Holding meetings outside the U.S. has its own challenges — so many that we have a whole special supplement and section on our Web site to help planners navigate their way. But how much thought has gone into accommodating differences in webinars and other types of virtual events that attract an international audience? That’s what webinar expert Ken Molay tackles in this post: Don’t Give Green Hats In China (and yes, he does tell you why green hats aren’t a good thing in China, which is good because I was wicked curious).

Update: Check out David Patt’s post on other types of cultural differences — very interesting points.

From ASAE’s Acronym blog comes the results of a new association executive study. Here’s the interesting meetings-related piece of it:

“Where execs were most wrong, though, was predicted in the first economic study we did after the economy soured in early 2009, when we got responses from 8,500 members of 97 diverse associations. The data from that study suggested that there would not be a mass movement from face-to-face meetings to online events. This was contrary to the expectations of association execs, 61% of whom were expecting revenue from online education to increase. In actuality, only 33% reported in 2010 that such revenue had increased.”

That’s about what I would have predicted (she says, with perfect hindsight).

So sad to hear that the record snowfall in the D.C. area — with more to come — has prompted ASAE and The Center to cancel its 2010 Technology Conference, which was to start tomorrow and run through Friday. Check the link of refund information, etc.

Meanwhile, here in the usually frozen lands of New England, it’s been awfully dry lately. They say we’ll get a bit of the next storm, but where I live is on the north side of the state, so we’re not supposed to get a lot of accumulation.

Update: Thanks to Joan’s comment below, we now know that there’ll be an unconference of some sort. Stay tuned to #tech10 on Twitter for details.

2nd update: This is getting cooler by the minute. Now there’s a Web site with unconference details, and an unconference schedule wiki, and, well, just go over to Maddie Grant’s post for all the details. The new Twitter hashtag is #untech10. I don’t know why I’m getting so excited about this, especially since I’m nowhere near D.C. today, but it’s just so cool to watch this unfold that I actually wrote “cool” three times now in once paragraph.

We all want people to be fully engaged in every moment of a live meeting or conference, but what can we reasonably expect of people going to a virtual event? That’s the question Steve Gogolak tackles in this post on A Wider Net. I was surprised to learn that, generally speaking, people hang out at a virtual event for two to three hours. He doesn’t say if they’re checking e-mail at the same time or are sticking just to the virtual event site, but either way, that’s a lot longer than I would have guessed.

More important, though, is the idea that virtual event organizers really stop to think about what they want people to get from the event, and how long they will need to linger there to get it. I believe a lot of us still, in our minds at least, equate online events with face-to-face meetings and set our expectations accordingly. But the level of engagement is different, the experience is different, and the interactions are different — and so should be our expectations.

Picking an e-community tool to use in conjunction with an event can be tough, and it’s getting tougher all the time as new things come onto the market all the time. Thanks to Jeff Hurt, who goes through 14 online e-community options for events.

The only bad thing about reading his post is that I found a few I haven’t explored yet. Oh no!

I’ll admit it: I was a big fan of the original Star Trek series. I wanted to be Captain Kirk. My best friend and I made our own homemade Tribbles out of old stuffed animals and disemboweled robot-type toys. I even made a fake flip-open communicator out of an old microphone when I was on the AV squad (did I mention I was a total geek?).

But little did I know that one day we may actually have in our sights the touch-a-button-on-your-shirt-and-talk thingie that all those poor red shirted guys wore in vain, slapping at their chests for help right before the salt monster sucked all the moisture out of them.

But check it out: The Star Trek communicator lives! This could make those old walkie-talkies at a conference completely obsolete. Yes, I am a little overly excited about this. Yes, I am still a geek.

I’m a big fan of ASAE and The Center’s use of social media, as you may have guessed from all my mad gushing about it.

So it was with a big happy face that I recently had the chance to chat with ASAE’s vice president of knowledge initiatives Peter Hutchins about social media strategy. I just now got around to writing it up and wanted to share it with you all: Social Media Case Study: ASAE and The Center

During the ASAE and The Center annual meeting, I ran into a situation that made me wonder if social media actually is making us antisocial, at least with the people we’re actually in the room with.

So I asked Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, and the association community’s leading voice for innovation, what exactly might be up with that. Here’s a podcast of our conversation, which did not go anywhere near where I thought it would, but ended up with Jeff asking us to question our assumptions about just what “social” really means these days, and how meeting organizers can rethink their meetings to be more adaptive to our changing ways of sociability.

It’s a touch shy of 20 minutes long–I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.

If you just read one post today, make it this one: Money, Money, Money, Money, MONEY: Social Media Revenue Streams for Trade Shows and Conferences, by Michelle Bruno at Fork in the Road. Great ideas, great resources, just all-around great.

Tech guru Corbin Ball’s latest Tech Talk e-newsletter has some articles well worth reading. Here are a few to check out:

Mobile tech tools for meetings and tradeshows

5 Reasons to Use Online Conference Proceedings

Strategic Meetings Management Program Implementation and Idea Guide