There’s a mini-storm a-brewing that maybe just four or five of us care about, but what the heck, I’ll jump in. First, IAEM starts up a blog for its Expo! Expo! show. Cool—you may have noticed I went a little gaga over ASAE’s show blog earlier this year. And like ASAE, IAEM wants to encourage people to comment on the various posts, so they’re offering a chance to win an iPod Nano for those who register and comment.

Rich from the TSMR blog calls it “bribery” (and objects to the marketing effort itself as pretty lame). Jeff over at the Tradeshow Blues Blog likes the idea so much that he has (sort of) started his own comment giveaway contest—only in his version, everyone’s a winner, just not of a Nano. Then the Expophile, whose company is managing IAEM’s blog, chimes in to defend the giveaway (look in the comments section).

I guess I’m kind of with Jeff and the Expophile on the bribery issue. For some reason, people who read the few blogs out there for this industry for the most part aren’t into commenting for some reason, and I have no problem with giving a little incentive if that would encourage more participation. After all, it’s not like a hotel offering to give a Jaguar to meeting planners that book X amount of business with them. But Rich is right on one thing for sure: The announcement was pretty bad marketing.

Is this unethical? I don’t think so. It’s more like an exhibitor holding a raffle for those who stop by the booth. It’s just a way to encourage a little conversation, and conversation is always a good thing.

“The bed’s too hard.” “The coffee’s not hot enough.” “I had to walk out of that session, it was so boring.” “My plane didn’t get here on time and I missed the reception—what are you going to do about it?”

Sound familiar? As a counterpoint—or is that complement?— to my last post, I wanted to drop a quick note begging you to cherish your whiners. While they may make you grind your teeth and dig your fingernails into your palms, they’re also doing you a great service by letting you know what all those polite folks won’t say. Sure, there are some folks you can never please, but if by some miracle of diplomacy you do get them to their happy place, you will have won over more than a convert. You’ll have someone who will be just as loud about telling others what you did right as they were about what you did wrong. That’s pure gold.

OK, off my soapbox for real this time. Thanks for listening.

Last week I posted about the importance of letting new ideas bubble up, instead of trickle down. About how it’s important to listen to your customers (or attendees, or in my case, hopefully readers) if you want to make positive change happen. Then I remembered something that happened at an industry event earlier this year, something that’s happened a bunch of times before and since, and am reminded of why this doesn’t always work.

This guy comes up to me at a reception. It’s someone I interview pretty frequently, and I very much respect his opinions. He says lots of nice things about Medical Meetings, and my work. Then he lowered his voice and steered me into a quiet corner. “I hate to say this, but there’s something you should be considering,” he said, sotto voce. And gave me a few points about things he thinks we could be doing better, apologizing all the while. Despite my effusive thanks, he kept on apologizing. It happened to me again a week or so ago. I was interviewing someone on the phone, and he said something like, “I really appreciate that you try to get it right, and most often do.” So of course, I dig in like a terrier after a mole: What are we getting wrong? But he wouldn’t answer me because he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. When I finally dragged it out of him, it turned out to be something that’s a matter of perspective, his being that of someone who’s been in the industry for decades, disaproving of the opinion we published of someone who is newer to the industry. I happen to disagree that we “get it wrong” when we include information from the latter as well as the former, but that’s neither here nor there. We need to know that there’s a disconnect between the experience levels, and work harder to show ways they can learn from each other, rather than just putting the perspectives out there.

But the real point of this ramble is that our “customers” don’t want to hurt our feelings by pointing out what they really want from us. I appreciate people wanting to be nice and all, but how can I improve if you don’t let me know my flaws?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d rather you be honest than nice. If something I’m doing stinks, I want to know it. Even if it just smells a day or two past the sell-date, I want to know it. You don’t have to be mean about it, but I sure would appreciate your honesty because without it, I’m flying blind. Of course, I love to hear the good stuff, but bad is OK too.

Wouldn’t you want to know if people really disagreed with your choice of keynoter, or F&B, or whatever, rather than having them gush about how wonderful everything was, then not come back to next year’s meeting? I know I would.

Which is probably why the second point I made in the previous post is a more important one—walking in your customers’ shoes to find out what causes the blisters, as well as what helps your ankles look thin—because, unless you’re very lucky, they may not be able to bring themselves to tell you. They’ll just buy their shoes elsewhere.

So says Promo, in a report from the Motivation Show:

Cash is no longer the ultimate motivator. That’s according to preliminary data from the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement at Northwestern University, which found that non-cash awards would be more effective in all cases expect increasing sales.

The study found that non-cash awards programs would work better than cash in such cases as reinforcing organizational values and cultures, improving teamwork, increasing customer satisfaction and motivating specific behaviors among other programs. But cash reigned as a slight favorite in driving sales.

Just when you thought you’d taken advantage of every possible sponsorship opportunity a meeting or convention might offer, along comes branding via parking lot stripes and escalator hand rails.

(Via Fast Company Now)

Back in July, I posted about the story in the Washington Post about what sounds like an event planner, Sunnye Sims of Eclipse Events, whose lucrative TSA-related subcontract in the post-9/11 screener training days was being audited for all kinds of potential improprieties, if not fraud.

So today, I got a call from the reporter who wrote the story. He’s interested in following up with people who know the planner, or who have first-hand knowledge of what went on in those chaotic nine months of TSA screener recruitment and training. I got a few e-mails about it at the time, but they disappeared when I got a new computer (my new Mac G5 rocks, by the way). If you have something to say about it, please get in touch and I’ll pass your info along.

And does it seem weird to anyone else that this story didn’t get picked up all over the place? A juicy story about possible scandal among government contractors is usually the kind of thing the mainstream media eats for breakfast. I don’t think even any of the meetings industry publications gave it much play (we just did a quick rehash and link to the Post’s story), and the MIMlist was amazingly quiet about it—this at least is a little more understandable, seeing as how nobody likes to see one of their own seemingly caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Maybe we’re all just waiting until the audit is completed—once the truth of the allegations is found, there should be more of a story. As we enter the government contract zone of Katrina, I cynically believe we’ll be hearing more stories about fraud, waste, abuse, etc., of government funds by contractors/subcontractors as we go along. Let’s just hope that planners and hotels stay above the fray this time. (Sorry, I shouldn’t assume guilt on the part of the event planner in question, but paying yourself $5.4 million for nine months of work? Can’t find a way to justify that.)

Did your latest keynoter leave attendees with a case of katahara itai (Japanese for laughing so hard their tummies hurt)? Or, heaven forbid, did you have a nakkele at your banquet (A Tulu, India word for someone who licks the plate food is served on)? English is pretty limited when you start looking at all the words and phrases we don’t yet have (check out the BBC for more). A guy named Adam Jacot de Boinod actually collected a bunch of phrases from other languages that have no English equivalent in his book, The Meaning Of Tingo - a collection of words and phrases from around the world.

Having pored over 280 dictionaries and trawled 140 websites, he is also convinced that a country’s dictionary says more about a culture than a guide book. Hawaiians, for instance, have 108 words for sweet potato, 65 for fishing nets - and 47 for banana.

And we won’t even go into Albania’s 27 different words for moustaches…

A few years ago, I was researching a story about gender differences in meetings, and came across an interesting study from some Canadian researchers. Women generally don’t ask questions anywhere near as much as men in a mixed-gender session, but ask as many in same-gender sessions as men do in either mixed or men-only sessions. I can’t remember the details now, but I’ve paid attention to the gender of the question-askers since, and find it to hold pretty true.

I’ve been e-mailing with some friends about this lately, and then today, I ran across this article about the importance of Malaysian women speaking up in project development meetings, because otherwise the men will decide what the women’s priorities are. A snip:

“While the menfolk would ask for roads and bridges, the women want piped water supply to their village.

However, the men may think this is not a priority as their wives can carry water from the well.”

While most of us in the U.S. anyway don’t face anything this drastic when we don’t speak up in meetings, the general point holds true. So, meeting planners, what do you do to encourage women to go up to the mic at your meetings? Or is this reticence so ingrained by the time we’re adults that it’s unsurmountable (since similar results show up in same-sex schools)?

I just heard of this icebreaker idea, and thought it sounded like fun:

Create a list of 20 to 30 things that attendees can ask each other. Put them on a sheet for attendees to fill out: Each “player” needs to try to find at least one person in the group who fits that “thing”, e.g.,
1. Find someone who travelled more than 25 miles to get to the meeting, or less
than 5 miles
2. Find someone who lives in a house
3. Find someone who has a
4. Find someone who has never travelled outside the USA
5. Find someone who speaks (native speaker? How did you learn that?)
6. Find someone who studied in college (where and when?)
7. Find someone who has three or more sons/daughters (ages?)
8. Find someone who coached a sports team (what sport? who was on the team?)
9. Find someone who has fixed a meal for more than 20 people at one time (what was the occasion?)
10. Find someone who plays the (how long?)
11. Find someone who has been on a television show (name the show)
12. Find someone who slept in a tent last year (where?)
13. Find someone who has gone to a this season (against what team? Who won?)
14. Find someone who has a family member serving in the armed forces (what service? where?) Etc.
Get creative . . . You don’t necessarily have to actually *have* someone in your group who has that thing in order to create your list—in fact, if you have one question that no one fits, you are almost assured that each player will talk to each other before the time is up. There are no winners or losers (or you can offer a prize to the person with the most questions having at least one name next to it in the allotted time).

For Hurricane Rita watchers: A good combination of Google maps and hurricane-tracking data is here.

The Houston Channel 11 news station is running a continuously updated blog on what’s happening in the city. Houston MetBlogs also is running first-person commentary related to Rita.

Hang in there, folks. Our thoughts are with you as we all wait to see where and how Rita plays out. At least it sounds like most people evacuated this time.