Here are some good meeting promotion tips from Susan Nowicki on The Forum Effect. Also, check out this article by Dave Lutz for some examples of associations doing it well. Thanks to both for the good ideas!

This post by Jeff Hurt makes me think that I’m one of the few left who go to conferences mainly for the content; it sounds like a lot of people are shifting their decision-making mainly to who they hope to connect with while they’re at the event. Don’t get me wrong, I love to meet up with those I only know from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., and to reconnect with old friends, but I’m mainly there for the sessions. Might have something to do with knowing I have to write about them later, eh? (All personal conversations are off the record, just in case you were avoiding me in fear that something you let slip will show up in a magazine or something.)

But it does make me wonder if conference planners need to put even more emphasis on the networking, and less on the content, than they did in the past? I’ve heard that mentioned a few times in conjunction with some meetings industry events, and have to agree that the social aspects could use some bolstering. Especially for the really cliquey events that are so terrifying for newbies. But I wouldn’t take anything away from the content in order to do it–it’s not an either/or proposition, as I see it. The ideal, for me anyway, would be to thread the content through the networking, and the networking through the content, so conversations and connections happen more naturally and focus more on professional development than the latest gossip or the cute thing the cat did the other day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if I spend a lot of money and take the time away from the office, I really do want to learn something.

Update: Extraordinary idea-rouser that he is, Jeffrey Cufaude made a comment on this post over on Facebook that really made me think. Hope he doesn’t mind that I share it here. He said: “But I do want us to drop the idea/frame of networking and focus more on the business of connecting: people to people, people to content, questions to answers, and interests to opportunities.” Kind of reshapes the whole discussion when you think of it that way, doesn’t it?

I’m probably the last person on the planet to see these street art sculptures made out of plastic bags and subway exhaust, but wow are they cool:

Thanks for the pointer, T!

Still catching up on the news after my week-long sojourn in Italy, but I couldn’t believe that some U.S. government agencies actually have put in place policies that prohibit them from meeting in certain cities. At least some in our government realize how dumb this is and are doing something about it, but this knee-jerk numbskullity (I know, it’s probably not a word, but I like it) has got to stop.

Everyone, take a deep breath, then look at what your meeting is trying to accomplish, what type of venue will help you accomplish it, and a location that works for your meeting goals and your attendees. Find a property that fits with what you need at a price you can live with, period. There are some great deals to be had at resorts right now, and in fact I’ve heard a few stories about how planners ended up paying more at a low-end property than they would have at a great five-star because the powers-that-be wouldn’t allow them to use anything higher than a three-star, regardless of the actual cost/value ratio. That’s just stupid. Ditto for blacklisting entire cities for some perceptual issue that may or may not exist.

If you can show that your choice was the appropriate one to help you achieve what you need to achieve at a reasonable price, that’s all that should matter. I’m getting mighty sick and tired of hearing about how fears about how a meeting will be perceived is causing people to make decisions that in fact end up being wasteful, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

Oh great, #1 on the Travel and Leisure list of the 10 worst airports is one I have a four-hour layover in on my way to Toronto in a couple of weeks for ASAE and The Center’s annual conference: Newark.

Here’s the full list of airport infamy: America’s Best and Worst Airports 2009. So, all you people who went to MPI’s WEC in Salt Lake City not long ago, do you agree that town’s airport deserves its #1 status?

Thanks to MeCo for the pointer.

It looks like the airlines are planning to cut back on the number of flights offered, and up the price, come fall, according to this Travel Mole article. I see it as a continuation of the trend we’ve been seeing for the past year or so in many markets. But not all. It’ll be interesting, anyway. I’m thinking I should start booking some of my fall/winter trips now, just in case. From the article:

“The coming hits are broad-based. In the US; some parts of the Midwest and leisure points in Florida and Nevada will see reduced service. Overseas, parts of Europe and Asia will see big cuts.”

It adds that while some places will be harder to get to (more connections, etc.), most will still be accessible.

Can’t help but wonder how it’ll affect meetings travel, and meeting planning. Are organizations upping their plans to go regional and get more drive-in attendees if air travel gets too expensive and difficult? I’d be giving it some serious thought, particularly if I had a high concentration of attendees in a particular area.

Check out the latest meetings-related editorial from Ben Stein, this time from the American Spectator: No Meetings on the Table.

He’s turning out to be one of our biggest big-name supporters these days. Wish I had been able to see his keynote at MPI (Mike McCurry posted some about it; haven’t had time to scope out more, but I do hear it was good.) I especially like this quote from his editorial:

“Business meetings had zero to do with causing this recession. Even more to the point, banning or condemning business meetings will not help us get out of the recession. Instead, this anti-meeting policy gets hotel and airline workers fired, kicks hotel maids and busboys in the teeth, wrecks communities used to working hard to be good hosts.”

Keep on saying it, Ben. Hopefully someone other than interested parties like me will take notice.

P.S. Sorry to be so quiet lately here on face2face. First I had back-to-back production on two magazines, then a vacation with my three sisters in Rome, Italy (poor, poor, pitiful me, right?). Just got back last night, but I promise to try to catch up here (as well as elsewhere) as quickly as I can. Anything exciting going on that I missed?

Check out this story from Johnnie Moore’s thought-provoking post, Change Management and Mistaking Green for Gold:

A few years back, a well-known consultancy business decided to abandon it’s dress convention of dark suits and white shirts and said folks could dress casual. But quite soon, they decided to make it a bit clearer just what counted as casual and what was unacceptably scruffy. They thought they’d changed, cos people were no longer wearing the boring suits. But just below the surface, they remained a company fixated on telling people how to dress.

When you think about bringing new ideas to your next conference, keep this story in mind. It’s more common than you’d think (because, of course, it’s more comfortable to change the surface than the infrastructure, in so many ways).

Try one of the models Julius Solaris outlines in this brilliant post on the EventManagerBlog: 10 Alternative Business Models for Events. They may not all work for your purposes, but I’d bet they all get you thinking about what else you can do, given your market, attendees, and other environmental factors.

The debate on “free” when it comes to whether or not to charge for repurposing conference content for the Web (for links to the posts that started it all, see What is the cost of free?) got me thinking about a similar discussion that’s been raging in the industry my new job covers, medical meetings.

Everyone from the pharmaceutical industry and medical device organizations to congressional leaders to state legislators have been working to sort out the problematical relationship between healthcare provider education and the industry folks who shoulder most of the financial burden for providing that education.

The easy answer, at least for some people, is to cut the commercial support ties altogether and just have docs pay full freight for their continuing medical education. No ethical issues, no worries about commercial bias creeping in, no more marketing disguised as education, the argument goes.

But docs are decidedly unhappy with the idea, because it means they’d be paying a lot more for what used to be either reasonable or even free (sound familiar?). And education providers aren’t happy, because they wouldn’t be able to afford to put on all the education healthcare providers need to keep current these days. Those workshops on rare diseases? Gone, because the audience is too small to make it worthwhile. And the commercial supporters aren’t happy, because they lose the opportunity to get in front of the docs. You should hear the resounding “no!” that echoes from almost every quarter every time the suggestion comes up.

Would HCPs be willing to pay out of pocket if the education truly was amazing? Maybe. Would some pretty lame CME finally bite the dust if people had to pay? Assuredly. Would there be a lot less variety of offerings? Probably. Would physician education, and patient health, suffer? Most likely.

Like the arguments over “free” in online content repurposed from meetings, the argument over “free” (in this case, aka commercially supported) education is far from over. I happen to think sponsorship is a good happy medium, as long as there are controls in place, which in CME there most assuredly are. Someone suggested in another discussion over on Facebook that we need to recondition people, whether HCPs or not, to accept the fact that we have to pay for what we get. Sounds simple, and it sounds right. But the reality is a lot more complicated.