Talk about communication failure! This is scathingly on target.

Thanks to @BrianSMcGowan for the pointer!

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!

I spend a lot of time with continuing medical education providers, but not so much with the meeting planners who make those meetings at which the CME is conducted happen, so it was fascinating to have the chance to sit in on a frank discussion of what their biggest challenges are, and what they are doing to resolve them, as my last session of PCMA 2012.

One thing that seemed to be of huge concern was the idea that exhibitors were going to start asking them to provide physician attendees’ National Provider Identification numbers. Since this is public information, I’m having a hard time understanding why that is the meeting planner’s problem—why can’t the exhibitors just look them up? If someone can explain why this is potentially a big issue for exhibitors, please let me know. I tried to find out from a few folks after the session ended, but everyone was in a rush to leave so I didn’t really get much other than if an exhibitor demands it, it’s their problem. Which I get, but I don’t get why exhibitors would demand this from them. Light-shedding on this would be welcome!

Other big issues were the costs of complying with government regulations and Accreditation Council for CME rules, pressures to find new sources of revenue, building traffic to the exhibition floor, international initiatives (including visa-related challenges), CME credit interchange with other countries, and all the various codes and rules and regulations they are supposed to follow nowadays.

One participant was particularly concerned about the Council of Medical Specialty Societies’ newish ethical code that is designed to limit drug and device company influence over patient care. While similar in many ways to the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support, it also prohibits society presidents, CEOs, and editors-in-chief of society journals from having direct financial relationships with relevant for-profit companies in the healthcare sector. One participant said her organization actually had to ask one of its journal editors to resign after her society agreed to abide by the CMSS code.

Sponsorships and exhibit dollars on the decline had most of the crowd at least someone frazzled. As one person said, “With the PhRMA Code, they don’t want to sponsor anything anymore.” Several said their organizations were going the same route as PCMA, offering year-round sponsorships that extend far beyond the meeting rather than providing one-offs on tote bags and banners. (Note: This article offers some good tips on how to get more sponsorship dollars. And here’s another one.) One thing sponsors particularly seem to like, said some participants, is being able to meet with board members and other influential people in the industry at board and other high-level meetings. Some said they give preferential treatment on the show floor to exhibitors that are also in more extensive sponsorship relationships, others said they kept it completely separate.

From what people were saying, I’m not sure they’d buy into this snip of research finding that physicians aren’t eschewing the trade show floor now that the tchotches are out due to PhRMA Code restrictions. It sounds like, for medical meetings as for other types of association conferences, it’s becoming more and more of a push to get people on the show floor and interacting with exhibitors. While product theaters can help, they don’t appear to be a major solution to the exhibition drain problem. As one person said, “The surveys say they value exhibitions, but they don’t go. We give them food, product theaters, we’re even putting the reception on the show floor. Nothing seems to help.”

One said she was going to take the “continue the conversation” idea from PCMA, where a follow-on informal session is held after a keynote so those who want to can dive deeper into the material, only hold it on the show floor. Which is fine, as long as it isn’t for credit, warned another person. Another pointed to a different angle on the problem: Maybe it’s the booths that aren’t so attractive. So that organization offers a consultant who can evaluate exhibitor booths and suggest ways to improve them.

Some said they had added a virtual trade show component as a complement to repurposing educational content from the conference for online distribution, but it didn’t appear that the value was all that high (one said that only 42 percent of virtual attendees visited the virtual exhibit, which I thought actually sounded pretty good. Another said it was more like 25 percent for his group). Streaming the educational session, with or without CME credit attached, live and archived, seemed to be pretty popular among attendees of most of the planners who said they had done it. However, interest dropped off a cliff when members were asked if they would pay for it, one person said (shocking, I know!). Another said she had a good response to charging one fee to get access to all the content, and an additional fee on top of it if they wanted to get CME credit for it.

They didn’t talk a lot about CME educational grants, but one person did point out that, now that pharma budgets for CME grants are shrinking, their ad budgets actually are growing. Accordingly, medical organizations are beginning to put more of their focus on attracting those ad dollars to support their meetings.

There was more—a lot more—but I’ll leave this one with two of the wildest promotional ploys I’ve heard of:

One was a company that brought colored chalk and proceeded to draw its logo on the sidewalk in front of the medical conference’s headquarters hotel. Another person told of a company that put its logo on the mainsail of a big sailboat and had it sail up and down the harbor in view of the meeting (I’m not sure if this was in San Diego, but I could see it happening there.)

I had been looking forward to this one because, while I’m not sure Richard Saul Wurman’s done the world a favor by unleashing a million TED knockoffs (then again, I shouldn’t blame him for others piggybacking on an idea that may not be a great fit for their meeting) and I’m not convinced his www.www conference format is all that (then again, as he said, he doesn’t care, since he didn’t invite me anyway).

From the abrupt introduction—here he is—to the abrupt end—I might as well stop now since I got a laugh—he was not everyone’s cup of tea, but I was delighted through and through. What a cranky, unique, fearless individual he is. He created TED because “I wanted to design a meeting I’d want to be at. I did TED because I wanted to do it.”

He described the designing process for TED as one of subtraction: He took out panels, dress codes (he cut off the tie of anyone who dared to wear one), took out the podium (which he described as just something to protect your groin and to give you a place to put papers to read off of—and “who wants to be read to?”). Meetings, he said, are made up of small things that make people feel comfortable so they can learn.

He talked a bit about his new www.www conference, which he’s again designing through subtraction (no tickets, no presentations, no set schedule). One thing that sounds interesting is how he plans to disseminate the conference later, which is going to be in black-and-white film available online that will offer customizable ways to find out more about each of the discussion participants. Basically, again looking to create a conference he’d like to be a part of, he’s looking for a modality that allows people to create their own experience based on what they’re interested in.

He went on for a while about a fable he created in his books What If, Could Be and 33. I won’t go into it, but it involved turning everything into its opposite (example: copyright becomes right to copy. Note to self: Buy these books. They sound really interesting.).

More favorite quotes:
“I don’t show visuals because I don’t want to be a caption.”
“The more famous you are, the shorter the introduction.”
“Learning is remembering what you’re interested in.”
“I’ve tended to fail sideways throughout my life.”
“Humor is not trivial: It’s the opposite of expectation.” (He said this just before reeling off some of my favorite Stephen Wright one-liners, like, “Everything is within walking distance if you have enough time.”)
“We live in the age of also.” (As in, you can do it this way, and also that way.)

And in case this wasn’t eclectic enough, he ended up with a quick biomimicry example of learning a better way to peel a banana by watching an ape do it. I actually learned this one a few years ago and have been peeling my bananas from the bottom up ever since. I later on in the afternoon got into a really interesting conversation about what else we can learn about meetings from mimicking what nature perfected a long time ago. Stay tuned for more on that one…

I also went to an interesting session on incorporating product theaters on the trade show floor. It was moderated by John Houghton with the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, who also showed lots of slides of different product theater setups. Interesting that almost all of the slides I saw were of open-sided theaters; of the few I’ve seen, they mainly have been at least somewhat shielded from the hustle and bustle. He was joined by panelists Carrie Abernathy, CMP, CEM, with the International Association of Fire Chiefs; Matthew Cunningham, CMP, with the American Petroleum Institute; and Colleen Donohoe, CMP, with the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. Eclectic group, eh?

A few things I learned:
* Don’t do it unless you’re going to demo something. Sounds like that’s what they’re most effective for.

* Market product theaters with the rest of your program several months out.

* Where to place it on your show floor will really depend on the specifics of your attendee and exhibitor base. That said, while you don’t want to monopolize your premium space, but you do want to put it where it will get traffic. That may be in the back near the food and beverage stations, or in a more central location. One online session attendee said she put hers in the center of the show floor and used fabric to dampen the noise. Another mentioned that where you place it speaks to how important you think it is.

* For medical trade shows: Product theaters can not be offered for continuing medical education or CE credit.

* Panelists were mixed on whether to give product theaters dedicated time or run them opposite other programming. Matthew, whose organization runs its product theater concurrently with other sessions, basically tells companies to send their best speakers so they can compete. Colleen, on the other hand, keeps it unopposed both to make it worth the cost and to keep non-CME from competing with CME.

* You can use your mobile app and/or social media to push out messages about the product theater, both before the fact and during the show by broadcasting the news that a hot-topic session is coming up on the show floor. The panelists also promoted the sessions on the show floor with large, tall, eye-catching graphics over the sets, and had people holding signs saying “Follow me for a great hot-topic session.” I didn’t catch what her association was, but one attendee whose organization must be involved in lumber somehow said they place a live tree in the middle of the show floor, then sell space around the outside of it. They use the tree to demo whatever it is that organization’s people demo, then have the last session be about how to cut down a tree, demonstrated on the tree, which is then carried off the show floor as logs.

* To combat the idea that people will rush past the booths to get to the product theater, you can build in time around the on-floor sessions for booth browsing, or, as one person said, invite exhibitors to speak next time!

Let’s face it: Most general sessions are pretty boring. People go expecting to have to suffer a half hour, an hour, some seemingly endless amount of time as the association runs through its business issues and updates, thanks sponsors, etc., before getting to the keynote speaker. Or attendees just skip over that part and show up an hour into the session, hoping to spare themselves the experience.

In his 15-minute whirlwind at the Learning Pavilion, online and IRL conference moderator extraordinaire Glenn Thayer said we don’t have to follow the old formatting rules—who made those rules up, anyway? Why not make up your own rules based on the unique needs of your organization and your attendees? Let’s not be afraid to evolve, he said.

As Dr. Medina said, we learn in 10-minute chunks, so that’s a place to start, he said. What else do we experience daily that chunks up content? How about TV shows? Not that your general session is murderously dull, but it could take some clues from shows like CSI, which lead off with a pretty compelling setup (i.e., someone dies in some bizarre/grotesque/mysterious way), then breaks for commercial. We’re accustomed to that, so why not adopt a TV show format for your general session?

As Glenn pointed out, PCMA actually did in its opening general session, which was broken up into nine segments, just as a TV show is. The keynotes were short. Sponsors were thanked only after we got a payoff in interesting material, and we even had a video ad (Hawaii did a very cute, even humorous, video that I won’t describe because it will sound hokey, but it worked in context). Other ideas instead of just having a sponsor introduce the keynoter would be to have them do a behind-the-scenes vignette, or have live demos, or produce funny YouTube videos.

Don’t just look to TV for inspiration, he said. Check out what makes you excited to be at everyday places. What gets your attention at the mall? How does Disney World make long lines palatable. And don’t forget to ask your event producers what you can do to make the format fresher and more engaging.

Side note, sort of: I’ve now met Glenn a few times, and each time he impresses me more. We got to talking for a while after his session about meeting planning career paths and how to really get strategic, and he just blew me away. If you ever get the chance to talk with this guy, take it!

Another great info-chunker is learning evangelist Kathleen Edwards, who is rapidly becoming one of my new favorite meeting design experts. At her 15-minute session at the Learning Pavilion, she had kind of a new year’s theme, as in “Out with old, in with the new.”

What’s out:
A small group of people on a program committee who may or may not know what the audience wants and/or needs making all the content choices for the conference.

What’s in:
Using technology to connect with the audience to learn what they really need.

What’s out:
Speakers who try to cram everything they’ve ever learned into a session.

What’s in:
Outcomes-focused, learner-centered sessions that focus on key points that can be digested over the course of the session.

What’s out:
Sage on the stage providing a one-way firehose of information.

What’s in:
Guide on the side who engages the learners and facilitates learning by making it all about you, the learner.

What’s out:
Learner apathy, as in people who just sit and passively absorb (or not) the information.

What’s in:
Learners who take charge of their learning. If they aren’t getting what they want, they’ll go somewhere else to get it.

I’ve experienced this type of “from the horse’s mouth” customer advice session from Sam Lippman’s ECEF in the past, and they’ve been really useful. So I had high hopes for a similar session I went to today, where Bob Priest-Heck of Freeman interviewed panelists Nancy Niepp, Cisco, and Jeff Singsaas, Microsoft, to find out what makes them want to buy into being a sponsor or exhibitor at a third-party event (both panelists also put on plenty of their own events). I wasn’t disappointed.

Among their key points:

* The audience demographics have to be what they’re looking for, preferably demonstrably so (i.e, if the event is audited, which they both said is exceedingly rare).

* Are their partners going to be there? The competition?

* Are the conference’s themes consistent with the corporate mission and goals?

* How did the show perform for the company in the past?

* Will the show organizer provide company names/titles/city/state/zip codes the potential sponsor/exhibitor can use to get their regional salespeople interested in being there?

* Will the show organizer engage with us early in the process (something both said is exceedingly rare)?

* Does the show organizer have a basic knowledge of the company’s business (again, much too rare)?

* Can the salesperson have a dialog about how the show will benefit the company, ask about their needs first and then try to find ways to meet those needs instead of just selling space (again, dodo bird rare)?

* Can you offer ways to engage with attendees off the show floor?

* Does the show have a virtual/digital component? (”It would be a show stopper for us if there wasn’t a digital component,” said Jeff.) Can you provide the equipment to live-stream from the show so the exhibitor doesn’t have to schlepp all the stuff to the show location?

One thing Jeff said that kind of rocked me, and should rock you, is that shows like SouthXSouthwest and Maker Faire that come together in an organic way, with attendees doing much of the organizing, are going to be the future of conferences. Think on that a bit, my friends.

So much more to say about today, but I must head out to the “urban convergence” reception in the Gaslamp Quarter. They were already starting to set up already at 6:30 this morning when I was out wandering around, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with since then!

PCMA did something pretty bold yesterday—they shook up the general session format, omitting the association business items that usually slow things to a crawl and splitting the keynotes into three separate, but related, speakers. And they were awesome.

My favorite by a hair was John Medina, PhD, author of Brain Rules and the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, who has to be the funniest neuroscience guy I’ve heard yet. He revealed some stunningly obvious yet often ignored “brain rules,” like “people don’t pay attention to boring things.” Duh, right? Except we always seem to expect them to listen to that lecturer drone on as he reads his Powerpoint. And that we can only absorb new information for about 10 minutes before we need to shut off the data hose and digest. (Digression: He demonstrated how the human brain needs to chunk information into groups it can understand by asking us to memorize a stream of letters in seconds. It was impossible, until you realized that the stream of letters consisted of four acronyms. Then, of course, it was easy.)

So we need to find ways to divvy up the info into short bits, then give the brain a way to make meaning of it between chunks by showing how it relates to elemental human needs (is it food? Will it consider me to be food? Etc.).

Joining us next via Skype (and yes, PCMA staff gave an audible sigh of relief when the link picked up clear) was gaming expert and author Jane McGonigal, who explained the whole concept of gamification (I really dislike that term, BTW) and how cool it would be if we could harness all the brainpower that goes into hurling angry birds at pigs to solve real-world problems.

I loved this quote: “The opposite of play is not work–it’s depression.” She walked us through an example of a game she did for the centennial of the New York City library that incorporated the four things you can do to create game-like engagement: build a sense of urgent optimism (invited people to be a part of an overnight event where they would come up with ways to change the world for the better through finding clues); weave a tight social fabric (as they worked together through the night to find the clues, make the case for their ideas, etc.); create blissful productivity (see above); and make them be a part of something that has epic meaning (created an actual book that became a part of the library’s collection). It literally gave me goosebumps.

Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate, then took us through the seven triggers we can use to create fascination in others, using online dating profiles as examples of what instantly grabs and what doesn’t. One thing that she said that should strike fear (or inspire serious thought) in the heart of online marketers is that, though we can withstand up to 10 minutes of info load in real life, online we have an attention span of 9 seconds, the same as a goldfish, she said.

I didn’t get as much from her as I did the two previous speakers, but I will have to go see what my F-score is: Something to do while waiting for my redeye home!

Kudos to PCMA for taking a chance on a new format for its opening general session, and for its choice in speakers.

Speaking of speakers, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the day’s closing general session speaker, New York Times columnist David Brooks. I’m a big fan, so he didn’t say much I hadn’t heard before, but I just love his delivery, sense of humor, willingness to take questions at the end, insights on today’s bizarre political scene (he said it’s so polarized now that Democrats and Republicans won’t even sit in the same green room together before the Sunday morning show, which I found just appalling). A big takeaway for me was his reminder, with scientific backup, that so much of what influences how we think about things is driven by our un- and subconscious mind.

This reminded me of a conversation I had lately with the fabulous thinker and communications expert Kare Anderson. She left a comment on a blog post about cross-sensory perception and meetings, and I had to find out more. She pointed out to me strange things like we tend to feel more warmly toward someone who hands us a warm beverage instead of an iced one, and that rooms with lots of hard edges and angles make us, well, edgy. We talked about all this a lot more in the Really Live Chat on meeting design I later facilitated (Kare was one of the thought leaders whose recorded thoughts were available to spark conversations), so it was very cool when Brooks circled back around to it. There have been a lot of echoes and resonances like that at this meeting for me, which just keeps deepening the learning. I love that.

Back to Brooks…my favorite quote of his: “Emotion is not the opposite of reason; it is the basis of reason because it allows us to assign bias to things.”

I had a blast this morning facilitating (with a serious power assist from Velvet Chainsaw’s Jeff Hurt) one the Really Live Chats in the PCMA Convening Leaders Learning Lounge. The topic was “designing meetings for learning,” or something like that—in true chat form, we meandered around a bit.

The format was pretty cool. The Velvet Chainsaw peeps had recorded (some recordings more polished than others) a bunch of really interesting people saying some really interesting things about meetings, brains, learning, and how grown-ups perceive the world and each other. We would watch a video, or more likely, a short snip of a video, then talk about it, brainstorm, spark ideas off of each other, gain insights or just commiserate when we couldn’t think of ways to get at a specific issue.

As one person said, it was great to have the option to do something informal but not totally unstructured, as a break from the more formal breakouts going on elsewhere.

I haven’t had time to put my thoughts together too coherently, since I haven’t had a whole lot of time to stop and reflect on what came out of that Really Live Chat (one of the things we did talk about a lot was the need to build in reflection times so our brains have time to digest what we’re learning, but to do it in a more organic way than just say, “stop and talk amongst yourselves”). But I will say without much reflection at all that I love the format, and having the videos to get discussions started, and then tying what they talk about into real-life examples of what we do and what we now would like to do, is one example of a well-designed meeting component if you want people to learn rather than just hear content.

What I would love to do is, once the videos are posted (which I hear they will be), is to sort of reverse-reverse engineer the format and try to maybe put together a Google+ hangout or some other easy, informal way to continue the conversations as we learn more from the Big Brains, and/or bring new folks into the discussions. We only viewed maybe two full videos and a piece of a third; there is so much more there to talk about and we only have so many hours here in San Diego (did I mention the absolute hugeness of the content on tap here? Not just in the Learning Lounge and general sessions and breakouts, but there’s also the co-located Virtual Edge Summit’s plethora of interesting-sounding deep dives into hybrid, virtual, 3D, and who knows what else meetings?).