This time, the example under the microscope is Starbucks new holiday ads, but this dissection on Brand Autopsy holds a few lessons for meetings marketers as well. Key quote:

Anytime you can swap out your logo for a competitor’s logo in any piece of marketing collateral and it looks fine, you have a problem.

Unfortunately, that’d be the case with 99.9 percent of the meetings brochures I have seen.

From Chief Marketer: Top Ten: Marketing Ideas to Consider in 2008. Some are no-brainers, like green is red hot, but others are a little less obvious. Like using the gaming trend to market your wares (including, possibly, your meetings somehow?). Since Access All Areas already has given the list a good rundown, I won’t repeat it here, but definitely this is a list worth checking out.

The American Bus Association is doing an interesting promotion touting the industry as being “green”—and saving some penguins in the process (click to ABA’s home page, then on the penguin headline to download the pdf for the full brochure). I don’t know if it would persuade anyone to bus over fly to go to your meeting, but it does make me wonder if there are interesting ways you could tie your meeting promotions into some of the more popular social causes.

I have no idea, but if you accept credit card payment for registration at your meetings, it’d be a good idea to check out this month’s MeCo chat, led by Jim Lewis of Best Meetings Inc. Here’s some more info from the e-mail announcement:

Do you take credit cards? If you are not compliant you can face fines of $10,000 per transaction. Do you know if your company is compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS)? Do you know if your online registration company is PCI DSS compliant? Do you know what level your organization is in dealing with PCI DSS compliance (They are from levels 1 to 4 and based on total amount of dollars transacted per month). This chat will a overview of what PCI DSS is and what you need to know to get your organization compliant and what to look for when using other service providers.

James “Jim” Louis’ experience flows into the technology area of meeting planning, website management, online registration and association management. Jim has been a presenter at the MSAE Technology Expo in 2006 and 2007 on the topics of On/Offline Registration Systems, Smart Phone Selection & Useful Tools and Online Community Building. Jim is employed by Best Meetings Inc. out of Bloomington, MN.

November 27th in the MeCo Chat room
and
November 28th at the MeCo Mansion in Second life

1:00 - 2:00 PM PST
4:00 - 5:00 PM EST on both days

OK, there are too many good posts on We Have Always Done It that Way, which I’m just catching up on after taking a news reader hiatus. Here are a couple more good ones related to conferences:

Why you shouldn’t just provide PowerPoint templates to presenters

It’s time to lose the standard evaluation forms and replace them with something that actually means something

Now that we’re starting (finally) to understand that lectures aren’t necessarily the best way to go for educational sessions, some people are confused over how to use the expertise of presenters and still get people participating. Check out Mickie Ropps ideas on how to make it work.

Check out this post on We Have Always Done it that Way for one of the best ideas I’ve heard yet on getting the next generation interested in coming to your association’s meeting.

If you want something insanely addictive to do, check out Touch the Bubbles, a game where you have to match sounds being played. It’s harder than you’d think, and even harder than that to turn off.

Yes, I’m making very good use of my long Thanksgiving day weekend!

Did you know it takes eight glasses of water to wash just one glass? I didn’t until I read this article from HotelOnline about how Atlanta hotels are conserving water during the current drought. In addition to only serving water when asked, they’re doing the “reuse your towel” thing, and turning off decorative fountains. Just these measures, the article says, will save millions of gallons of water.

So, why aren’t we all doing this? Just curious.

Sorry to jump the season a bit, but when Patti Shock got herself elfed, I just had to get elfed too (along with my dog Augie, of course). This is too funny!