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.

business cards go high tech with Poken

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!