I got an e-mail promotion yesterday for a “whine tour”—nice and big in the subject line. It may not be as fun as a wine tour, but it sure gave me a giggle, and another reason to remind folks to proof everything at least twice (and have someone else check all promotions, too). Especially the subject lines in e-mail materials, which are all too easy to forget to check, for me at least. Your PSA for the day.

And now, it’s time for a video that must be seen to be believed (turn down the volume): David “The Hoff” Hasselhoff - “Jump In My Car”. Just like the good folks at Grass Shack Events & Media where I found the link, it left me speechless.

According to the Houston Chronicle, no one stopped a guy with bomb components from boarding a plane in Houston—and now the local police and TSA are busy pointing the finger of fault at each other instead of figuring out how to keep this from happening again. *sigh*

Here’s a snip:

The report states that a man with a Middle Eastern name and a ticket for a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta shook his head when screeners asked if he had a laptop computer in his baggage, but an X-ray machine operator detected a laptop.

A search of the man’s baggage revealed a clock with a 9-volt battery taped to it and a copy of the Quran, the report said. A screener examined the man’s shoes and determined that the “entire soles of both shoes were gutted out.”

No explosive material was detected, the report states. A police officer was summoned and questioned the man, examined his identification, shoes and the clock, then cleared him for travel, according to the report.

A TSA screener disagreed with the officer, saying “the shoes had been tampered with and there were all the components of (a bomb) except the explosive itself,” the report says.

The officer retorted, “I thought y’all were trained in this stuff,” TSA officials reported.

David McCann wrote an interesting post on MISoapbox about MPI’s recent focus on return on investment, and whether or not that focus is setting planners up to fail (he thinks it is—read his post for arguments as to why he thinks this might be). I wasn’t able to attend this year’s MPI WEC in Dallas, but he says people he spoke with there are not all on the ROI bus on this one.

In a comment on his post, meeting industry maven Joan Eisenstodt points out that ROI isn’t all about dollars and cents, but also about what participants take away from the meeting. While I understand the increasing business need to prove meetings are worth the time and money being spent on them (and Sarbannes-Oxley reporting requirements just turned the heat up higher on this one), so much of the real value to the bottom line is intangible, and you’re not going to get at it by just doing the math on dollars spent versus dollars increased afterward.

For example, say I attended a journalism conference and came away with a better way of writing a story (I know, it’s not possible that I could write any better than I do, but let’s go hypothetical here ; o). Will ad sales increase as a result? Maybe, but I highly doubt it. Will I save the company money by using this new technique? Maybe, but probably not. In fact, I may end up costing the company more money by researching using a more expensive-but-better resource, or whatever. Will it make our magazine more valuable to readers? I would think so, but there’s no way to put a pricetag on that, is there? That’s the problem with trying to measure values that are more abstract than concrete.

Plus, and I’m sorry to say this, folks, it’s pretty well-established in the literature that adults generally don’t put something into practice after attending a one-time session unless it’s a serious no-brainer improvement. We need to be “touched” with the new knowledge at least seven times before it sinks in and we start using it—assuming we buy into it being a better way of doing things than what we had been doing. And there could be barriers to implementing the change that no education can address (say our budget won’t allow me to use that new resource I learned about, so I can’t do it, even if it would result in better articles). So expecting bottomline results from a one-time event is fairly unrealistic. It needs to be measured over time, in increments, with reinforcements.

And how many people measure results beyond the basic meeting evaluation form, anyway? Only once, ever, has someone followed up with me after a conference to see if I was using what I’d learned (and to my eternal embarrassment, while I remembered loving the session, I couldn’t even remember what it was about, much less anything I learned, much less anything I learned that I was using). Continuing medical education providers are the only ones I know who are really doing much in measuring the outcomes of their activities in terms of changed behavior, but even they are stymied by the high cost of this type of research, and the difficulties in getting good, objective data to work with.

Suffice to say that I think the ROI push is putting the cart before the horse. First we need to know what attendees really need to know to improve their performance, then we need to design the meeting so it will be most effective at addressing that need (if it’s a straight knowlege data dump, a lecture could work. But if you’re trying to change attitudes or beliefs about something, you need a whole different design). Then you have to measure how well that need was met on an educational level. Then you go back and measure, preferably after a period of time has passed, what people are doing differently as a result. And if you want them to be doing things differently, you’ll be following up with reminders, tip sheets, webinars, podcasts, papers, etc., to reinforce the learning and make it sticky enough that they’ll make some changes.

Then you can try to put some dollar value to those changes. Without all those other pieces, I have a hard time believing that any ROI study is going to come up with results anyone wants to share with the big brass. After all, who wants to measure ROI only to find it in the red?

Many associations find that their highly targeted, brilliantly crafted, permission-given e-mail marketing messages aren’t making it to their members. Instead, they get stuck in the spam filters so many of us have come to rely on. Here’s a tool from Lyris.com called the contentchecker, that may help. You can plug in your e-mail message and get a report on its likelihood of making it through the filter.

Of course, the spammers probably are using it, too, so I don’t vouch for it, but it’s worth a try.