I’m sure you’ve heard all about how various government officials and agencies think companies receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program funds should handle their meetings (in case you haven’t, some references: Treasury Dept. TARP Guidelines Target Meetings, Model Guidelines for TARP Fund Recipients, Industry Response to Meeting Restrictions Shifts into High Gear, Coalition Plans P.R. Tool Kit for Meeting Industry).

Then we hear through this article on Bloomberg, Golf After Bailout at Northern Trust Prompts Outcry, that Senator Kerry of the great state of Massachusetts has decided to join the anti-meeting fray with some proposed legislation of his own.

Key points from the press release on Kerry’s TARP Taxpayer Protection and Corporate Responsibility Act

• Any recipient of TARP funds shall not be allowed to host, sponsor,
pay for conferences and events and pay for holiday or entertainment events
for the year in which they receive TARP funds.

• A recipient may seek a waiver from the Secretary of Treasury for
any event which the recipient believes is directly related to the operation
of the business. The Secretary has thirty days to respond to a waiver
request.

• Any violation will require the federal government to be reimbursed
by the company’s CEO for the cost of the event and there will a fine of
$100,000 per violation. A recipient will have 30 days to reimburse the
government and pay the fine. The fine increases $10,000 a day for each day
after 30 days.

If you’d like to send a letter to Sen. Kerry and tell him what you think, his e-mail is available here. We’ve been talking about this on the Miforum listserv, and several people already have let him know they are less-than-pleased with his ideas. Please feel free to join the chorus. The Meeting, Event, and Incentive Coalition has put together some sample letters you can use to get started, if you need any inspiration.

And stay tuned, because this is far from over…

I got a press release this morning from the BlueCotton t-shirt company about a survey they did this month about t-shirts (natch). Specifically, the type of t-shirt people hold onto forever. Turns out that, while the top response was t-shirts people got while on vacation (48 percent), the next highest response (30 percent ) went to t-shirts they got from a business or employer–and I’d wager most of those are related to events or conferences.

I know some of my all-time favorites have come from conferences I’ve attended. One I got from a Religious Conference Management Association conference I went to a while back I wore until it shredded and my husband made me throw it out. One of my new faves is one I got at last year’s ASAE and The Center conference, a screaming yellow number with “my editor thinks I’m on assignment” on the back. It seldom fails to be a conversation starter, and I just loved that someone thought to do that just for us press people. Though I do still hang onto a Grateful Dead t I picked up back in the day, even though it’s way too small for me nowadays (concert t’s came in third on the survey).

So, while they may not be a new idea, I’d say that t-shirt giveaways, particularly if they’re clever/cool/specifically made for your audience, will have long shelf lives (or is that off-the-shelf lives?) for your participants. We may chuck out the conference bags, but the t-shirts will stay with us forever.

I just found out about the Eventprofs Twitter group from the Meetings Podcast Guys this morning, so I missed the premier networking event, but I’m now duly signed up and ready to check it out. (Mike’s post explains more about it, and how to participate, if you’re interested in joining up, too. Here’s a search of the posts from people at the first event, in case you want to check out what people were talking about.)

Maddie Grant explains how the microblogging tool called Twitter really “>came into its own at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference. Not being able to attend myself this year, I have been following the Twitter stream, and have to agree that it’s been pretty cool to watch (though I would much rather have been there!). Maddie explains:

We always talk about it adding a new layer of content/conversation/participation over the “official” conference content - but this was the first time that we could really SHOW that to people who might not have been aware of it in real terms. What I mean is that we early adopters have been using Twitter for quite a while and it’s been like a club, like something we and our buddies know is cool but have had a hard time, sometimes, showing other people how awesome and powerful it is. But here’s an example of how that worked here. Yesterday I was in Lindy’s session on Blogging and Twitter. I randomly took it upon myself (ha) to live tweet the session, but Lindy also told people they could tweet me questions should they not feel like asking them out loud, and I tweeted that I would relay questions from Twitter, from people who were not at the conference or not in the room, should there be any. And there were! So we were able to really show how people NOT in the room were listening and participating, asking questions and giving feedback. It was a pretty amazing thing to watch, a really simple thing but with so much potential.

She also talks about how they showed people in the session the Twitter search stream for #Ideas09, including all the people commenting on things related to the conference, not just that particular session. “I think there’s lots of potential for energizing a conference using Twitter in a more strategic way, too, rather than have more noise than signal, so to speak,” she says, “but just looking at this Twitter stream updating was illustrating in a very direct way that even if you are not using this personally or for your organization, it’s all happening around you regardless.”

Exactly. It is all happening around you, whether you’re paying attention to it or not. But why on earth would you not want to pay attention to such a rich source of feedback? And join in the conversation?

update: Ben posts about how speakers can handle a Twittering audience.

update 2: More resources:
Good primer on Twittering and events (from @corbinball on Twitter)
Six Steps on Using Twitter for Events (includes ASAE’s Great Idea conference as an example, and not always in a complimentary way)

Read ‘em and weep: Northern Trust golf events scrutinized

Update: Just found this thoughtful post on Pat Ahaesy, CMP’s Professional Event Production blog: Northern Trust, and Corporate Meetings. Here’s a key takeaway:

Agreed, Earth, Wind & Fire, Chicago and Sheryl Crow don’t come cheap. Admittedly hotels and hotel food and beverage don’t come cheap either. However, an event like this was not scheduled and planned in the last three months and could possibly have been planned at least a year ago. The money to pay for this is pre-bailout money.
I’d love to know what the cancellation fees would have been if they had, indeed, cancelled these events. The answer is probably a large percentage if not all of the total.
Another factor is the affect that it would have on hard working middle management who were being rewarded for the good work that they did. Most likely they brought in a lot of money that was squandered by poor decision makers on the top.

Update 2: Roger Dow of the U.S. Travel Association responds to this latest blow to the meetings industry. Key quote:

“We are perilously close to falling into a witch-hunt mentality in which working Americans are unfairly punished. For every case of wasteful spending, we are seeing scores of instances in which the game of ‘gotcha’ has forced businesses to cancel legitimate activities that would have grown their bottom lines and generated jobs and economic growth for local communities.”