Thanks to Krys at Gathering for putting together this list of networking tips/resourcesfor shy people. I’m bookmarking it for a closer look, hopefully sometime before ASAE and The Center’s annual meeting in August. I am a total trainwreck when it comes to those networking events; maybe these tips will help.

Thanks to Nancy Wilson of Meeting Strategies Worldwide for this one: A Green Meetings Glossary. If there are green-meetings-related words or phrases you’d like to see added, drop her a line.

I’d like to see this incorporated into the APEX Glossary, or be offered as an adjunct to it on the Convention Industry Council site. Is that possible?

According to a post recently on the MeCo listserv, it looks like the housing pirates are still alive and well. You know, the folks who find your exhibitor and/or attendee list and try to market rooms to them for your show, sometimes posing as the actual show organizer, sometimes saying things like the block is sold out (whether or not it actually is) and offering rooms at hotels both inside and outside the organizer’s blocked facilities. Can anyone say attrition?

If you run into this, this article, though I wrote it a while ago, may have some tips on how to deal with pirates who try to raid your attendee block.

At the green meeting session this morning at NEMICE (led by my colleague at Corporate Meetings & Incentives, Barbara Scofidio), I was in charge of keeping the discussion going on greening up conference bags, gifts, and giveaways.

We had two questions to start off the conversation: What our organizations were currently doing to green up their bags, etc., and what our organizations were aspiring to do make be greener in that area. Here’s a quick recap.

Bags: Some people said they were trying to do away with bags altogether, while others were trading in plastic bags for cloth, since cloth is more biodegradeable. Some said they asked people if they wanted a bag, which cut down on the number of bags used since not everyone took one.

One idea I loved was BYOB–bring your own bag. They asked, and an amazing number of attendees did in fact bring their own. Another person said she gave her leftover bags to a friend who was going to China, who gave them to an orphanage there.

Also, some people said they stopped putting dates and 4th annual whatever on the bags so they could reuse them for other meetings.

Giveaways: The trend on handouts and proceedings was to take as much of it as possible online, and have people download what they need ahead of time and bring it with them. Some were using flash drives to hold the PowerPoints, or CDs, which also have the added benefit of being updateable up to the last minute, just in case some speaker may decide to make a change. I know, it never happens, but…

Some were condensing their syllabi down to 1/5 of what it used to be. Others were using recycled paper.

Hot green giveaways were plastic and metal water bottles that attendees could use instead of the usual disposables and refill at water stations. Everyone seemed to like the idea of bookmarks that contained seeds attendees could take home and plant. People were interested in the idea of giving away saplings as gifts, which PCMA did at its annual meeting in Seattle this year.

Gifts: Some people were giving donations to charity in their speakers’ names as gifts; some were contemplating offering carbon offsets, but we weren’t sure if that’d be well-received or not. Also, some were cutting back on the gift-wrapping as a small way to cut waste.

Tips and ideas
Buy from local merchandisers
Check out biodegradable cups made out of corn (that came up a couple of times)

Other things that came up but weren’t related to bags and gifts:
• Set up recycling stations for cans and bottles
• Reuse signage
• Donate banners to organizations that make handbags out of them and donate them to charity
• Donate food to local food banks/shelters. Hotels may balk, but you may be able to talk them into it (more on the topic is here). I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the national group that can help you find local organizations to donate to at the time, but now of course I remember that it’s America’s Second Harvest. One person talked about a meeting she held in California when all the wildfires were burning–she donated the unused food from her meeting to the fire victims.

Another reason to use that do-not-disturb sign, brought to you by Cindy at AE on the Verge. You do not want this to happen to you!

As in laptop-less? Now that people are commenting on meetings in real-time through social networking tools, you can’t help but worry that some things are getting out that just shouldn’t go public. So why not just ban laptops, along with BlackBerries and the rest of those insta-communicators?

Personally, I really like this idea, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who would disagree.

Hat tip to the Fabulous Spellos Brothers for the pointer–and who could resist playing with that headline, really?

Mike Mason from the Farm Credit Council again is posting lessons learned from this year’s meeting. I especially like that he actually tried some of the meeting print program improvements he posted about last year, even if they didn’t always work out quite like he thought they would.

Sadly, two things he learned are 1) that attendees don’t like change, and 2) the tech corollary that those who are on board with technology already still are up on the latest, while those who aren’t, aren’t. This may just be specific to his market, but I don’t think so.

We may be at the point where the digital divide is pretty much set. I mean, social networking has been around long enough now that those who are interested have already given it a shot, and those who aren’t have already marshaled their arguments against it (see Ben’s synoposis of these arguments here). We may be able to nudge a few more holdouts over the fence, but my feeling is that the lines are already drawn.

But, believe it or not, I have been wrong. Maybe there just hasn’t been enough time yet to win over the luddites. With the pace of change in technology, though, those who aren’t on the bus may find themselves too far behind to catch up even if they do have a change of heart. My feeling is that they are missing out, but who knows, maybe they’re right and all this blog/Wiki/LinkedIn/Twitter stuff isn’t ultimately worth paying attention to. Naw.

In this case, it was getting people to stop talking during a meal at MPI so they could listen to the speaker, but it could work almost anytime you have a non-attentive crowd: Clap three times.

As I go through my notes from the PCMA conference in Seattle, I found another green tidbit I thought was really interesting: at a press conference, the Washington State Convention and Trade Center vice president of operations mentioned that the center partners with a company that recycles old trade show banners and turns them into bags. I tried a quick Google and didn’t come up with any obvious hits of companies that do this, but I thought it was a pretty cool concept.

OK, back to my notes.

This post by Margaret on Event Marketing points out something that is missing from most events I’ve been to: A place to hang out. Here’s what she did:

with the help of our general contractor, Freeman, we created a wonderful globe which had places to hang out, view videos of biotech innovations around the world and more. On the first day, attendees had agendas to fill so the area was not busy. Staff was worried that our hang out area was a flop. But not me. It happened. When those convention feet were tired, attendees said “meet me at the globe.” It worked. The globe helped us create a hangout spot, more networking and a memorable special event.

And you do need something big and splashy, like the globe, along with some places to actually sit down. Most shows have some sort of lounge area, but it can be pretty diffuse. For big shows, I’d think you’d want a few of them scattered around…hey, what a cool way to carry out your meeting’s theme, too.