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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Several points that I found interesting from a meeting planning perspective, which reinforce my opinion that virtual events just aren'tgoing 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 & 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/)
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
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.
One of our high-tech clients just finished their annual conference in Vancouver.This group the is perfect training ground for new meeting technologies, because the delegates are inquisitive early adopters, game to try anything once.This year, our social experiment was Poken: your social business card.
Pokens are small USB drives (AKA thumb drives, jump drives, memory sticks, etc.) that contain your contact information.Users plug them into their computers to create a Poken profile, which can also include any other social media information you might want to add, such as links to your Facebook page, twitter handle, etc.
The Poken devices can be customized with your conference logo, or you can select from several dozen stock Poken designs, which run the gamut from funky to fierce.
Poken has a little hand-shaped end that you can “high five” with other Poken users to swap information. When two Pokens are touched together, they light up so users know that their information has been shared.I was a bit apprehensive that Poken would catch on, but during our six-day conference, we had:
17,337 - Poken interactions
1,409 - Linked Pokens
3,366 - User logins
Though the numbers speak for themselves, my very favorite review of Poken came via the conference’s twitter stream: “Poken is the saviour for drunk research-related conversations I otherwise wouldn't remember in the morning.”So, Pokens are also good for jogging fuzzy memories.
Coming soon on the Poken front: Poken tagging using your iphone and other smart phones.Though the Pokens themselves are pretty nifty, that’s awesome too!
I just saw this great idea from Meetings & Conventions:
BOTTLE SAVER
Little is more frustrating than picking up your luggage and finding everything soaked in wine from a broken bottle. One inexpensive way of preventing that is storing wine in the Jet Bag, an absorbent, zip-seal bag that protects a 750 ml bottle and absorbs all the liquid if it does break. A three-pack of Jet Bags costs $15. (248) 891-8939;thejetbag.com
meetsmart mobile and Meeting Professional International Southern California Chapter (MPISCC) implemented the new mobile app at the MPISCC 30th Annual Conference. By offering the app at the Conference, MPISCC gave their members:
- A smart, easy-to-use first mobile experience - A great way to put Meeting information into delegates hands quickly & easily - Generated new communication & increased professional interaction
meetsmart mobile received great reviews and MPISCC derived excellent benefits. Read the article here: http://engage365.org/2011/04/mpiscc-meetsmart-mobile-a-conference-navigation-app-success-story/
meetsmart mobile is the only event navigation app designed by meeting planners. Attendees get a powerful information tool and associations receive the benefits of a very affordable revenue-generating tool which keeps them on the cutting edge of technology.
We are excited about the continued efforts across our industry to reduce the environmental impact of meetings and conventions. Our team often works with clients to incorporate common-sense green initiatives that also save money, such as using local suppliers to reduce shipping cost, custom-building menus to take advantage of local and seasonal ingredients, and managing power usage.
Small changes are important, but their impact is gradual. One big step that organizations can take to reduce their carbon footprint as well as boost the budget is to add technologies that reduce or eliminate the need for printed materials. Online registration virtually eliminates faxes, as well as reduces staff time and stress. E-marketing has become easier and more affordable – as well as more effective! – than expensive postcards and printed advance programs. And e-posters allow content to be captures and shared beyond the boundaries of time and space.
Replacing a printed conference program with a mobile app can easily save an annual meeting thousands of dollars in printing costs alone. In fact, one of our team members saved an association nearly $50,000 in printing and shipping costs by transitioning their meeting to a paperless format. By contrast, mobile apps start at just $5,000!
A comprehensive mobile app reduces or eliminates the need for printed materials of many kinds, including: * Conference program books * Exhibit hall maps * Exhibitor guides * Speaker biographies and session descriptions * Onsite errata sheets to alert attendees about changes and last-minute additions
The C&LC team is proud that our meetsmart mobile conference navigation app is being used to support green initiatives. For additional ideas on greening your meeting, visit meetsmartmobile.com.
If you have a smartphone, you’re probably familiar with mobile apps that save you time, simplify mundane tasks, or just entertain you with movies or games. We rely on our phones for much more than just talking or texting.
In the last year, mobile apps have also emerged as an innovative method of both generating revenue and reducing costs for meetings and conventions. In fact, a leading meeting industry publication has dubbed 2011 the Year of the Mobile App. Savvy organizations are realizing that mobile apps return a great deal of value for a relatively small investment.
The question we often hear from our clients is, How can we maximize our investment in meeting technology? Mobile apps are extremely attractive to conference sponsors, who realize that conference delegates spend countless hours on their smartphones – both during conference sessions, as well as in their free time.
Technology sponsorships offer much richer delegate engagement than traditional sponsorship opportunities. A mobile app used throughout the conference draws hundreds of page views, while single-use items like food & beverage or disposable giveaways are quickly forgotten.
Sponsors are willing to invest $10K - $25K or more to get their logo and message in the place that attendees are already looking. A single sponsorship pays for the app several times over – bringing in additional revenue well beyond the initial investment. Additional sponsorships and ads can also be sold to produce even more profit. Small investment, big return!
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