One of my favorite sessions from this year’s Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum that we cosponsored last month with The Center for Business Intelligence was one led by our Medical Meetings social media columnist, Brian McGowan, PhD. I cornered him after his session and asked him to give us a few thoughts he took away from the session. Here’s what he had to say (and big thanks to Brian for being such a good sport about doing this):

Just wanted to let everyone know that the free webinar we put on last week on how to use social media to market your events is now available for viewing on demand. Here’s the link.

Update: How cool is this? Ellie Bayrd at the Meetings Blog has posted some of her top takeaways from the webinar.

Thursday’s the big day: We’re holding our free webinar on how to use social media to market events at 2 p.m. Eastern. I’ve been having a great time working with our panelists on this (I’ll be moderating), and I can tell you these folks have some great info lined up for you.

We’re starting off with Lara McCulloch-Carter, who it turns out is even smarter than I thought she was. In addition to being the chief brand storyteller for her company, READY2SPARK, Lara also founded #eventprofs, a thriving online community. Lara will talk about who your attendees are these days (and how to find them online), how to develop content that they just can’t resist, and how to avoid common problems event marketers run into when they begin to integrate social media into their efforts. Then Kate Slonaker, director of marketing for Cvent, will talk about how event marketers can use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to reach their potential audience where they live.

Rounding out the lineup is Julius Solaris, founder of the Event Manager Blog and the popular Event Management LinkedIn Group. Julius will give tips on how to grow your Facebook Page, Twitter account, blog or Youtube channel, and measure your return on investment.

So c’mon down and join us at 2 p.m. EST on April 14. (Did I mention that it’s free?) If for some reason you can’t make it tomorrow, the webinar also will be available on demand afterward. Also, please feel free to follow along on the Twitter hashtag, #event2pt0, and definitely swing by that Twitter hashtag afterward because Lara, Kate, Julius, and I will be there to answer questions and continue the conversation.

A big challenge for most, if not all, of the meetings I’ve gone to in recent years is the ending. We generally start off with a bang—someone with inside information on industry trends, or a motivational speaker of some kind, or a big production number—and work out way through the conference in a mix of sessions, hallway conversations, impromptu meetings after hours in the lobby bar, etc., etc.

But the end is always such a throwaway. For some reason, everyone is so focused on catching planes and getting home that we miss the chance to put the conference away right. I’m one of the biggest offenders, although I will stay to the bitter end of for a Malcolm Gladwell presentation, even while suffering the early pangs of what turned out to be a heck of a flu. But the energy just isn’t there 98.6 percent of the time, and we all know it, so we all book as soon as we see an opening.

Not so with this year’s Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum, which we co-sponsor with The Center for Business Intelligence (warning: I may be a touch biased). A big part of the reason why the energy carried through to the end? I blame this little lady (and I do mean little—she packs a lot of attitude into a small Australian package):

This is productivity expert and author Neen James, and if you were at the Forum last week in Philadelphia, you probably met her. I know you heard her unique voice at some point. She was there at the opening reception, in the front row at general sessions, tweeting from breakouts, mingling on the show floor…the woman was everywhere, meeting everyone, and if the rest of the participants were like me, you kind of had to stick around to hear her final general session presentation on productivity.

We learned if we were planners, crammers, or slammers, night owls, early birds, or hummingbirds, and how to conquer the world in 15 minutes. We made pacts with each other to check in and make sure we’re following through on commitments. It was nothing short of awesome, and left us feeling connected to each other, still a community, instead of already breaking off to rejoin our life outside of that community.

Then Christine Duffy, the conference chairwoman, picked up where Neen left off, leading a discussion of some of the key learning points people had at the conference. And while that’s a great way to keep what we learned top of mind, it can get a little, well, dull, or at least overly earnest. Not this time.

Before it could begin to get bogged down, the fabulous troupe from Boston’s Improv Asylum took over the stage to illustrate some of the points in their inimitable way. I took some iPhone videos of it, but you really can’t hear what they’re saying over our laughter so I won’t bother to post them. But they kept the energy high right until we walked out the door, and even then I felt like I could go a few more rounds. And I definitely felt like I didn’t want to wait a whole year before I could hang out with these people I’d just been sharing laughs and experiences with again.

The experience just brought it home to me how often we don’t put as much thought into how we end our meetings as we do to everything that leads up to it. This was like a double hot fudge sundae after a great meal, when all too often we just get a mental toothpick.

I just put together this quick video slideshow of our Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum at animoto.com.

From the opening reception to the closing wrapup, it was pretty fabulous if I do say so myself. I’m still digging out from the meeting, but watch for more to come…

The worst fee imposers may not be who you think they might be (if you’re like me anyway)—here they are, courtesy of Elliott’s blog.

While they may only rank third, I still find airline fees among the most annoying. And it sounds like they’re going to vie for the number-one spot: According to this Boston Globe article, they’re looking to double the $18 billion they already get in fees over the next five years. Oh joy.

Remember the Brookings report? You know, when Heywood Sanders, professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that the convention center market was, according to an article we published in 2005 when the report came out, “oversaturated, that demand won’t catch up with supply any time soon, and that convention centers, by and large, are not meeting economic impact expectations.”

Not surprisingly, most in this industry, including IAEE, thought he was full of hooey. Eventually it all quieted down, and convention centers—most recently Philadelphia’s—went back to expanding.

But as I read the Boston Globe this morning, I came across this column that cites Sanders in an argument against building a 1,000-room hotel near the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and eventually doubling the size of the BCEC itself.

When asked why the forecasts for room nights booked due to the BCEC so far have proved to be a bit optimistic, Jim Rooney, who heads the authority in charge of the BCEC, says in the Globe column that the emphasis should be more on snagging the big biotech, medical device, and financial shows the BCEC currently is too small to accommodate (hence the need to expand the center) than on “how many people slept in the Westin.”

I’m no city planner, but I’ve always been of the mind that we should beef up development around the BCEC, including hotels (along with residences, shopping, dining, etc.), to make it more attractive to the groups it already can accommodate but isn’t getting now because the larger shows have to go pretty far afield right now to house all their attendees. I think a new headquarters hotel would be a good use of the millions of dollars in public subsidies it would require, because I do believe in conventions as “financial engines” for cities. Then we can talk about further expanding the center (and hopefully simultaneously continuing development of hotels/shopping etc.).

Boston’s not alone in this fight by any means. Which do you think should come first, the convention center chicken or the hotel/area development egg? In cities like Boston that already have nice, relatively new convention centers but lack the facilities nearby to fully support conventions, I vote for the egg. Am I wrong? Tell me why.

The Canadian Society of Professional Event Planners has honored 11-year CanSPEP member Sandy Biback, CMP, CMM, of Imagination + Meeting Planners Inc., with its Industry Builder Award for her work in educating the current, and the next, generation of meeting planners. I’ve known Sandy for a while now, and she is an educator to her soul. Good call, CanSPEP!

Congratulations also to the other winners: Paul Marchildon (Industry Innovator); Julie Holmen (Industry Mentor); Jessica Ambrose (Industry Rising Star); Susan Prophet (Industry Volunteer); Nicola Kastner (Industry Planner); and Jane Wallbridge (Industry Veteran).

Do games have a place in the future of the meetings industry? I don’t mean pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey or icebreakers, but really integrating aspects of gaming (particularly those that make online games so addictive) into a meeting’s agenda.

I started thinking about this a few years ago when I attended a session at ASAE led by Susan Fox of The Forbes Group on how online gaming would affect the future of associations. It came up again at the 2010 Global Alliance for Medical Education meeting in a session about how mobile online applications based on gaming are infiltrating the world of continuing medical education (in a good way).

More recently, I read on the Interactive Meeting Technology blog about how the Green Meetings Industry Council used gaming to spark learning at its meeting. Then, in another piece of serendipity, I finally got around to reading my latest issue of Wired and came across an article by Clive Thompson on how games can re-energize the work environment.

Is anyone else getting really excited about all of this? Maybe it’s just because I can get a tad competitive (ask my sisters!), but I think the intersection of gaming with education may just be an important new tool in our educational kit.

What do you think? And do you know of any other good examples out there?

The worst I’ve seen actually was a near-miss, when the opening keynote speaker didn’t show up until the very last second, didn’t answer her phone, and left the organizers scrambling to shuffle the schedule around to come up with someone else who could do a credible job of opening keynoter. But she did show up, albeit a bit late, and the show went on. I must live a sheltered life.

Of course I’ve also heard of horror stories like keynoters dropping dead on the dais; and natural disasters like a twister dropping in on an outdoor exhibition. And, of course, there was 9/11, when meeting planners at the World Trade Center had to shepherd their attendees through the unimaginable and others had to find ways to get their people home. It still hurts my heart to read their stories.

But somehow, no matter what you have to deal with (and check out the “everything-that-can-go-wrong-did” story Mike McAllen tells on Meetings Podcast), you manage to get through it all.

So, what’s the worst thing that’s happened at one of your meetings? How did you cope with it?