Hopeful Financial News

Some Hopeful News

Joseph Sanders Visa's Chief Talks Up Global Growth:

"Three years ago, in the throes of the recession, people who had money thought it was cool not to spend money. A lot of markets shrank. And those markets are beginning to open up.

The convention venues, resort venues, travel itineraries of individual families, business travel on a global basis. It's more than it has been in a long while. It's not as robust as it once was. But I think things are slowly and surely getting better."

meetsmart mobile - the mind blowingly easy mobile show guide

meetsmart is the mind-blowingly easy mobile conference guide.

Specifically designed by meeting planners, its understanding of Conference needs is astounding. It hits the mark by delivering exactly what all the meeting attendee and the host organization expects - AND the meetsmart concierge staff does all the work. No added workload for your staff.

Quick navigation. Cross Platform. Powerful search. Lots of detail. Maps. Create schedules. Build sponsorship & exhibit revenues. Alerts. Analytics.

Special offer - book meetsmart mobile by December 31 and receive a complimentary iPad2! Email Larry Wilhelm at larry@meetsmartmobile.com or call 410-849-2177 for details.

meetsmart mobile - Another success!

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) implemented meetsmart mobile for their 75th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Chicago. This was the first time SAA used a mobile app for their Meeting. During the week before the SAA Meeting, the app had already been visited over 1,074 times with 18,606 page views! On average, each user visited 17.3 pages and spent 9.5 minutes on the site.

SAA has 1,664 registered attendees. They had expected only a moderate use of the app because they thought their members were 'late technology adopters'. Surprise!! Everyone was thrilled by the very high traffic and the great feedback.

meetsmart mobile brought great new technology to SAA, put their Meeting into the palms of their members, added a positive new dimension to the attendee experience and provided great ROI to the sponsors and exhibitors. Another great success for meetsmart mobile and for SAA.

64% of Meetings Are Using a Mobile App

With so much new meeting technology being developed it can be hard to know what’s worth investing your time in, and what will simply be a flash in the pan. Our clients rely on us to keep them abreast of trends and technology, so our team works hard to keep our finger on the pulse of the meetings and convention industry.

Earlier this summer, Conference & Logistics Consultants conducted a survey of over 300 meeting planners to gauge our industry’s comfort level with new technologies. A key finding of the 2011 Meeting Technology Trends Survey was that 64 percent of meetings are already using a mobile app, or intend to add one this year. Another 16 percent intend to add one within three years.

If you’re not thinking about a mobile app for your meeting, you’re being left behind. Attendees are clamoring for instant access to information, and ways to personalize their conference experience. Mobile technology is an easy way to provide both. Mobile conference guides run the gamut from inexpensive web-based platforms ($9 – 15K) to high-end custom native apps ($25 – 100+K).

The survey also revealed a lot of other interesting information, which we will put out in a white paper later this fall. Stay tuned to the blog or subscribe to our RSS feed for future updates.

PCMA Convene: A People-Based Approach to Virtual Meetings

Next week, PCMA and the Virtual Edge Institute will release a new research report that takes a fresh look at the role of digital technology in the meetings industry.

Instead of the typical "virtual versus face-to-face" approach, this survey took a comparative approach, looking at how digital technologies can best be used within the framework of meeting environments. The survey asked: Why do people attend in-person and online events? What business goals are being achieved? How are attendees engaging within these environments?

Check out the full survey information.

Several points that I found interesting from a meeting planning perspective, which reinforce my opinion that virtual events just aren't going to replace face-to-face events any time soon:

1) The networking just Isn't the same. Only 33% of people surveyed said they traded contact information with other attendees in a virtual meeting, versus 78% of people at a face-to-face meeting. That's a lot fewer connections being made.

2) Attendees pay less attention. Virtual meeting attendees are more likely to IM due to boredom, shop or surf the web, take a phone call, check email, and leave the meeting than face-to-face meeting attendees. Online attendees are easily distracted, which means your content and delivery has to be twice as engaging to deliver the same educational value.

3) You'll have to charge less. Only 25% of people surveyed said they would pay the same for a virtual event as an in-person event. That's 75% who expect virtual events to cost less. Pretty important stuff when it comes to evaluating revenue and expenses for your next event.

meetings drive the US economy

Meetings & conventions are valuable to the US and world economy. Our industry has always been difficult to quantify, because sometimes we’re considered part travel and leisure, part hospitality, part tourism.

So to prove our collective worth, in 2009 the Convention Industry Council undertook a study entitled “The Economic Significance of Meetings to the US Economy.” The study found that the total direct spending associated with US meeting activity is estimated at $263 billion!

And that’s only the direct spending: out total contribution to the GDP was estimated at $458 billion, including 6.3 million jobs. Other nifty facts:

• 205 million attendees participate in 1.8 million US meetings each year
• We pay our taxes, including $64 billion in federal tax revenue and an additional $46 billion in state and local tax revenue
• The 1.8 million meetings generate 250 million hotel room nights per year.

These figures show that the hospitality industry is vital to the health of the US economy. For more information, visit Meetings Mean Business (http://meetingsmeanbusiness.com/)

learn from social media with EventBurn

One of my recent conferences took a spin with a cool new social media service, called EventBurn. EventBurn is a social media aggregator, created for use at conferences and meetings, that’s designed to “summarize social media conversations.”

EventBurn makes social media more useful for conferences and events, by combining all the different content streams into a single feed. The web-based service “ automatically summarizes the top links, photos, and users, and creates a browsable long-term archive of the messages.”

Basically, EventBurn scours social media networks like Flikr, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for parameters that you define, sorts through all the clutter, and bubbles the most interesting content to the top. Through sophisticated algorithms, EventBurn returns only the most relevant information, and cuts out the clutter. Isn’t that refreshing?

EventBurn also provides all sorts of interesting statistics about your users, to help you learn from your event. Here’s just a sampling of the data that EventBurn can provide:

· top users, photos, and networks used

· most shared links and most reshared messages

· most popular hashtags

· number of messages, links, photos, users

· usage statistics such as time and frequency of use

Check out the EventBurn archive from my event here.

Specifically created for face-to-date events, “EventBurn makes it easier for event attendees, remote followers, reporters, and others to learn about emerging topics of conversation, find people to connect with, and follow the buzz quickly and easily.”

If you’re already running a Twitterfall or some other social media aggregator at your conference, EventBurn is a great next step.