I can’t believe I missed the opening of San Francisco’s Exploritorium’s Reconsidered Materials exhibition, which features wonders like this depiction of the Bay Bridge, made out of Jell-O, by artist Elizabeth Hickok.

She’s probably too much a purist to do it, but wouldn’t something like this make an interesting centerpiece for a buffet? Yes, it has been a very long week.

I know I tend to rant a lot about customer service, but I think it’s wicked important (to use a Massachusetts saying) to the success of any meeting or event. But then I got this phone call that had me scratching my head.

It was a followup call checking on the level of service I got about a month ago when my printer went kaput and I screamed for help. She asked me to rate the guy I spoke with on his timeliness, demeanor, etc., and I had to rate him as excellent. Except that my printer still doesn’t work. “So, other than the fact that the original problem still exists, you’d say you’re satisfied with the service?” she asked me. I had no idea how to answer that one.

I know that meeting planners often get complaints about things they can do nothing about—an attendee’s flight was late; the spouse hates the color of the guest room; the person in the elevator had on so much perfume the attendee choked, etc. I even wrote an article about how to deal with whiners. But sometimes, it just isn’t enough to be heard and dealt with politely. Sometimes, we just want our printers to work.

End of rant. Thanks for listening.

OK, I just got this press release about a very cute Super Bowl bet between the Pittsburgh and Seattle CVBs and had to share:

The losing city’s CVB will congratulate – and help promote – the winning city in numerous ways, including via telephone, Web site, advertising and personal appearances. For instance, the losing city’s convention and visitors bureau will hang banners or fly the flag of the winning team for one week in their offices. The losing city’s bureau staff will dress in the winning city’s colors for a day and a group photo will be posted on both the winning and losing CVB Web sites.

Both CVB Web sites will reflect the “Destination Challenge,” with the losing city’s Web site providing a link to the CVB Web site of the winning city. The CEO of the winning CVB will be made an “Honorary CEO” for the week at the losing CVB. Telephones at the losing city CVB will be answered for a day in a playful manner that reflects the winning team name or CVB. An official announcement from a city official will proclaim the day to be the “Winning City’s CVB Day.”

While details are still being worked out, the losing CEO will make a video appearance at the winning city’s CVB dressed, of course, in the winning team’s jersey.

“First and foremost, this destination challenge is to celebrate the great success of the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In the world of sports and entertainment it doesn’t get much bigger than the Super Bowl,” said Don Welsh, president & CEO, Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Our respective communities and our millions of fans take pride in the fact that our two cities are playing in the Super Bowl. Plus, this is also the perfect event to showcase the diverse and rich offerings that each of our cities provides to convention attendees and visitors from around the world. May the best team win!”

See, isn’t that cute?

Funny that this came up just after I attended a session on cultural competency in CME at the Alliance for CME meeting last week. Simone Champagnie at Something Extra says that IMEX and Meeting Professionals International will be launching a Culture Active Tool at MPI’s 2006 PEC Europe. According to an article in Travel Daily News, it will be a “Web-based, standalone cross-cultural analysis and briefing tool that will be accessible on a global basis.” It will include two modules:

* Personal Cultural Profiles (PCPs) enables individual classification and characteristics by completing a cultural questionnaire online.
* National Cultural Profiles provide cultural roadmaps to approximately 70 countries; a rich database which enable users to compare specific behaviours in one culture with those of another.

This is a start, but we have a long way to go, and I do worry about something like this leading to stereotyping. While some states are starting to mandate that physicians learn about how to treat patients of different ethnicities, I’d say that, no matter what our profession, we need to learn more about where we’re all coming from. Especially meeting planners, who often have a very diverse group to accommodate. And we have to become more aware of our own cultural backgrounds, and how that affects our interactions with others. It’s a huge, and hugely important, topic, and one that will continue to grow as our world becomes increasingly multicultural.

We’re starting to see more of the meeting “matchmaking” programs, where you go to a Web site, fill in your interests and areas of expertise, and have a way to find ahead of time those who you might want to connect with face to face. I’ve taken one of these for a demo ride and absolutely loved it. But then I read this post by Kevin Holland at Association Inc., and he’s not too wild on the concept. His main objections are:

1. Since these are all associations I’ve belonged to for quite some time, why do I have to tell them what my interests are? Why don’t they already know what my interests are?

2. What am I supposed to do with a list of attendees?

3. Just because someone may have the same interests as me doesn’t mean they have anything useful to teach me. That probably sounds harsher than I mean it. What I mean is, how useful is a list of people’s interests/issues without any context? There are lots of things I’m interested in that I don’t know anything about. There are a few other things I’m interested in that I’ve got a lot of experience in. The same is true of everybody else.

As to #1, yeah, they should know at least your professional interests. But if they don’t, here’s their chance to make good on the oversight. One would hope that, once you fill the thing out, it goes into their files so they can target their marketing for future programs to stuff you’re mostly likely to be interested in, at the very least.

#2: Get in touch with them. Now that you know they at least have some common interests, why not try to get a bunch of like-minded folks together for coffee or drinks, or grab a lunch table together?

#3: Associations should include “I have lots of experience with X” and “I’d like to learn more about Y” in the fields to be filled out. I think this option is available in most of these programs.

And Kevin makes a great point later on in his post about how, since associations are by nature in the relationship/community-building business, this shouldn’t just be for an event, but should be ongoing. Agreed. While it’s great to use as a short-term tool to meet people at a conference, it also could be a way to network all year long. If the network is always waiting for you, it should be fairly easy to find someone to help when you run into a specific professional snag, or at least give you a place to start.

Does your colleagues’ monkeying around drive you ape? Believe it or not, CareerBuilder surveyed 2,050 people to find out. From the press release:

Fifty-three percent of workers say they feel like they work with a bunch of monkeys. One-in-five say they think their boss is a monkey.

While they don’t define “monkey” in the PR, my guess is that this is not a complimen0—47 percent of those who feel like they work with monkees also said they were ready to look for a new job. Their top 10 beefs:

10. The manager who tried to get employees in another department fired for eating bagels that were reserved for an event the next day.
9. The co-worker who constantly e-mails the person who is sitting right next to her.
8. The co-worker who sits in a crowded cubicle area and insists on putting every conversation on speaker phone, including the exploits of the night before.
7. The boss who cut his fingernails while standing in his employee’s cube.
6. The co-worker who steals other people’s food from the lunch room refrigerator and then acts baffled when asked about it.
5. The co-worker who changed his job title to look more important without approval from his boss.
4. The boss who swears at the top of his lungs and occasionally throws his chair or phone down the hall.
3. The co-worker who walks up and randomly scratches other people’s backs.
2. The co-worker who was caught sleeping on the job more than once and would insist he was praying.
1. The co-worker who every morning would greet her fellow employees (before they had any caffeine) with, “Are you ready for another fun and EXCITING day?!”

With the possible exception of #3, I’d say it is an insult to monkeys to attribute this sort of behavior to our primate friends. What’s the worst behavior you’ve seen on the job? It’s a tough one to call, but for me, the publisher I once worked for who put her dog, cat, and horse above me on the masthead is way up there.

Ben at the Certified Association Executive also offered up some “meeting planning goodies” ASAE and The Center… did at the conference:

All handouts were delivered on a 1 gigabyte USB jump drive. At just 1 x 3 inches and a few grams, this is vast improvement over the gaudy and awkward conference bags and heavy manuals that are typically handed out at large conventions. Big thumbs up!

The conference schedule was printed on a 3 x 5 inch laminated card that came attached to the badge and lanyard. Since there was really no paper to consult, this was an innovative and handy resource born out of necessity.

I love both these ideas, though I’d still want the big old book to consult while writing stuff up on site, since I can’t print anything while I’m on the road, at least not easily. But I wouldn’t feel the need to lug it home, which would be great. The second idea also is terrific, as long as your program isn’t as extensive as the one for the Alliance for CME’s conference I attended last week. That would have been a bit much to have hanging around my neck, but it would have been great to just have a daily schedule-at-a-glance type of card so I didn’t have to drag the big book everywhere with me. If there was one, I never saw it.

I wish I could have attended the ASAE and The Center(…) technology conference that just wrapped up recently. But since I couldn’t, I’m glad Ben over at the Certified Association Executive has been doing some posts about it.

What I find particularly interesting, other than his Web 2.0 and Social Media experiment, are his musings on an association’s role in creating online communities (here.

Instead of re-inventing the community, can our associations jump on board with existing online communities, acting as a sponsor or participant in the community?

This, coupled with the comment/amplification from Jeff De Cagna in a comment, makes a lot of sense to me, and not just for associations—why reinvent the wheel if there already are a few spinning? I know some newspapers are starting to link to blogs done by regular people in their communities, and I’d love to do something similar for people blogging in the meetings space. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many of us yet, but it’s well worth thinking about. I just wonder if people would find that useful, or weird, or if there would be any liability concerns if someone we link to suddenly goes nutty on their blog, or what.