While outboarding — renting a hotel suite and wooing customers at a trade show without actually supporting the show itself — is nothing new, the recent Consumer Electronics Show’s problems with it have caught the attention of the New York Times In fact IAEE released a statement condemning the practice four years ago.

What does seem to be new, at least to me, is that hotels at CES seemed to be taking the initiative to give the boot to convention crashers. Is that putting too much of a burden on the hotel? I tend to agree with the hospitality lawyer the article quotes and say it is, especially in this economy, a bit much to ask hotels to be the exhibit police, though I applaud those that are willing and able to do it.

I can’t imagine this problem is going to ever go away entirely, but it is interesting to see a major newspaper covering it.

Update: If you ever have doubts about the importance of fact checking, there’s a doozy in the article that someone just pointed out to me: The article says CES drew 1.4 million attendees, down from 1.7 million. Needless to say, those numbers actually refer to the show’s square footage. Oops.

Jeff’s at it again over at Midcourse corrections, putting out yet another great post. This one is his top 10 myths about adult learning at conferences. Commenters have added a few more; it’s starting to remind me of something I wrote ages ago: My top 10 reasons for bolting.

The funny thing is that a lot of the myths he’s busting aren’t really myths — I mean, does anyone actually think that learning can only occur while people are seated? Common sense says otherwise. I think that’s just a crowd-control thing we got pounded into us from kindergarten on and just don’t bother to change because, well, it’s practical to jam 2,000 people into a ballroom and have them sit quietly while someone yaps at them. It’s a lot harder, and likely a lot more expensive and labor-intensive, to create a learning environment that works for all the different types of learners represented among those 2k folks. So we don’t do it.

Ditto for several other of the “myths” he points to. I guess my follow-on question would be: What are 10 ways to combat the status quo and create better learning environments at our meetings? Keeping in mind, of course, that some of the most ardent fans of the status quo are likely your organization’s leadership and your attendees.

Everyone does the early-bird special pricing for those who sign up for next year’s conference by a deadline, but surely there are more creative ways to get people to commit to coming by putting their bucks down now. In reading Seth Godin’s post, The magic of dynamic pricing, I was struck by how little dynamism there is in conference pricing. He’s talking about e-books when he says this, but what a great ideas for conferences: “you could reward the market for getting excited. What if the price for everyone drops if enough people pre-order it?”

Anyone game to give it a try? Any other interesting pricing incentives people are using these days to get on-the-fencers to sign up?

There’s a new scam in town (or at least, one that’s new to me): Invitations to attend a fake academic conference so the “organizers” can get your personal information. Bob Grant recounts his experience with one such conference on this post on TheScientist.com.

He starts with this question, then gets into the gory details: “Are phony academic conferences the new Nigerian princes of the internet?” Oh, I sure hope not. It’s bad enough that legit scientific conference organizers have to watch out for overseas attendees who try to get invitations just to get in the country holding the meeting; the last thing we need is for legit attendees to have to worry that the conference is bogus.

Just now finally getting caught up on my RSS feeds, and ran across this must-read post by (who else?) Jeff Hurt: 8 Ways to Provide Remarkable, Purple Cow, Unique Conference Experiences.

Read it. Then do it. On behalf of your attendees, I beg you.

We’ve gotten all too good at renegotiating room blocks downward as the economic crisis worsened over the past year, but are you ready for a rebound? Mike McCurry has a great post about managing room blocks when and if the economy unexpectedly rebounds higher than you anticipated. Don’t miss his three suggestions on hedging your room block bets.

Now let’s all just hope that this becomes a problem…

Steve Yastrow makes an interesting analogy on the TomPeters blog:

In the 2004 movie, 50 First Dates, Henry (Adam Sandler) and Lucy (Drew Barrymore) meet, have a great first date, and plan to see each other again. But the next day Lucy acts like she doesn’t know Henry. Lucy has a short-term memory loss problem, so each day is a new “first date,” in which Henry has to attempt to rekindle the relationship.

Most people think of 50 First Dates as a romantic comedy. Not me. I think it is a business movie. Isn’t this what it is like to do business with most companies?

And, I would add, isn’t this like registering for all too many conferences? You get the generic brochure, the generic Web portal, etc. — where’s the appreciation for your loyal attendance all these years? Where’s the attention paid to your needs and wants? If you ever needed a prod to get started in segmenting your prospective attendee base to personalize your offerings, especially to your returning attendees and your first-timers, consider yourself prodded.

First dates are hard enough the first time you have them. To have to go through it year after year just makes you feel like the sponsoring organization just doesn’t care. And I’m pretty sure that’s not the message you want to send.

While the advice Krys gives in her post, feeling achy? check for a curly tail!, is specific to what you can do to protect your attendees this fall from H1N1, much of it is just good advice for any meeting held during flu/cold season. She also includes a great resources list, including links to Mitchell Beer’s great columns on preparing for a meeting in the age of H1N1.

If you want to put in your two cents on how green meetings standards should be set, take advantage of some face-to-face meetings coming hopefully to a city near you. For details, see
Your Final Chance to Help Shape Green Meetings Standards.

Check out Madigan Pratt’s most excellent rant against the idiocy of recent media reports about the SSA spending on meetings, government officials who jump in without knowing what they’re talking about, and I’m going to stop now before my blood pressure starts heading north. Appropriately titled, “Excuse Me While I Scream,” it’ll likely make you want to scream in harmony. Here’s just one quick snip:

Turns our the SSA got a great deal spending only $85 a night at The Arizona Biltmore ($11 below the government daily rate for Phoenix) with a total spend of about $1,000 per person for travel, food and lodging for three days. But instead of receiving praise for astute meeting planning SSA Comissioner Michael Astrue was ridiculed publicly by the media.

If that weren’t enough, the media hogs in Congress felt compelled to get involved…

(Here’s another great rant on the topic, in case you missed it the first time around.)