According to Jeff Hurt, normal ain’t what it used to be, and you better get used to the idea. Coming off this year’s annual conference for his association, he posts some predictions about what the “new normal” you can expect will be. And it turns out to turn some long-held beliefs on their heads. Like your meeting’s history is a good predictor of the future. Not anymore, says Jeff. And if you’re basing your attendance on your member list, you’ve gotten it backwards.

Is he right? Probably. At any rate, there’s lots of interesting food for thought with no F&B guarantee (one prediction I will add is that you can expect F&B minimums–something I have been hearing lots of grumbling about in recent years–to continue to be a reason to grumble, if not outright shriek).

And, I may say, rightly so. See WTF? Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes name after internet jokes.

The body charged with attracting more visitors to the midwestern state will now be known as the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin (TFW), in an attempt to put a stop to the jokes.

It seems that the federation was unaware of – or unconcerned by – the modern meaning of WTF until its acronym featured on a blog that compiles unfortunate corporate logos earlier this year. (I’d provide the link, but the one in the article went nowhere and a quick Google got me nowhere.)

In case you haven’t thought about it, it might be time to check to make sure you’re not inadvertently saying something you’d rather not be with your acronym (and don’t forget to look at it from all angles. I think MM (for Medical Meetings) is pretty innocuous, thankfully.

Cindy at AE on the Verge has some good tips for meetings being held during this flu season (she positions it as for dealing with H1N1, but it’s good advice to follow to keep people from getting the seasonal flu, colds, and whatever else happens to be going around, too).

I hesitate to even link to this post, but I just have to: Bruce Schneier on the latest security threat: Butt bombers. (Warning: The post talks about body parts normally more sat upon than regulated by TSA.) I’m actually surprised it took this long for someone to go there, so to speak. If someone’s willing to die for a cause, what do they care what they have to do to make it happen? I do doubt TSA will be hiring proctologists to handle this new threat, though.

Did you know that sipping a hot cup of tea might make you literally feel more warmly toward the person you’re with? That’s among the thoughts proposed in “Thinking Literally: The surprising way that metaphors shape your world”, in today’s Boston Globe. Could this have implications for meetings? Oh yeah. And there’s now research to back it up, at least preliminarily. From the article:

A new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how ”warm” or ”cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how ”weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.

Go read the article. It is fascinating. (And the English major in me feels vindicated, too! Or maybe it’s only because I was drinking coffee when I read it that I feel so hot for this idea?)

That’s the question SocialFish Maddie Grant is asking. It’s a good question (and, may I add as a member of the Big Boom, one my generation is asking itself as well).

As Maddie says, ” Have YOU gone mainstream? Or are we still the guerrilla army, changing the world (only without telling anyone)?”

So my Gen X friends, what say you?

Update: Jamie Notter’s response is jaw-droppingly great. Just what I would have said if I could have thought as brilliantly as he does.

Check out Used Event Stuff, a site that lets you recycle your meetings castoffs instead of chucking them in the dumpster or paying to haul them back home and store them. You can buy, sell, and find green vendors, too.

What a great idea! (Thanks to Julius Solaris at the Event Manager Blog for the pointer.)

I know I don’t need to tell you this, but while Indexed’s brilliant Jessica Hagy titled this one “Barefoot Dancing at the end of the wedding,” it could just as easily be called “What every new meeting planner needs to know”:

This just blew my mind completely. It’s well worth the eight minutes to watch:

Thanks, T, for the pointer!

I’m a big fan of ASAE and The Center’s use of social media, as you may have guessed from all my mad gushing about it.

So it was with a big happy face that I recently had the chance to chat with ASAE’s vice president of knowledge initiatives Peter Hutchins about social media strategy. I just now got around to writing it up and wanted to share it with you all: Social Media Case Study: ASAE and The Center