These faces might look familiar, as well they should: We’re talking about PCMA president and CEO Deborah Sexton, and longtime industry veteran and MPI Foundation supporter Rod Abraham. But why are they holding up their badges like that? (Click to enlarge).

Made me laugh, anyway, in a “aren’t computers idiotic” kind of way.

So much to like about my first MPI WEC that it’s hard to know where to start, but here are a few of my favorite things, in no particular order:

Puppies! I loved the puppy cuddling CSR station, where the good folks from Pacific Assistance Dog Society brought in little–and mostly grown–bundles of sweet puppyness for us to play and snuggle with (thank you, St. Louis, for making it possible). Like Hawk here, who took a quick snooze between snuggles.

They say we were helping to socialize the puppies, but really, I think the puppies were doing a lot more for us than we were for them.

Meeting Eli Gorin! And Mitchell Beer! and Samuel Smith! Of course, it was wonderful to reconnect with a lot of old friends, but actually getting to meet some amazing people I’ve only known virtually (in some cases, probably “stalked through cyberspace” might be more accurate) was phenomenal. There are a few more that, while I didn’t actually get to meet them, I did get to sit in on their sessions so I know now that they are, in fact, just as cool in person as they are online (like AVGirl Midori Connolly).

Vancouver! I’m not, generally speaking, a city person, but I could see myself living here. I won’t wax all poetic about it again, but the mix of sea and mountains, urban and green, friendly and professional, great food and even greater food, is pretty compelling. I mean really, how often do you see a cruise ship tied up next to a convention center?

I ended up taking the Skytrain to get back to the Vancouver Airport, and it was gorgeous, spotless, fast, and only cost $3.50. I would definitely recommend it for conference attendees.

Keynoters! John Furlong, CEO of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee, made me cry a little as he talked about the challenges and joys involved in making the Olympic and Paralympic Games happen (and he’s forgiven for gloating just a bit about Canada’s hockey team victories); futurist/consultant Emmanuel Gobillot, who had a tough act to follow (Furlong) and did a fantastic job of outlining how meetings are essential for changing the world; and Jeremy Gutsche, innovation expert, author, and founder of TrendHunter.com, was funny, insightful, energetic (and very cute). Videos of some of these guys are available on MPI’s Web site.

Flashpoint speakers! I only caught two of the 10 (environmental activist/actor Ed Begley Jr., and
executive coach/author Libby Gill), but I loved the format of having 10 speakers with only 15 minutes each to rock your world (and, I presume, get your business). They need to work on the formatting a bit, though, if they plan to do this again. The room was too big and spread out, and having them squished on small stages to either side was kind of awkward. MPI is going to release videos of the Flashpoint speakers throughout the remainder of the year, so keep an eye peeled for those.

The Twitterings! Participants seemed to get into tweeting about the sessions, which was really useful. I hadn’t planned on going to Seth Mattison’s session on working with Millennials (I’ve been to too many of those in the past few years), but after seeing a bunch of rave reviews on the Twitterstream, I went to his last session. Even though I had to sit on the floor — it was SRO — this old dog learned a few new tricks, and found reason in the person of Mattison to hold high hopes for the future. What a sharp guy.

The Future of Meetings sessions! I wasn’t able to attend the Future of Meetings co-creation session on Saturday (Samuel Smith’s excellent wrapup is here), I did get to participate in the two-part session led on Sunday by Joan Eisenstodt, and by John Nawn on Monday. I’ll do a writeup of these sessions at some point, but they were very thought-provoking, to say the least.

The parties! OK, so I only went to the opening reception and a few private social events, but I hear the Big Deal poker event on Saturday night was a hit, as was the Rendezvous party and the closing block party on Granville St. I think it must have been the jet lag that kept me from doing the stay-out-all-night-and-rock thing.

Then of course, there are my least favorite things:
While the Water Coolers were absolutely hilarious (especially their takeoff on flying economy, and the unforgettable “office hottie” number), their relentless pumping of Harrah’s Las Vegas was pretty off-putting. As one MPI staffer said when I mentioned it, Harrah’s paid for it and so they can do whatever they want, but I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in wishing they hadn’t customized the act so much that it became a de facto PR pitch. Or at least that the PR parts were as funny as their regular numbers.

The lack of a printed on-site program. I know, I know, it’s all the rage in green circles not to print things out, and I was encouraged to see that MPI provided little fold-out daily schedules you could tote around easily. Unfortunately, I found them a little confusing, expo times were hard to find, and you had to go to the Web site to get session descriptions. I did print out a bunch of stuff to bring with me, but the staples would come undone and I lost pages, yada yada yada. The whole thing was pretty awkward, I thought, and I ended up missing some things I wanted to check out. Like the conference bags, I’d make an on-site full program an option for those who want it.

The session rooms sometimes didn’t fit either the size of the crowd — I sat on the floor a lot at this meeting! — or weren’t set up to facilitate the type of education that was going to be going on in them (try doing small-group interactions when you’re sitting in locked-down rows of chairs). And while I know it’s better to keep the temperature on the cooler side, it got a bit arctic at times.

Trade show as bowling alley. I think we can blame the fabulous weather and the siren call of Vancouver for this one, but the trade show floor was pretty much a ghost town the times I walked through it. But I didn’t hear much grumbling from exhibitors I spoke with, so maybe it wasn’t as sparse as it seemed to me? Or maybe they were getting enough client contact outside the trade show?

(Disclosure: I received comp registration to the MPI WEC)

If you haven’t been following all the conversation around MPI WEC and the socia media gurus, you should. At least if you have any interest in trying to figure out how to work with bloggers, tweeters, and the rest of the social media gang who most likely will be coming to your next event.

I’m not sure if I would go with a formal program like MPI did with its SMGs, but I do like the idea of offering registration discounts or some other type of perk to attract the twitterati who may not otherwise come. The first thing to do, though, is to know what you want from the social media elite when it comes to your meeting.

• If you want them to promote your event pre-show, or certain aspects of the event while it’s happening, I don’t know as how you need to do much of anything. I’d ask my organization’s staff to put whatever it is we want to promote out there and trust that people will retweet if it’s interesting. If it isn’t, it’ll fall on deaf ears no matter who puts it out there, IMHO.

• If you want to give those who haven’t used social media a taste of Twittery fun, having a few volunteers stationed in the Hub with a big screen of the latest mentions on LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, blogs, etc., and a computer to show people how to get started would probably be welcomed. Those of us who’ve been using all these media channels for a while tend to forget that getting started can be intimidating, and a friendly face to guide the set up would be a nice service to provide.

• If you want to engage and excite SM-active members, I think a simple invitation to join in the discussion and what hashtag to use would suffice. Everyone who wants to join in will anyway, from my experience. One thing that I saw at MPI WEC that was incredibly cool was that some of the speakers were sending tweets to the #wec10 hashtag, and it was obvious that they were paying attention to what others were tweeting about, too.

ASAE also has done a terrific job over the past several years in involving members/attendees in its social media efforts. They invite certain people to post right to the Acronym blog, and are fantastic and providing pointers to any and all posts they can find about their meetings. Last year’s social media hub — which incorporated meeting-related tweets, blog posts, you name its all in one place on their Web site — was a thing of beauty indeed. They have a lot of members who are very active both with the association and with social media, and it looks like they are ready, willing, and able to jump in and lend a hand as needed. I wrote a bit about ASAE’s media strategy after last year’s annual convention, and I bet they’ve done a bunch more since then.

While all the industry associations are giving it their best shot, so far I think ASAE has the best handle on using social media to support its conferences. But ASAE, like MPI, PCMA, other industry organizations, and the rest of us, are still trying to find better ways to make social media enhance, not distract or detract from, our shows. If you have any interesting ideas, I’d love to hear ‘em.

I was just thinking about a problem I had at MPI WEC 2010 that I’m pretty sure is shared by others: A netbook with limited battery power. Like two hours or so, then it might as well be a doorstop. I know most people have hyper energy-efficient smart phones now that they can use for tweeting and blogging and checking e-mail, but I can’t be the only one tethered to a power-sucking netbook or laptop. I was fortunate in that I had access to the press room, which included a power strip I could plug into to recharge. But I joined the others crawling around checking baseboards for free outlets in session rooms after forgetting my power cord in the press room overnight and arriving at the Vancouver Convention Centre juiceless just in time for the 8:30 sessions.

So, for at least the next year or two until we’re all blessed with super-cool smart phones with unlimited battery life, what do you think about adding recharging stations to the on-site services sponsorship opportunities you offer, along with the now-fading, once oh-so-essential cyber café? You could call it The Power Bar! The thought tickled my mind when I saw something similar at the Las Vegas airport on my long trek home and rushed over to get my electricity fix, so I thought I’d pass it along in case you weren’t already providing such a thing.

I never did pick up my official show pedometer so I was out of the running (so to speak) on winning the most steps taken at MPI WEC contest, but here’s my unofficial tabulation from my personal pedometer:

Thursday: 10,623
Friday: 12,947
Saturday: 30,053
Sunday: 12,770
Monday: 18,852
Tuesday: 21,961

Trip total: 107,206 steps, or somewhere around 53 miles. And I didn’t even do the Grouse Mountain Grind! Hopefully those 53ish miles will help offset all those prawns and crab and blueberry tarts!

Some of my favorites from today:

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey… what a long, strange trip it’s been.”–outgoing MPI chair Ann Godi

“If two people tell you you’re drunk, go to bed.”–incoming MPI chair Eric Rozenberg

“Sustainable means doing the right thing every time no matter what.”–John Furlong, general session speaker and CEO of Vancouver’s Olympic organizing committee

“[MPI’s meeting tagline ‘When we meet, we change the world’] doesn’t go far enough. The only way to change the world is to meet.”–general session speaker Emmanuel Gobillot

(Disclosure: I received a comp registration for MPI WEC 2010)

Went to a session today on the business value of meetings, led by Roger Rickard. He went over some of the studies that have come out on the topic lately, such as MPI’s Business Barometers, and research by the U.S. Travel Association, National Business Travel Association, Oxford University, British Airways, and Forbes. The upshot is that while things are definitely looking better than they did this time last year, we’re still not recovered to where we were when the freefall precipitated by AIG et al began. And with our elected officials bashing meetings in general as boondoggles and certain destinations as boondoggle central, well, that doesn’t help, Rickard said.

What we really need is data from the study PricewaterhouseCoopers is doing for the CIC, which Rickard says will be out in 4th quarter 2010.

Some interesting numbers he mentioned:
$12.50 — revenue return on every dollar spent on business travel
28% — amount of current revenue that would be lost if f2f meetings went away
17% — drop in profits if business travel was eliminated, and it would take three years to recover
95% — executives who said meetings were critical to maintaining longterm relationships
8.5% — how much more you’d have to pay people if you did away with incentives

“One thing we must do is blend all the numbers, facts, and research with the human spirit,” he said. Face-to-face meetings bring benefits that are extremely difficult to measure.

What we can expect in the future? Likely more of the same: greater accountability for the money spent, more scrutiny, and a continuation of negative public perception. It’s time to stop singing to the choir and start singing to our elected officials — state, local, and federal — about the facts we have about the value of meetings.

(Disclosure: I received a comp registration for MPI WEC 2010)

(Disclosure: I received a comp registration for MPI WEC 2010)

I’ve heard MPI throws a mean party, but last night was nothing short of amazing. They lit the Olympic cauldron for only the second time since the Olympics (the other time was for Canada Day, I heard). The whole thing was held outdoors in the open space next to the convention centre, with those incredible views of the harbour and mountains as the sun slowly set. But that was the only thing that was slow. Amazing fresh seafood and sushi was flying off the woks and platters, people were drinking some strange blue concoction I didn’t dare try but I heard was good, and we were entertained by all manner of interesting acts.

There was this one, where these incredibly fit young men and woman jumped off this structure onto a tramp, flew back up and defied gravity in all kinds of ways. Actually, that could have been the theme of last night’s event — defying gravity — as attendees got jollier and jollier and BMX bikers spun off ramps and twisted through the air, and young women did some complicated, Cirque du Soleil type of twisty dancey thing hanging from shirts and pants on clotheslines.

One might say the whole thing was very well orca-strated (heh heh):

As it was all winding up, I found a friend to go see the fireworks that were a part of Vancouver’s Celebration of Light (I didn’t bring my camera, but here is a nice Flickr stream from those who did).

I fully intended to check out The Big Deal poker tournament Harrahs was sponsoring that night, but my dogs were beyond barking at that point, they were downright howling. So I retired for the evening, read a chapter or two of The Girl Who Played with Fire (awesome second book in the series), and passed out to have my first really good night’s sleep since I got here. Exhaustion will do that to you!

Speaking of which, I haven’t picked up my official show pedometer yet, but so far here’s my steps on Canadian soil:
Thursday: 10,623
Friday: 12,947
Saturday: 30,053 — hence the exhaustion! Forgot to mention that I spent the afternoon wandering the city, from a stroll through Stanley Park to shopping mecca Robson St., which I decided was out of my price range, to Yaletown, took the Aquabus across False Creek to Granville Island, then back over for a wander along the seawall past the Science museum and through Chinatown, then through Gastown, where I just so happened to be there on the hour to see the famous steam clock do its thing, then wandered my way back to the hotel.

I may beat my record set at ASAE last year after all.

Off to the morning sessions. Looking forward to some great learning and some puppy cuddling!

(Disclosure: I received a comp registration for MPI WEC 2010)