If you’ve been waiting until broadband usage hits the mainstream of your meeting attendees before jazzing up your meeting Web site, chances are you can go ahead now. According to this article in Telephony Online, “Broadband penetration in the U.S. reached 47.87% of all active Internet home users in April and the penetration is trending upwards quickly, according to new market data.” So chances are that at least half of your attendees are stuck with dial-up anymore.

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That’s the message of this article from Catalog Age, and I think it’s great advice for those who are in charge of marketing a meeting, or anything else, for that matter.

An example from the article: “The NFL, for instance, establishes a monologue with consumers who opt in to receive a weekly e-newsletter: It asks them which team they follow and subsequently sends them a newsletter that focuses on the team (and sells merchandise specific to the team). In contrast, Major League Baseball conducts a monologue by sending only one generic e-newsletter that covers all the teams.”

How can you translate that into your meeting marketing efforts? How about asking potential attendees what they’re most interested in learning more about, then sending them links to information, interesting bits about the person who’ll be presenting on that topic at the meeting, and books about it they can buy from your organization’s bookstore? The possibilities seem endless.

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Interesting results on MPI’s Web poll. It asks what types of educational topics people are most focused on these days.

Of the 148 who’d voted as of the time I posted this, leadership and motivation wins with 29 percent; tech trends comes in a close second at 25 percent. Meetings ROI and life balance come in third and fourth at 13 percent and 12 percent respectively; while legal issues, crisis preparedness and security trail with 9 percent each.

I don’t know what to make of this, just thought it was interesting.

A guest blog from Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy, executive
creative director for meetings and events at Maritz Canada in
Ontario:

Top 5 Mistakes Made in Meeting & Event Planning:

–The conventional approach to staging that places the audience in
rigid rows facing forward toward leadership is alienating, mind
numbing, and supports the old-school style of business — “there’s us
and them.”

–Performances that offer packaged glitz and glamour, lacking
authentic personalized interaction, miss critical opportunities to
meet the most important objectives.

–Celebrities that are not personally aligned with the experience or
promise of your brand are better left to television, where they are
much less expensive to enjoy.

–Believing that your meeting or event is a moment in time unto
itself, ending with the departure of your attendees, assures that you
will not effectively leverage the larger investment made within your
communications plans.

–If a theme for your event does not ask to be extended beyond the
event, you are paying too much for it.

Interesting article from the New York Times that takes another look at Studs Turkel’s book, Working, which was published 30 years ago.

Says the article, “When it appeared, “Working” was a revelation, a window on the thoughts of Americans who were rarely heard from: hospital aides, skycaps, gravediggers. Many of the interviews follow a similar, surprising trajectory, beginning with mundane workplace details but quickly moving on to existential thoughts. Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, ‘for daily meaning as well as daily bread.’”

That was before computers and new management practices changed just about everything, of course. Now we have higher productivity but, the article posits, “job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read “Working” without thinking about what has gone wrong in the workplace.”

Are we really working on “digital assembly lines” that discourage creativity and independent thought? I don’t know about you all, but that’s definitely not the case for me in my job. And I’d think that meeting planners, on the front lines of creative thinking, would be among the other professions that are escaping this trend. Or is the trend toward commoditizing meetings changing all that?

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A guest blog from Susan Hatch, executive editor of Corporate Meetings & Incentives:

The National Business Travel Association white paper on meeting consolidation kicked up some dust on the MIMlist meetings industry listserv last week, with one planner “shocked and appalled” by what she took to be Meeting Professionals International’s endorsement of a paper she believed implied that “business travel managers can more effectively manage meetings; therefore meetings departments should report to business travel departments.”

Paranoid much?

The NBTA white paper is a service to the meeting planning community, and MPI should be envious that it doesn’t have its name at the top.

I recommend you read it for yourself. The work done by NBTA’s Groups and Meetings Committee, chaired by Madlyn Caliri, global hotel and meetings program manager at AT&T, and Tracey Wilt, purchasing consultant, travel and meetings services for Xerox Corp., focuses on two key areas: 1) building a business case for a “strategic meeting management program” (identifying opportunities for process improvement, risk management, cost savings, etc.) and 2) best practices in corporate meeting consolidation (standards for meeting approvals, data collection, sourcing, etc.).

The NBTA’s meeting committee was launched in March 2003 to address the reality that some NBTA members–travel managers–are being asked to also manage meetings and events, and the association formed an alliance last August with MPI. The consolidation white paper is the meeting committee’s first product. Sure, it’s useful to a travel manager or a purchasing professional who needs to take control of meetings, but I would argue that it’s just as useful to meeting managers who want to keep their jobs. If your department isn’t tracking and leveraging your company’s meeting spend, you can be sure that there’s another department that will.

Data collection and strategic sourcing may not have been in the job description you started with, but for corporate meeting planners who want to stay in the game, ignore it at your own risk. The meeting planning community is fortunate that NBTA has made its white paper public, and I for one look forward to reading its upcoming research on insourcing versus outsourcing, developing meeting policy, technology options, and more.

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With all the wild and horrid weather lately in the Mid-West, and devastating flooding and mudslides in the Carribean, I can’t help but worry about the upcoming hurricane season and the potential damage it can wreak on unprepared meetings.

Thanks to Joan Eisenstodt, empress of the MIMlist listserve, here’s the 2004 Hurricane Season Printable Data Sheet and Resource. If it’s even a remote possibility that your upcoming meeting could be in a hurricane zone, it’s well worth a download.