I had the great good fortune on Monday to once again experience the Christmas Revels at Sanders Theater at Harvard. Not only was it a great show (with my little cousin in the children’s chorus—he rocked it), but I noticed something interesting in the program.

Instead of just a note asking people to turn off their cell phones during the show, it said something along the lines of, “Before you turn off your phone, please feel free to Tweet, Facebook, or otherwise share that you’re here enjoying the Revels.” So of course I did. Seems like something that could help spread the word about a conference as well.

I’ve been linking to him a lot lately, and today we have a guest post from Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc. His topic du jour is finding the right venue for your event. Take it away, Andy!

It only takes one bad experience at a hotel to know that a site inspection at a property is essential. Even then, ensuring that you ask the right questions while on that inspection can save you a lot of headache and extra work. On one program, our staff actually had to prepare and set a breakfast due to the fact the kitchen and banquet staff did not show up. Needless to say, we were not told of the hotels labor issues prior to our arrival on-site. After that unthinkable experience, we always had a meeting with the food and beverage manager at the site inspection!

Site inspection is more than just visiting the property to view sleeping rooms and meeting space. Visually, a property may look great and fit your meeting needs, but if you scratch the surface a bit more, your expectations in their level of service or food quality may leave little to be desired. During your site inspection remember to verify and be comfortable with the five basics of meeting planning: Location, Facility, Hotel Staff, Meeting Space & Food and Beverage. Follow these tips and your property selection will be a success.

Start with the location. How close is the property to a major airport, and what type of recreational activities does the area afford? Is there shopping nearby and what are the latest hot restaurants? Is this a location your group will enjoy? More importantly, does it fit the overall strategy and objectives of the program? Also, think ahead about the hook you can use for your attendees during the recruitment process. Request the top ten most popular activities to do in/around the hotel from the Concierge before you leave.

Another very important step in the process, before you get to the site inspection, is making sure there are no city-wide programs happening during the same dates as your program. A city-wide is when another group or association is taking over a large block of the hotel rooms in a city. If you find yourself, as a smaller group, competing with a larger group, you will always lose. Stay away from a city-wide situation if you can. If you can’t, then make sure you choose a hotel that is not part of the city wide event. This will ensure you will get the attention you deserve. Make sure you ask about any other groups in-house during your stay. If there are groups other than yours, how will they impact your group?

Next, really delve into the creature comforts of a facility. If the property has thought of the little things, you can bet they have thought of service. What is the availability of guest services, for example how many ATM machines are there, where is the concierge desk, and are there safes for valuables in every room? Are the bathroom fixtures updated and are the rooms comfortable and clean? What types of room amenities are offered? HINT: Ask to see the best room on the property and the worst. A good sales person will show you both. Also always ask for free upgrades for your VIP’s and free rooms as a percentage of your total room block. These are standard negotiations and good to request during the site inspection process.

The hotel staff is critical to ensuring a pleasant experience for any hotel guest. Take the time to notice if you were greeted with a smile and by name either in the valet or at the front desk. How long did you wait before getting your rooms keys? Did you get escorted to your room and given an explanation of the hotels amenities. HINT: Call the operator from your sleeping room and see how many rings it takes until they answer the phone and the tone of the operator upon answering.

A key element of this is a strong concierge’s program. A concierge that is knowledgeable and helpful will make your stay and your attendee’s stay truly memorable. They will know the latest hot spot, how to get on the best golf course at the last minute and always knows how to get to a 24-hour dry cleaner. Remember, we are talking about experience here, and experience is perception. Let me give you an example. A recent trip to the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Nigel in California quickly turned into a nightmare for one client. His luggage got lost and he arrived on a Sunday evening when everything was closed. You can imagine the stress of having no business clothes and an entire conference to attend. The concierge was able to call a local suit shop and arranged to have it open that Sunday evening to get the client a suit, shoes and shirts for the next day. You can imagine the smile on his face when he walked out of that shop. The concierge saved the day. A happy staff makes for happy guests.

Nothing will ruin a meeting quicker than bad meeting space. Are there columns or other obstructions on the meeting rooms that may obstruct viewing? Discuss with your meeting planner how your meeting room set-up fits into this room. Should you arrange classroom style or theater seating? Will table rounds work better for your meeting or half rounds? Make these decisions during the site inspection and take advantage of visually of being on-site where you can imagine and get a true sense of the space. Is there an accessible thermostat in the meeting rooms to easily make temperature changes? If the thermostat is not accessible to your on-site staff, what is the anticipated reaction time for the hotel staff to address and rectify the situation? Are there additional rooms available in the event that the meeting planner needs to provide for last-minute that break outs? HINT: Always negotiate free space and additional rooms for breaks in advance.

Finally, be very comfortable with the property’s ability to offer quality food & beverage service. Review the catering department’s standard group offerings. Confirm tax and gratuities, which will be 26%-35% of your base bill. Challenge the food and beverage staff to come up with unique menus and venues around the property. Also, make sure the room in-service menu meets your specifications for your attendees. HINT: The best way to an attendee’s heart is through the stomach. Offer quality food and suburb customer service for a great experience.

Run through your site inspection with these five areas in mind and you are on your way to a great program. Good Luck, and Happy Planning!

Andy McNeill is president and CEO of American Meetings, Inc., a global event marketing and meeting management company.

Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc., recently discovered a fun resource planners can give to their attendees (and, presumably, their families) to use in their free time while in the Big Apple: The New York Pass. The pass is good for most of the main NYC attractions and, a huge plus in my book, it gives you the super-hero ability to jump ahead in the lines. Read more about it on the AMI blog.

Google Maps is bringing its helpful blue dot indoors, so you’ll be able to figure out where you are relative to where you want to go inside as well as out. While it looks like it just has some major airports and shopping areas mapped out as of now, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you can use it at New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center, or even better, Gaylord Opryland. Though with more conference organizers including interactive maps in their show apps, maybe this will be not quite so needed by the time Google gets around to major convention sites?

If you find yourself designing your meeting’s brochure, signage, or anything else that includes type, you owe it to yourself to check out these 26 free retro fonts (you can download them straight from the linked site). If you have any sort of nostalgia theme, or just want a throwback look, you must check these out. (There also are links to many more beautiful, free fonts if you’re not in the nostalgia mood).

Fellow font freaks, rejoice!

It’s hard to imagine that the word hasn’t yet gotten out to some meetings professionals that it’s better environmentally, budget-wise, and even logistically, to lose the bottled water habit for meetings. And yet, we still see them on ice at breaks, so I guess the trend toward pitchers and other forms of water dispensers hasn’t quite hit the mainstream (so to speak).

Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc., tackles just this topic in this blog post that covers the topic nicely, including lots of related links to more resources and bottle alternatives AMI has found.

I can’t vouch for its total accuracy, but this is one handy guide to tipping around the world.

The results of the Velvet Chainsaw/Tagoras survey on speakers are in: Here are the top 15 things about speakers that drive meeting planners nuts. I can’t think of anything to add to the list, can you? Speakers, if you’re doing any of those 15 things, I beg you on behalf of planners (and conference-goers) everywhere to please stop!

Or at least it gives you some serious tools to work with, on both strategic and tactical levels. It’s called 42 Rules for a Web Presence that Wins. It’s written by 15-year Web veteran Philippa Gamse (full disclosure: I’ve been a fan of hers for almost that long), and it’s slender size belies the hefty number of info nuggets it packs.

She broke up the 40 rules (the first and last are more introduction and wrapup) into four categories: Management-level issues; things to think about when setting strategy and tactics; how to create content that connects your organization with your site visitors/social media contacts; and how to go about measuring results. Each short chapter (rules are no more than two pages apiece) includes an aforementioned nugget of insight from Philippa and some real-world examples of how that insight plays out for actual people and organizations. She also has scattered throughout the book interviews with all manner of experts, from the meeting industry’s own John Foster of Foster, Jensen & Gully LLC, to Rob Siefker, who is the director of the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team.

Just a few of the many aha moments I had in reading this book:
• Beware the Web designer! Their job is to make the site look good, but they don’t necessarily know your audience, your goals, and what is and isn’t currently working with your site. There’s an example in that chapter (Rule 14) of what can happen when designers run amok that’ll make your hair curl.

• Create a strategy for every single page of your site (Rule 20). Key quote: “You should always be aware of the paths you’d like visitors to take, and provide appropriate links and clickable calls to action that consistently move them forward.” That clickable calls to action thing is so important, and yet so often we forget to give people a hint on how to keep moving through the site to register for the meeting, or book the hotel, or, in our case, read another related article. Then we moan about bounce rates. Doh!

• Sometimes it’s OK to have high bounce rates. This is something I’ve always suspected, but it’s good to see it in print. You may have a segment of your audience that is supposed to just be “one and done,” and that’s just fine. Just be sure to keep Rule 20 in mind for those you want to have stick around, explore, and open their wallets.

• Another thing that really rang for me is similar to the figuring out your why I was pondering this morning. Once you figure that out, or at least what you offer that your audience can’t get from anyone but you, let visitors know early and often. Philippa offers a great suggestion from brand strategist Vickie Sullivan on how to formulate that value: “We (the business) combine A with B, so you (the customer) get C. And the more unrelated A and B are, the more compelling the value proposition will be.” For example, in Phillipa’s case, Sullivan says, “[Philippa] combines strategic advice for a compelling web presence with return on investment, so you get an online brand with emotional appeal that drives revenue, too.” Which pretty much sums up the book as well.

I haven’t had the chance to watch it, but I hear this free webinar of highlights from the book is pretty good, too. I’m going to keep both handy next time we head into a site redesign.

The good folks on MeCo were chatting about swag after reading this Fast Company article about swag, tchotches, and other conference giveaways. Then photographer Brian McCarthy mentioned one of the best giveaway ideas I’ve heard in a long time.

His clients hired him to take portraits of their convention attendees, which he was able to do at a quick clip of a few minutes per portrait (he travels nationally to work with conventions and meetings, he tells me. He also brings his own portable studio, which he specifically designed to meet airline check-in regulations). He said it was a big hit, because people got good shots they could use on their Web site, etc., the other vendors had a line of people to chat with, and the organization got kudos for providing what he says one attendee called the “best swag ever” (he e-mailed the images to each person at the end of the day, which gave the sponsor one more shot to message that person as well).

Is that not a terrific idea?

Speaking of swag, I also just heard that President Obama is not a fan of the stuff, at least not when the federal government is the giver of the swag (the swagger?). More on the ban on government swag here, also courtesy of MeCo.