sitting on the patio at Bridgehead Trading, the funky, fair trade coffee shop that serves as an informal meeting room and home-away-from-home for our office two blocks away. One of the counter staff came over to visit with [...]
“Ask yourself: Why are you having a conference?”
Last week’s Meeting Professionals International (MPI) World Education Congress in Las Vegas was filled with great experiences, intriguing conversations, and engaging sessions. None was better than the panel presentation entitled “What if the next generation had planned this conference?” led by Kansas State University professor Dr. Michael Wesch. I’m biased, of course. A member of [...]
When Blogs Have No Purpose?
The client is always right. So when a meeting organizer told me firmly that she saw no purpose in a post-conference blog, I stopped to listen. Our team has spent a good part of the past year showing how social media can extend the life and breadth of a conference, while the cornerstone content of [...]
