I was reading an article about how A/B testing is dominating Web design and generally changing how businesses evolve in Wired magazine last night, and it made me wonder if some version of it isn’t what we already do in meetings.

What A/B testing is, according to Wired: “Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior—gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases—it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it’s quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. A/B allows seemingly subjective questions of design—color, layout, image selection, text—to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science.”

If you can use this technology to maximize your meeting (and organizational) Web site, wouldn’t that just be the bee’s knees? But what’s easy to do on the Web is a little harder in real life. You can’t control all the variables or truly randomize the testing in the same way. But still, it’s the same concept that has meetings professionals use when they break their marketing program into pieces to address their niches, isn’t it? And when they tweak a piece of the program, introduce something new in formatting without doing away with the old first, then gauge which “works” best (with “works” meaning whatever it means for you, be it learning achieved, new behaviors cemented, information shared, etc.)?

While it makes me uncomfortable to think that it’s not important to understand why certain things work better than others, as the article notes, maybe I need to just let go of that and trust that if the data says something is better, it just is even if I can never figure out why? That has to be better than relying on HiPPOs, right? (HiPPOs being “highest-paid person’s opinion,” as defined in the Wired article.)

Like it or not, we’re living in an increasingly data-driven world, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think we just have to be careful not to lose the meaning behind the numbers. Anyway, it’s a fascinating read, and a reminder that, whether we know it or not, we’re all both the scientists and the guinea pigs in the great experiment of life.

Want to know which hotels offer the best and worst Wi-Fi? Check out Hotel Chatter’s 2012 hotel Wi-Fi report, which includes a great flowchart on this infographic about whether or not you can expect to get free Wi-Fi.

And in case you were wondering just how much of a cash cow Wi-Fi can be, they estimated the numbers for a typical 250-room New York hotel thusly:
Average total Wi-Fi installation cost: $125,000
Average yearly Wi-Fi maintenance cost: $7,500
Average yearly profit from Wi-Fi: $200,000

Moo.

I just ran across this post on Greg Ruby’s Gems about how to make an event app work for your event, which is a pretty good rundown. Here are a few more good nuggets on event apps:

8 Steps to a Winning Mobile Meeting App

How-to Guide to Mobile Meeting Apps

Your Mobile Meeting Apps Questions, Answered

App Map: How to Produce a Mobile Meeting App

What Mobile Meeting Apps Can Do: 36 Features

Mobile Technology Strategies for Meetings

App Happy: How to Put Your Corporate Meeting on Attendees’ Smartphones

Then there’s always this free webinar: How to Create a Mobile Meeting Strategy

And a video:

Wow, we’ve covered this even more than I thought! But we need to, since it looks like most attendees expect at least a bare minimum app these days.

Here’s a guest post from Josh Marx, director of marketing with American Meetings Inc. It’s a handy little step-by-step guide to promoting an event on Facebook. Take it away, Josh!

With social media being the buzz of today and gaining moment everyday, it is smart to get on the “Bandwagon” and use these platforms to your company’s advantage. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are providing such a broad area to connect with people and other companies, it makes it a perfect platform to share real-time information and promote your events.

Facebook, for example, has over 800 million users and is said to have over 1 billion accounts by August 2012! On no other platform can you reach so many people. This makes Facebook a perfect forum to promote events, conferences, meetings, and any other functions that your company is organizing. With your friends and colleagues already on your Facebook page, it makes these people and their friends much easier to reach. The following steps will show you how to set up an events page and promote an event.

Login to your personal account, then click on the “Events” link on the left hand side of the page (if for some reason the “Events” link is not there, click on “Edit Page”. Then, click on “Apps” and then “Events. After that you click on “Go To App”.

Now you click on the “Create Event” button. You can now fill any information that you wish in this area. You can also upload an image that promotes the event.

At this point you can promote your event by clicking on “Invite Guests”. Now you will need to go through your friends list and manually invite the people you want.

If you would like to further promote your event, you can post it periodically to your wall on Facebook with a link to your events page. You can also send this link to friends and ask them to share it also. Remember, for every person that is your friend, there are 150 people that are in your network. This means that all these people can view the information that is posted on your friend’s walls and news feeds.

The event feature on Facebook would be excellent for also promoting other meetings, trade shows, and even international conferences. Facebook is the number one most visited site in the world; so don’t let your opportunity go by to promote you next event.

Sue here again. So what are your best tips for promoting events using social media? I always worry about crossing the line between offering useful information about something people will want to know about and being one of those LinkedIn or Facebook spammers who offer nothing but marketing messages wherever they go. So I guess my biggest tip would be to follow the 90/10 rule, where 90 percent of what you post is just useful stuff and just 10 promotes your stuff (or is it 80/20? Best to err on the conservative side).

Being the editor of Medical Meetings and having written what seems like endless articles on the thorny issue of pharma funding, I had to check out this 2.25-hour session that used a system called Wizerize—yay, we got to play with iPads! Boo, we didn’t get to keep them after the session!

I’m not sure how others in the room might have felt, but I’m not sure the tool fit the needs of the session. Basically, the Idea Rally was a process that went something like this: Each table brainstormed a challenge, then came up with two or three proposals to meet the challenge. We then had to agree on one proposal, and spend the remaining 12 minutes of the 25 we were given to flesh it out on the iPad.

Then the entire room was given access to each table’s challenge and proposed solution, and every individual could then rank each idea on its relevance and value, and add comments to improve or critique the ideas. Then the proposals, now attached to rankings and comments, went back to the tables for further refinement. A final ranking of all the proposals was tallied in the system, and the top three ideas were recognized.

I liked the system and could see it working for some topics, but I think for this particular big hairy problem, it didn’t allow us to really dig in and get to more than superficial solutions, or first passes at ideas for solutions that may or may not be possible to carry out. Given the quality of the conversation at my table (and there were only three of us), I think we may have gotten more value out of just talking it out among the group, or some other format that would have let us maybe chunk down the topic to something that could reasonably be attacked during that timeframe, then setting us all to the task of solving it through discussion.

I know there were a few more ReThink sessions using Wizerize, notably one on the role of third party planners and new ways they can bring more value to the table rather than be stuck getting in a fee war in an increasingly commoditized meetings world, that may have been more conducive to the system. If anyone reading this participating in one of the other ReThinks, I’d love to know your thoughts (comment below or here’s my e-mail).

I recently read that some theaters in Boston are thinking about setting up special seating areas for patrons who feel compelled to let their Twitter followers in on every detail of a show as it happens.

Being a rather huge fan of live-tweeting meetings, I was kind of surprised at my first reaction to the idea—namely, horror. At first I thought, well sure, the whole point of going to a theatrical production is to get lost in the story, the sights and sounds, the experience of being there. Tweeting would pull you out of the experience, not to mention interfere with the enjoyment of those around you who’d rather not see your screen aglow and hear your thumbs a-clicking (the latter is the reason some theaters want separate sections for the tweet-obsessed). And the tweets quoted in the article aren’t exactly going to add much to anyone’s experience. To wit:

At the Palm Beach Opera this month, tweeters updated followers on the tragic love story between an American officer and a geisha in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.’’ “Cio-cio san is telling it like it is! #pbobutterfly,’’ one tweeter wrote. “Butterfly will die. Goosebumps. #pbobutterfly,’’ wrote another.

Hmm, scintillating and insightful—I can see how those tweets couldn’t wait an hour (sorry, couldn’t help getting a bit sarcastic).

But is this really all that different from live-tweeting a conference? Ideally, you should be caught up in the experience of the session as well (and, actually, I often am, and have to stop tweeting so I can just soak it all in). Does being both a participant and a simultaneous interpreter of the experience diminish it somehow? Is that only true for entertainment, and not for education?

Can anyone help me figure out why in my brain tweeting at a movie or Broadway show is unthinkable, but tweeting a conference is just fine? I can’t quite figure it out. And on an ancillary note, would it be useful for the non-tweeters to have special tweeting sections at conferences? I can see how the tapping could be distracting, but I’m not convinced it would be necessary.

Today I got a press release from a company that was making an “>interesting offer: If a conference organizer uses the company’s services in response to an attendee’s referral, the company is offering to reimburse that attendee up to $500 in registration fees as a “thank-you” bonus.

I have never heard of anyone in the conference space doing something like this, but, while it seems like it could be a bit unwieldy to manage if it really catches on, what a cool idea. Leave it to the social networking folks to come up with an attendee incentive to market their stuff. I just hope that those who take advantage of it really think this is a good service for their conference, and aren’t just in it for the free reg!

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.

If you’ve ever struggled over when, how, and if you should charge for your content, Dan Loomis has put together another really useful post on the Big Ideas blog outlining how you don’t need to pick just one way of pricing content for, in the case of associations, members and nonmembers.

He advocates for what he calls a “hybrid content strategy” that includes a mix of free-to-all content (older evergreen info, teasers for premium content, etc.); free or discounted premium content just for members; premium content for conference attendee eyes only (such as conference content for 90 days post-con); and some fee-only content that anyone can buy.

This is his second post on this topic lately, and I like this one even more than the last one.

I’m downloading this one now: Jets, the travel app that fills you in on where the best seats are on your flight (and the worst). Kind of like SeatGuru for your iPhone.