If you’re thinking about going virtual with a conference, check out these words of wisdom from C. David Gammel, CAE, president of High Context Consulting, LLC:

Changing a face-to-face event to an online-only event is like an athlete changing from running shoes to diving flippers.

You can still go fast but you better be jumping into water right after you put those flippers on. If not, you will do a face plant within seconds.

Don’t make the same mistake so many of us in the magazine world did when the Internet came along and just plop real-word content online. It doesn’t work that way, as we found out all-too-painfully. Your audience is different, the way they interact with information, vendors, each other, and your organization online is different, and their attention span is waaaaay different.

New from the Ritz-Carlton Chicago, via a press release: The Jewish deli Bento box lunch for meeting attendees. I can’t figure out if this is super-creative and fabulous or just bizarre.

Check out this latest post from the Meet Prepared blog: Swine Flu Pandemic and the Meeting Professional.

Just read this on Hotel Chatter: Hong Kong Hotel Quarantined Due to Swine Flu Case. What would you do if your meeting was being held there (and this could happen elsewhere, don’t kid yourself)? Would the meeting go on? Seriously, what would you do? Another contingency to consider in your ever-growing contingency plan file.

Today is Melanoma Monday, a day set aside by the American Academy of Dermatology for awareness of this all-too-often deadly form of skin cancer. People often think of skin cancer as no big deal, and even melanoma is incredibly curable when caught early. Mine wasn’t, but fortunately, a year and a half out from diagnosis and surgery, I’m still coming up clean. But just this morning I heard that a friend’s husband, who has been battling Stage 4 melanoma for three years, has taken a turn for the worse and now is facing more brain surgery.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about melanoma being disease of the week on Grey’s Anatomy, but I do hope it helps to raise awareness and hopefully get some people making appointments with a dermatologist to get that weird mole checked. Know the ABCDs (asymmetry, border, color, diameter) to look for, and the EFs (evolutionary changes, funny looking). It could mean the difference between life and death.

Carver has a lot more information here.

After reading Ann Oliveri’s Creative Brief post about the new ad for Shredded Wheat (you know, the “we put the NO in innovation” one), I can’t help but wonder if sometimes a lack of innovation might not be a bad thing—which by the way is the opposite of the conclusion she reached.

It got me thinking about Gilmore and Pine’s book, Authenticity, which while confusing is a pretty interesting read. When I interviewed Gilmore and Pine a couple of years ago, one of the five genres of authenticity they say people are longing for nowadays is just what Shredded Wheat is doing: staying true to your roots. We are what we are, we got it right the first time and don’t need none of the new-fangled stuff, etc., etc.

But no, you still can’t count out innovation after all. Your meeting of course has to stay true to its roots (education, an incentive to reward a job well done, or whatever that root purpose might be), but the way you do it should constantly be adjusted to bring that message in a way that resonates with people today. People’s need and desire for the type of wholesome breakfast grandma made may not have changed, and their need for education itself is probably more essential than ever, given today’s information firehose. But the type of education they need likely has changed, along with their lifestyle, their jobs, the way they like to learn (and yes, possibly what they want to have for breakfast at a conference).

So I guess I agree with Ann after all, but I do think we need to be very, very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What is it that is at the core of your meeting? Why does it need to happen? If you stay true to that, innovation just gives you a better means to deliver it.

Thoughts?

Dan Parks just posted an interesting poll: Do you think we will still be talking/worried about the Swine (H1N1) Virus in 6 months? I’m in the minority who voted “yes,” mainly because I think this will resurge in the fall for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. But we won’t know for sure until we get better data on its fatality rates, communicability, and the possibility of a vaccine. As things stand right now, though, I think this might wax and wane, but I expect it’ll still be an issue in the fall. Hope I’m wrong.