Here’s an interesting guest post by Doug Archibald, vice president, sales and service at Ungerboeck Software International- a worldwide provider of mobile event management software for conferences and venues. He’s talking more to the venue side than the meeting planning side, which is a different perspective than you’d usually see here. I hope you enjoy it.

As smartphones, iPads, and tablets take over the market share of wireless Internet devices, accessing the Internet at a conference or large-scale event is not only necessary, but expected by attendees. This expectation can be an opportunity for large venues to gain a competitive edge, and generate additional revenue through providing the wireless access while generating additional revenue. There are many options when it comes paying for wireless, and generating a revenue stream in the process is the norm for most venues.

The simplest and most popular way to generate revenue is to charge for the wireless itself or charge for additional services. A venue can ask the user (attendee) to pay to access the service itself, or charge a fee to access the service at a higher download speed. Another option is to charge the organization hosting the event, and they can pass the fee onto their attendees as they wish. Various options such as network speed, restricted site access, and data usage can be priced differently to increase revenue.

Some venue owners do not want to manage wireless access, and a popular solution to this issue is to allow commercial wireless carriers (such as AT&T or Sprint) to install access points for their services. Carriers pay rent for the access points, which provides revenue to your organization while servicing your attendees. Carriers install their own equipment and are responsible for maintenance and technical support. Many convention and conference centers are made of concrete and steel, and receiving a signal or maintaining one can be frustrating for the venue owner and attendees. With this option, managing wireless access problems is passed onto the carrier. The carrier can also sell directly to event organizers, eliminating the hassles of selling wireless service as well.

Even if the market demands a venue offer free service, then generating revenue through advertisers on the network is common and often the most profitable. Branded portals are available, and your venue can sell sponsored ads within this custom app. Branded portals can also be linked to social media sites, giving your venue even more exposure to potential clients and organizations.
Venue owners can easily profit from the new age of wireless by researching the options available, knowing their competitor’s wireless service options, and selecting the right combination of products and services. Conference or event attendees expect to have access to the Internet, and venue owners can easily turn this into a revenue stream with the right knowledge and some creativity.

Brought to you by the always brilliant Lara McCulloch-Carter, the #EventProfs community, and Plan Your Meetings: Stuff Event Planners Say.

My first full day at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual conference, going on now in Orlando, was packed. Some notes on the meeting as a meeting.

I’ll get the whining out of the way first:
-Yes, I already have stuffed-brain syndrome from having way too much thrown at me in too little time with no connection between session topics and no time for reflection built in.
-We hit the “I know you can’t read this slide, but…” wall before the first general session was over.
-We hit the “I know this classroom setup makes it almost impossible to break into small groups, but we’ll have to do our best…” shortly thereafter.
-Healthy food is good, but replacing the chips with bean salad and the cookie with an apple in the bag lunch seems a bit over the top. Must we resort to Starbucks for all our dietary sins?
-Speaking of over the top, is it just me, or are there way too many sessions to choose from? I know, tough problem to have, but I’m finding myself torn between six or seven I want to go to in every single time slot. It’s making me crazy to be missing so much good content (and hearing people tweet about some of those sessions to the #acehp12 hashtag just makes it worse).

Awesome aspects, meeting-wise:
-Free WiFi! Thanks to Bernie Halbur, PhD, FACME, ACEHP’s Professional Development & Meeting Management Director, for making it happen, along with everything else we’re enjoying logistically. I gave her a standing ovation when she was recognized yesterday at the general session, and I wasn’t the only one.
-Love having the brief outdoor breezeway walk to the exhibition area, and the tables set up for eating/hanging out/computing along the way. At least we’re assured of the opportunity to catch five minutes or so of the gorgeous Florida weather as we go back and forth, instead of never even knowing if the sun is shining or not, as so often happens at marathon meetings.
-Beautiful hotel (the JW Marriott), beautiful rooms, nice jogging path, great fitness center. I don’t know much about golf, but the course looks good to me.
-Being able to hold the new CCMEP celebration out on the patio last night was a wonderful touch. Again, being able to get outside in January means a lot, especially to those of us who hail from the frozen North!

(Cross-posted on Capsules, where I’ll be posting a bunch more that’s content-specific to continuing medical education, so if you’re into that, come on over and browse!)

While it may not rock your world, this list of 10 quick meeting-planning tips from the AMI blog is a good reminder of what really counts: that it’s all about the attendees, not your organization. It may be simple, but it’s probably not easy!

That’s what Kristi Casey Sanders asks in this interesting post about how what’s hip today might become passé, presentation-format-wise. Plus she includes a great list of tips (and she’s funny).

Most of the conversations I’ve had recently around the trade show concept have focused on their being perceived as an old-school way to bring buyers and sellers together, one that is becoming increasingly ineffective and unappealing to attendees. Hence the move toward hosted-buyer programs, and adding education in hopes it will attract more people to the show floor.

Then I ran across this editorial in Forbes written by Consumer Electronics Association (which owns the CES show) president and CEO Gary Shapiro that is practically an ode to the trade show model. Called Want Innovation? Go to a Trade Show
, here’s the heart of his argument:

Perhaps most important, they come because relationships matter in business and, despite the worldwide reach of the Internet, a relationship cannot only be electronic. It must be personal.

This personal component to International CES – or any tradeshow, for that matter – is what makes it a living, breathing entity. It’s an experience that requires five senses. Some may scoff and wonder why in the age of technology and the Internet live face-to-face events even exist. Yet they not only persist, they also prosper because people, relationships and first-hand impressions matter. Five-sense interaction beats the Internet for creating a big picture view, allowing serendipitous discovery, developing trust, and evaluating people and products.

It’s an argument we’ve all heard before, and I of course want to get behind it. And yet I do hear, anecdotally anyway, an increasing reluctance on attendees’ parts to deal with the trade show model. Is the expo floor as we know it still a vibrant, living, growing model, or a dinosaur lumbering its way to an experiential tar pit? I’m sure the answer will in part depend on who the intended audience is, but generally speaking, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Or a stinky seatmate, or one that never shuts up? The list of things air passengers are and do that annoy their fellow travelers are legion. Which do you find most obnoxious? Head over to Elliott.org and register your vote on what makes for the most annoying seatmate ever. For me, the screaming baby is the hardest to take, closely followed by one not on Chris’s list: The seat-kicker. I swear I’ve taken some shots to the kidneys from kids in the row behind me that would put Ali to shame.

Talk about communication failure! This is scathingly on target.

Thanks to @BrianSMcGowan for the pointer!

If your attendees come to your meetings bristling with iPads, iPhones, and an assortment of other iTems, you’d best be prepared with plentiful bandwidth and perhaps a few high-tech goodies to make them feel appreciated. Like what, you ask? Here are five tech giveaway ideas from Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc..

This is really more to ask you all for feedback of various types. I’m curious about a few things:

1. What did you think of the different session lengths being all mixed together? I heard it was a bit tough for we older folks to get used to at first, while the younger ones jumped right in with no problem. I found it confusing, but I think more because of the sheer volume of offerings in any given couple of hours slot. Which brings me to…

2. What did you think about integrating VES into PCMA? As much as it made for a ridiculously long week last year, I think I preferred having VES piggyback rather than mesh with PCMA. There were just too many things to choose from, and all too often I ended up putting the VES sessions second.

3. Learning Lounge thoughts? I loved the Really Live Chats, would like to have them promoted more so you get a better sense of what’s going on and who the facilitators are. Also more info ahead of time on the videos and how it all works. I also loved the Big Ideas Pavilion; again, I’d like to have had a better sense of who was talking about what and when, though the serendipity of what I ended up going to was sublime. I didn’t go to much at the APP4that, but I liked what I did go to and heard a lot of similar sentiments. I did almost nothing at Digital U and Society just because I couldn’t work it in. I’d love to hear how those worked (or didn’t) for you.

4. Last but not least, I’d like to put together an online gallery of images from the conference so the poor peeps who couldn’t be there can at least enjoy it vicariously–I took a bunch of photos, but photography is not my forte. If you have any nice shots of yourself, your colleagues, your peers, funky hats, or whatever else struck your fancy at PCMA12 that you’d like to share (and that those in the shots wouldn’t mind sharing!), please e-mail them to me at spelletier@meetingsnet.com (and include who and what are in the shots, of course, and how you would like to be credited as the photographer). I’ve seen a few on the Twitter stream that were just fantastic!