So I’m on a Web site that’s selling something I most likely want to buy for my magazine, but it won’t let me. There is no way to find out prices, much less place an order. There is a number to call, but it just put me into an automated system that, after 10 minutes, dumped me into an anonymous voice mail. There’s an e-mail address, along the lines of info@thiscompany.com, which doesn’t give me confidence I will ever hear from a human, either. In the annoyance level, this may rank even higher than not being able to find a company’s physical address or phone. And it’s so stupid—their business is to sell me something, and they won’t let me do it.

Please, I beg of you, do not do this to your attendees on your meeting Web site! Right now, go to your Web site and try to register. If the experience isn’t seamless, fix it.

If you don’t make it incredibly easy for them to buy what you’re selling, they, like me, might just give up.

This is fairly brilliant, and a good example of how an association can slice and dice its membership to come up with new ways to enhance their community: Dog lovers wine club, offered by the *Humane Society. HSUS members are de facto dog lovers, and of course some of them likely are wine afficionados as well. So HSUS put together a partnership with Carivintas Winery, which from its Web site likes working with and donating to nonprofits.

Every month, members get a bottle of wine, with a dog’s picture on the label, mailed to them, along with dog tips and info about the wine.

What could you do that would be special to the different segments of your membership, association people? I could see putting together a number of lifestyle-type special interest groups that somehow tie into your mission, then giving them space to meet face to face at the annual conference. How cool would that be?

*Thanks to Sally for pointing out what had to be my best typo in months—Human instead of Humane, now fixed. Though when you think about, it really should sort of work either way…

Here’s the list. Congrats to the winners.

I caught a couple of interesting headlines on Patti Shock’s blog: Delta Calls In Todd and Rande To Spruce Up Airline Food and Drink; and The New Mile High Club: Forget the Hotel Room.

The first is about how yummy the new food-for-purchase will be on Delta once celebrity chef Todd English has a whack at the menu; the other is about how plushy first class is getting. Hmm. With my luck, they’ll run out of that great food in the first 10 rows (this happened to me on a flight from California to Boston, and I was dumb enough not to bring something on board with me—never did that again!). And did you know a Wolfgang Puck turkey sandwich on focaccio at Boston’s Logan airport is more than 900 calories??

But I would like to curl up on one of these Singapore Airlines’ business class seats on a long flight…

Another great nugget in today’s RSS feeds: Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down from Wired magazine. The goal is twenty slides, 20 seconds per slide. It’d make those internal meetings fly, that’s for sure, though I’m not sure it “combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.”

It’s worth clicking through, just to see A Whole New Mind author Dan Pink’s example of Pecha Kucha in action. Plus, his PowerPoint is about the emotional intelligence of signs, which every planner who deals with signage should study, I think.

Cindy Butts is at it again: Check out her 11 Ways to Use Zoomerang–and 14 Tips. Pure gold, and I would say applicable to other online surveying tools as well (I’m partial to Survey Monkey, but that’s probably just because I like the name.

What, you’re not using these free-to-very-cheap online surveying tools to gather evaluations, poll attendees, etc.? Why on earth wouldn’t you?

I was chatting the other day with someone who does a lot of speaking work and who recently gave a presentation at a meeting industry association conference. I mentioned the canned speeches the “thought leaders” at ASAE and The Center’s conference did, and how they were swarmed afterward (the ones I saw, anyway), with planners interested in hiring them for their own meetings.

He brought up a point that I hadn’t thought about before. While we always say we want speakers to customize their presentations to our audiences, the very act of doing that may put them at a disadvantage. For example, this guy said he customized 90 percent of his session to be specific to meeting planners’ issues. But, because meeting planning isn’t his area of expertise, he felt he was shortchanging himself, especially compared to other speakers who barely tweaked their canned speeches. “I lose the opportunity to really showcase my stuff by customizing it totally,” he said.

Which makes me wonder if this holds true outside the meeting planning industry meetings. Do speakers risk losing something when they customize? Do audiences gain more than they lose? I still think customization is vital, but this was a different point of view that hadn’t occurred to me before.

I know, today is Labor Day and we should all be out eating burgers, but I just ran across these centerpiece tips by Cindy Butts, CAE, and wanted to share. Just a few of her great ideas:

Inexpensive things we’ve found: a) going off season to a souvenir shop in that area and buying discount items related to the location (toy lobsters, carved/painted sea figures, lanterns) ; b) medium-sized potted plants such as cactus with something painted on pots; c) glass jars/vases from a dollar store filled with Oreo cookies and black/white ribbon tied around the top (black/white event)

Also in her post are things to consider when doing the flower-or-no-flower debate.