My first full day at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual conference, going on now in Orlando, was packed. Some notes on the meeting as a meeting.

I’ll get the whining out of the way first:
-Yes, I already have stuffed-brain syndrome from having way too much thrown at me in too little time with no connection between session topics and no time for reflection built in.
-We hit the “I know you can’t read this slide, but…” wall before the first general session was over.
-We hit the “I know this classroom setup makes it almost impossible to break into small groups, but we’ll have to do our best…” shortly thereafter.
-Healthy food is good, but replacing the chips with bean salad and the cookie with an apple in the bag lunch seems a bit over the top. Must we resort to Starbucks for all our dietary sins?
-Speaking of over the top, is it just me, or are there way too many sessions to choose from? I know, tough problem to have, but I’m finding myself torn between six or seven I want to go to in every single time slot. It’s making me crazy to be missing so much good content (and hearing people tweet about some of those sessions to the #acehp12 hashtag just makes it worse).

Awesome aspects, meeting-wise:
-Free WiFi! Thanks to Bernie Halbur, PhD, FACME, ACEHP’s Professional Development & Meeting Management Director, for making it happen, along with everything else we’re enjoying logistically. I gave her a standing ovation when she was recognized yesterday at the general session, and I wasn’t the only one.
-Love having the brief outdoor breezeway walk to the exhibition area, and the tables set up for eating/hanging out/computing along the way. At least we’re assured of the opportunity to catch five minutes or so of the gorgeous Florida weather as we go back and forth, instead of never even knowing if the sun is shining or not, as so often happens at marathon meetings.
-Beautiful hotel (the JW Marriott), beautiful rooms, nice jogging path, great fitness center. I don’t know much about golf, but the course looks good to me.
-Being able to hold the new CCMEP celebration out on the patio last night was a wonderful touch. Again, being able to get outside in January means a lot, especially to those of us who hail from the frozen North!

(Cross-posted on Capsules, where I’ll be posting a bunch more that’s content-specific to continuing medical education, so if you’re into that, come on over and browse!)

While it may not rock your world, this list of 10 quick meeting-planning tips from the AMI blog is a good reminder of what really counts: that it’s all about the attendees, not your organization. It may be simple, but it’s probably not easy!

That’s what Kristi Casey Sanders asks in this interesting post about how what’s hip today might become passé, presentation-format-wise. Plus she includes a great list of tips (and she’s funny).

Most of the conversations I’ve had recently around the trade show concept have focused on their being perceived as an old-school way to bring buyers and sellers together, one that is becoming increasingly ineffective and unappealing to attendees. Hence the move toward hosted-buyer programs, and adding education in hopes it will attract more people to the show floor.

Then I ran across this editorial in Forbes written by Consumer Electronics Association (which owns the CES show) president and CEO Gary Shapiro that is practically an ode to the trade show model. Called Want Innovation? Go to a Trade Show
, here’s the heart of his argument:

Perhaps most important, they come because relationships matter in business and, despite the worldwide reach of the Internet, a relationship cannot only be electronic. It must be personal.

This personal component to International CES – or any tradeshow, for that matter – is what makes it a living, breathing entity. It’s an experience that requires five senses. Some may scoff and wonder why in the age of technology and the Internet live face-to-face events even exist. Yet they not only persist, they also prosper because people, relationships and first-hand impressions matter. Five-sense interaction beats the Internet for creating a big picture view, allowing serendipitous discovery, developing trust, and evaluating people and products.

It’s an argument we’ve all heard before, and I of course want to get behind it. And yet I do hear, anecdotally anyway, an increasing reluctance on attendees’ parts to deal with the trade show model. Is the expo floor as we know it still a vibrant, living, growing model, or a dinosaur lumbering its way to an experiential tar pit? I’m sure the answer will in part depend on who the intended audience is, but generally speaking, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Or a stinky seatmate, or one that never shuts up? The list of things air passengers are and do that annoy their fellow travelers are legion. Which do you find most obnoxious? Head over to Elliott.org and register your vote on what makes for the most annoying seatmate ever. For me, the screaming baby is the hardest to take, closely followed by one not on Chris’s list: The seat-kicker. I swear I’ve taken some shots to the kidneys from kids in the row behind me that would put Ali to shame.

Talk about communication failure! This is scathingly on target.

Thanks to @BrianSMcGowan for the pointer!

If your attendees come to your meetings bristling with iPads, iPhones, and an assortment of other iTems, you’d best be prepared with plentiful bandwidth and perhaps a few high-tech goodies to make them feel appreciated. Like what, you ask? Here are five tech giveaway ideas from Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc..

This is really more to ask you all for feedback of various types. I’m curious about a few things:

1. What did you think of the different session lengths being all mixed together? I heard it was a bit tough for we older folks to get used to at first, while the younger ones jumped right in with no problem. I found it confusing, but I think more because of the sheer volume of offerings in any given couple of hours slot. Which brings me to…

2. What did you think about integrating VES into PCMA? As much as it made for a ridiculously long week last year, I think I preferred having VES piggyback rather than mesh with PCMA. There were just too many things to choose from, and all too often I ended up putting the VES sessions second.

3. Learning Lounge thoughts? I loved the Really Live Chats, would like to have them promoted more so you get a better sense of what’s going on and who the facilitators are. Also more info ahead of time on the videos and how it all works. I also loved the Big Ideas Pavilion; again, I’d like to have had a better sense of who was talking about what and when, though the serendipity of what I ended up going to was sublime. I didn’t go to much at the APP4that, but I liked what I did go to and heard a lot of similar sentiments. I did almost nothing at Digital U and Society just because I couldn’t work it in. I’d love to hear how those worked (or didn’t) for you.

4. Last but not least, I’d like to put together an online gallery of images from the conference so the poor peeps who couldn’t be there can at least enjoy it vicariously–I took a bunch of photos, but photography is not my forte. If you have any nice shots of yourself, your colleagues, your peers, funky hats, or whatever else struck your fancy at PCMA12 that you’d like to share (and that those in the shots wouldn’t mind sharing!), please e-mail them to me at spelletier@meetingsnet.com (and include who and what are in the shots, of course, and how you would like to be credited as the photographer). I’ve seen a few on the Twitter stream that were just fantastic!

I spend a lot of time with continuing medical education providers, but not so much with the meeting planners who make those meetings at which the CME is conducted happen, so it was fascinating to have the chance to sit in on a frank discussion of what their biggest challenges are, and what they are doing to resolve them, as my last session of PCMA 2012.

One thing that seemed to be of huge concern was the idea that exhibitors were going to start asking them to provide physician attendees’ National Provider Identification numbers. Since this is public information, I’m having a hard time understanding why that is the meeting planner’s problem—why can’t the exhibitors just look them up? If someone can explain why this is potentially a big issue for exhibitors, please let me know. I tried to find out from a few folks after the session ended, but everyone was in a rush to leave so I didn’t really get much other than if an exhibitor demands it, it’s their problem. Which I get, but I don’t get why exhibitors would demand this from them. Light-shedding on this would be welcome!

Other big issues were the costs of complying with government regulations and Accreditation Council for CME rules, pressures to find new sources of revenue, building traffic to the exhibition floor, international initiatives (including visa-related challenges), CME credit interchange with other countries, and all the various codes and rules and regulations they are supposed to follow nowadays.

One participant was particularly concerned about the Council of Medical Specialty Societies’ newish ethical code that is designed to limit drug and device company influence over patient care. While similar in many ways to the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support, it also prohibits society presidents, CEOs, and editors-in-chief of society journals from having direct financial relationships with relevant for-profit companies in the healthcare sector. One participant said her organization actually had to ask one of its journal editors to resign after her society agreed to abide by the CMSS code.

Sponsorships and exhibit dollars on the decline had most of the crowd at least someone frazzled. As one person said, “With the PhRMA Code, they don’t want to sponsor anything anymore.” Several said their organizations were going the same route as PCMA, offering year-round sponsorships that extend far beyond the meeting rather than providing one-offs on tote bags and banners. (Note: This article offers some good tips on how to get more sponsorship dollars. And here’s another one.) One thing sponsors particularly seem to like, said some participants, is being able to meet with board members and other influential people in the industry at board and other high-level meetings. Some said they give preferential treatment on the show floor to exhibitors that are also in more extensive sponsorship relationships, others said they kept it completely separate.

From what people were saying, I’m not sure they’d buy into this snip of research finding that physicians aren’t eschewing the trade show floor now that the tchotches are out due to PhRMA Code restrictions. It sounds like, for medical meetings as for other types of association conferences, it’s becoming more and more of a push to get people on the show floor and interacting with exhibitors. While product theaters can help, they don’t appear to be a major solution to the exhibition drain problem. As one person said, “The surveys say they value exhibitions, but they don’t go. We give them food, product theaters, we’re even putting the reception on the show floor. Nothing seems to help.”

One said she was going to take the “continue the conversation” idea from PCMA, where a follow-on informal session is held after a keynote so those who want to can dive deeper into the material, only hold it on the show floor. Which is fine, as long as it isn’t for credit, warned another person. Another pointed to a different angle on the problem: Maybe it’s the booths that aren’t so attractive. So that organization offers a consultant who can evaluate exhibitor booths and suggest ways to improve them.

Some said they had added a virtual trade show component as a complement to repurposing educational content from the conference for online distribution, but it didn’t appear that the value was all that high (one said that only 42 percent of virtual attendees visited the virtual exhibit, which I thought actually sounded pretty good. Another said it was more like 25 percent for his group). Streaming the educational session, with or without CME credit attached, live and archived, seemed to be pretty popular among attendees of most of the planners who said they had done it. However, interest dropped off a cliff when members were asked if they would pay for it, one person said (shocking, I know!). Another said she had a good response to charging one fee to get access to all the content, and an additional fee on top of it if they wanted to get CME credit for it.

They didn’t talk a lot about CME educational grants, but one person did point out that, now that pharma budgets for CME grants are shrinking, their ad budgets actually are growing. Accordingly, medical organizations are beginning to put more of their focus on attracting those ad dollars to support their meetings.

There was more—a lot more—but I’ll leave this one with two of the wildest promotional ploys I’ve heard of:

One was a company that brought colored chalk and proceeded to draw its logo on the sidewalk in front of the medical conference’s headquarters hotel. Another person told of a company that put its logo on the mainsail of a big sailboat and had it sail up and down the harbor in view of the meeting (I’m not sure if this was in San Diego, but I could see it happening there.)

I had been looking forward to this one because, while I’m not sure Richard Saul Wurman’s done the world a favor by unleashing a million TED knockoffs (then again, I shouldn’t blame him for others piggybacking on an idea that may not be a great fit for their meeting) and I’m not convinced his www.www conference format is all that (then again, as he said, he doesn’t care, since he didn’t invite me anyway).

From the abrupt introduction—here he is—to the abrupt end—I might as well stop now since I got a laugh—he was not everyone’s cup of tea, but I was delighted through and through. What a cranky, unique, fearless individual he is. He created TED because “I wanted to design a meeting I’d want to be at. I did TED because I wanted to do it.”

He described the designing process for TED as one of subtraction: He took out panels, dress codes (he cut off the tie of anyone who dared to wear one), took out the podium (which he described as just something to protect your groin and to give you a place to put papers to read off of—and “who wants to be read to?”). Meetings, he said, are made up of small things that make people feel comfortable so they can learn.

He talked a bit about his new www.www conference, which he’s again designing through subtraction (no tickets, no presentations, no set schedule). One thing that sounds interesting is how he plans to disseminate the conference later, which is going to be in black-and-white film available online that will offer customizable ways to find out more about each of the discussion participants. Basically, again looking to create a conference he’d like to be a part of, he’s looking for a modality that allows people to create their own experience based on what they’re interested in.

He went on for a while about a fable he created in his books What If, Could Be and 33. I won’t go into it, but it involved turning everything into its opposite (example: copyright becomes right to copy. Note to self: Buy these books. They sound really interesting.).

More favorite quotes:
“I don’t show visuals because I don’t want to be a caption.”
“The more famous you are, the shorter the introduction.”
“Learning is remembering what you’re interested in.”
“I’ve tended to fail sideways throughout my life.”
“Humor is not trivial: It’s the opposite of expectation.” (He said this just before reeling off some of my favorite Stephen Wright one-liners, like, “Everything is within walking distance if you have enough time.”)
“We live in the age of also.” (As in, you can do it this way, and also that way.)

And in case this wasn’t eclectic enough, he ended up with a quick biomimicry example of learning a better way to peel a banana by watching an ape do it. I actually learned this one a few years ago and have been peeling my bananas from the bottom up ever since. I later on in the afternoon got into a really interesting conversation about what else we can learn about meetings from mimicking what nature perfected a long time ago. Stay tuned for more on that one…