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The Tempest Over MPI’s Virtual Access Pass
By Mitchell Beer | July 7, 2009
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 charge for online content. But even that issue is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Until we see anything approaching a sustainable business model for online or social media, there will be no agreement on whether, why, when, or how much to charge for different categories of content.
The quickest, surest way to reach that point will be to experiment with a bunch of different approaches, celebrate when someone succeeds, learn what we can when there are failures, and share the knowledge in the best tradition of the interactive Web. Which is why it’s been frustrating to see MPI take such a pounding for the Virtual Access Pass.
The conversation began with a blog post and Twitter poll by Jeff Hurt, an educator, meeting planner, social media maven, friend of our firm, and former MPI staffer based in Dallas, Texas.
“Did MPI think this through?” Jeff asked. “Did they honestly think members who were not attending were going to jump up and down with glee that we had the opportunity to pay another $300 for content? Did they think about how upset some of us might be?”
There followed a long, intense debate that was a credit to the ability of social media to generate wide, varied conversation in a short period of time, but probably sold the Virtual Access Pass short.
The concept may or may not work.
If it’s edgy enough to be truly innovative, it probably won’t be an unqualified success—and if we understand how innovation really works, we probably shouldn’t expect it to be.
Through our firm’s own, admittedly arcane lens, we can already foresee a possible next step: reinforcing the verbatim video with value-added summaries, picking up on the online format we’ve introduced through the Green Meetings Portal.
But at a time when the average conference is about as financially secure as, well, the average daily newspaper, it’s hard to fault an association of meeting professionals for field-testing a new approach that might help its members keep their own face-to-face meetings alive.
By taking this step, MPI is stepping into a turbulent, high-stakes debate that is already reshaping commercial media, and will echo back to our industry as long as conferences are principally about knowledge and content.
“The sustainability of ‘free’ as a business model is a rough climb,” wrote MPI CEO Bruce MacMillan in his first of two blog posts on the topic. The ground in this area is shifting every day, and until it settles, “any hard and fast rules around ‘free’ content are a ways off.”
That reality, compounded by a sputtering and cautious economy, is playing out on the ground for almost every conference we talk to.
Our firm happens to be in the midst of a very good year, almost certainly a record year. But we’re talking to clients who are losing 20, 30, or 50% of their onsite attendance this year, along with large chunks of sponsorship funding. We know of some events that are down 70% or more. If conferences aren’t reaching their audiences and budgets are hemorrhaging, why wouldn’t organizations turn to their online communities for an alternate channel that keeps members engaged, and opens up a new potential revenue stream?
In his original post, Jeff Hurt took MPI to task for putting a price on online access at WEC, after opening a free channel for the opening general session at its February, 2009 MeetDifferent conference in Atlanta. But let’s look back at what was happening in February.
The meetings industry was under attack, with a bill before the U.S. Senate set to prohibit any meetings or events held by companies that had received federal bailout dollars. The opening session at MeetDifferent had been rebuilt from the ground up (on very short notice) to address a serious threat to meeting professionals and their livelihoods.
I didn’t know at the time that the live streaming from MeetDifferent was a beta test for a future billable product. But if I’d noticed, I doubt I would have cared. MPI was standing up for its members, finding common ground with other affected industry associations, and doing everything it could to get the word out, as quickly and widely as possible. Our association was doing what an association should do, and doing it well.
The industry’s response to the crisis wasn’t perfect. But that opening session is widely seen as the best that MPI or any other meetings association has ever put on, and streaming it at no cost was a smart and obvious move, given the issues and priorities the association faced at that moment. Five months later, it’s just as legitimate for MPI to charge for content, depending on the objectives and strategy behind the decision.
Even if the Virtual Access Pass crashes and burns, surely it’s part of MPI’s job to try out ideas and concepts that challenge our understanding of content, of community…or, for that matter, of conferences. A thousand criticisms would bloom if the association decided to stand pat and do nothing new, and rightly so.
Topics: Business Issues, Conference Blogs, Conference Content, Meeting Professionals International, Onsite Learning, Social Media, Virtual Meetings |
Comments Feed
July 7th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Mitchell:
Thanks for adding another layer to this discussion and I think we’re going to be dealing with the issue of free and online content for a while now. I had no idea I was going to touch such a nerve when I wrote my original post and the subsequent posts. I believe it is a healthy dialog at best.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Mitchell, great to see the discussion on another playground!
It’s super easy to play Monday morning quarterback on this issue. MPI on the other had to make a business decision that made sense to them at the time. Here’s a summary of where my head is:
1) I applaud MPI for leveraging WEC09 and making it live beyond the event!
2) I think the timing of offering the VAP is not so good. Ideally, the VAP would have initially been on the registration form as an alternative to live or one day attendance. Throwing this out 10 days before is one of the biggest issues of contention.
3) I’m of the opinion that you give some content away free (just a taste)…offer a bit more for free to members in good standing…and then hold some of the best stuff as an ala carte product offering (paid) after WEC.
4) All of these sessions are tremendous sponsorship opportunities. Any supplier worth their salt would love to be part of helping planners, especially when their reach can extend beyond the live event.
Great topic! I’m excited to keep reading and learning what makes the most sense for the long term health of an association and their major events.
Dave Lutz
Velvet Chainsaw Consulting
July 7th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
MPI is evil (and scary) and they must be stopped!
I can prove it. MPI is offering something called virtual access pass for content from World Education Conference - and they have the nerve to ask me to pay for it. How dare they adopt a business model with which I don’t agree? They must be evil as only I am the keeper of the correct approach do doing business. There’s no way this could be a simple difference of opinion. It must be a plot to take away my right to everything for free. And since they haven’t engaged with me at exactly a time and place of my choosing, I have decided that they do not listen at all. Sad. You would think they are in the process of moving an army of staff to Salt Lake City for their largest conference of the year or something.
And they are scary. I write this from an undisclosed location (aka my Mother’s basement) so that they won’t find me. Even so, I would not be surprised if their member repercussion squad is not outside my door at this very moment, paper bag of dog poo in hand, ready to set it afire, ring our doorbell and run! I heard once of an MPI member on a site visit on Lover’s Lane on the same day a deranged one-armed person escaped a mental institution. They heard a noise and took off. When they got out of the car, they discovered a hook hanging from the door – along with the remnants of an MPI name tag.
How could they have possibly grown to 24,000 members with such a poor value proposition if they aren’t evil? I envision that Bruce guy in a gray Nehru jacket, stroking a cat, pinky to lip, exclaiming, we will soon have one MILLION members! MU HU HU HA HAH HAH HAH! MU HU HU HA HAH HAH HAH!
July 8th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Thanks to all three of you for taking the time to comment.
Jeff, I agree, a big part of the back story is that this has become such a wide, important discussion, so quickly. In the last 12 hours or so, we’ve seen continuing back-and-forth — on your blog and ours, on the Facebook page where we posted a link to yesterday’s item, and in a batch of private emails. And my colleague, Andrew Horsfield, has written his own blog post (coming soon…watch this space) that takes the conversation in a slightly different direction.
All of which has the potential to become uncomfortable, sometimes, but it’s always good. Around the U.S. economic meltdown, we keep hearing (and I tend to agree) that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The lessons we learn, the practices we develop, the habits we acquire by figuring out the links between onsite and online will stand our industry in very good stead, at least until the next transformative crisis comes along.
(Hey, wait…didn’t I write yesterday that I *dis*agreed with Seth Godin’s enthusiasm for constant disruption?)
Dave, I think your comments take us very nicely in the direction of a practical foundation for some of the big-picture issues that have been circulating. You’ve also brought out an issue that we discuss with our clients every day: even if they want to build virtual content into their meetings (and many of them do!), they are quite rightly cautious about creating an online presence that will cannibalize their attendance–always for fear of losing revenue, often for fear of losing the critical mass of knowledge and perspective that makes onsite worthwhile.
That concern makes a lot of sense to me, not as a deal-breaker, but as a factor we will absolutely have to address if we hope to make these new methods and systems work. Contrary to some of the commentary that has gone by, I’ve seen MPI show a good bit of fascination with 2.0 technologies–onsite, online, and at the level of personal interaction. But here’s my disagreement with Godin coming back: It’s fine (and worthy) to advocate endless, creative disruption when we’re recommending it for other peoples’ organizations, but I’ve yet to see any client adopt it without being able to map the results back to revenue and other core objectives.
And Michael…thank you for contacting us from your undisclosed location, and I hope you’ve stocked enough pizza and freeze-dried ice cream to survive the onslaught! From what I’ve seen, by far the majority of the dialogue on this issue has been edgy, but productive and genuine. I’ve spotted a few posts that, ahmmm…well, haven’t quite hit the standard. At those moments, I’ve found myself getting just a bit protective of MPI–as protective as I would be of any association that is paddling hard to get it right and stay afloat, in a raging river, without a reliable chart. Which, come to think of it, describes every single one of our association clients these days.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I love “free” as much as anyone, but I also love the priceless and unparalleled power of the live, in person, face to face experience. I don’t want to do anything as a meetings industry professional to undermine that basis for our existence, nor do I want my professional association doing so, and it seems to me that MPI tried mightily to offer something meaningful with the least likelihood of unintended (negative) consequences.
What I most want from my professional association is for it to manage itself responsibly so it can continue to be my professional home, my community. From my view, that’s exactly what MPI is doing.
Joyce Paschall, CAE, CMP
American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine
Kendall College - School of Hospitality Management
July 11th, 2009 at 1:14 am
[...] is forcing us to learn the same lessons about the content we deliver onsite. As we’ve suggested in past blog posts, the ground rules are still taking shape, and the underlying business models are not at all clear. [...]