How Digging for Gold is Like Event Planning

Photo Credit – historichwy49.com

The California Gold Rush started in 1848 when John Marshall picked up a few nuggets of gold from a site where he was building a sawmill for John Sutter.  By August of that year there were over 4,000 miners staking claims in the hills and prospecting for gold.

There were three essential things one needed to be successful at gold mining:

• A map or compass
• Prospecting tools
• Gold Nuggets

Effective event planning is much the same.  You need a compass or map to tell you where you are going.  This is your vision for the event and then the objectives for the event.  You really need these before you start prospecting for attendees.  And, the nuggets are the things you want your attendees to, hopefully, walk away with from your well mapped out event.

Nothing too revolutionary there, but it’s still amazing how many event planners start with the tools or the operational considerations before they have a solid vision, map and design to work from.  Hard to get gold from your events without the map and compass first to know where you want to go.

Just a little thought for the day.

Some Practical Tips from Oracle OpenWorld

This is a joint post from Paul Salinger and Shawna McKinley.

Welcome to Earth Week.  In honor of the week we thought we’d post some practical event tips from our learnings at Oracle OpenWorld.  While the event is complex and what we measure and report on is lengthy, here are a few tips from what we have learned the last four years and some of the results we’ve had.

Don’t think the small steps you take to green your events matter? They do. In fact, we’ve learned that since 2007 Oracle has saved enough water to fill 3 Olympic-sized pools by eliminating bottled water from many events. We’ve also enabled re-investment of $1.3 million in event elements through waste-cutting actions. These achievements have made us a leader in sustainable events globally!

The approach is fairly simple:

• Rethinking how we plan our events to align with sustainable business goals
• Reducing what we use as priority
• Reusing where we are able
• Recycling any materials remaining from our events, and
• Measuring the environmental, business and community benefits from these actions.

We’re preparing to launch an online toolkit for sustainable events in June 2011 that will be available to all Oracle staff globally.  This is taking some of the ideas from Oracle OpenWorld and creating a set of minimum guidelines for the rest of Oracle’s 8,000 events worldwide.  We’ll report on that as the year goes by.  In the meantime, here are a few ideas of best practices you can implement for your next event.  

Oracle encourages all event organizers to implement the following best practices which are do-able for nearly any event.

1. Communicate sustainability expectations in agency/supplier briefings & agreements.
2. Use local suppliers and staff where possible.
3. Select venues that offer transit access and a basic set of sustainable practices that conserve energy and water and reduce waste.
4. Provide a recycling program at the venue to capture paper, plastic, metal and glass.
5. Eliminate un-necessary décor by taking advantage of venue features, podiums and re-usable centerpieces.
6. Use hotels that have a basic set of sustainable practices that conserve energy and water and reduce waste and are within walking distance of venues and transit.
7. Provide sustainable food options (locally sourced, seasonal and/or certified organic).
8. Reduce or eliminate bottled water.
9. Eliminate use of polystyrene.
10. Reduce or eliminate paper use.
11. Reduce or eliminate delegate packs, handouts and/or giveaways.
12. Use generic, non-dated branding for any signs so they can be reused.
13. Communicate sustainable practices to partner sponsors and exhibitors.
14. Collect name badges for reuse.
15. Communicate sustainable practices to attendees.
16. Ensure collateral materials reflect sustainable qualities for either: reuse, recycled content or local recyclability.

Hope these are useful.  Happy Greening of your events!!

GMIC Game On Delivers

Quick disclaimer – I’m on the Board of Directors and incoming President of the Green Meetings Industry Council (GMIC).

When we set out to design the annual conference for GMIC for 2011, we had many robust conversations about what direction to take it.  All of us involved in the conversation were feeling a lot of what others in the event industry have been feeling – how do we break the mold of a conference that had good content but was still a series of panels and stand alone presentations and deliver something unique, highly experiential and still capable of delivering the great content that the organization is known for.

This is something I think a lot of events and conferences talk about, but somehow, despite the best intentions, we seem to continue to fall back into conferences and meetings that have sessions dependent on panels and stand alone presentations where audiences continue to be passive listeners rather than engaged participants.

There are exceptions, of course.  Great examples of different formats like Event Camp and the Learning Lounge at PCMA have attempted to break the mold and experiment with different learning environments and levels of participation.

This week, in our humble opinion, the Green Meetings Industry Council delivered.  Was it perfect?  No, but as our good friend Sam Smith has said in the past if you’re not taking risks and there aren’t hiccups, then you’re not innovating.

Using concepts from the world of gaming as the foundation for a collaborative, competitive learning environment, Elizabeth Henderson and her design team took some early conversations that I was involved in and some ideas from Byron Reeve’s book “Total Engagement” and designed a program format that was intended to immerse the audience into the world of sustainable events with a combination of group work on case studies, combined with more traditional classroom sessions, keynotes and general sessions.

There was some worry that we were stepping out of the comfort zone of attendees and that people would decide not to participate in the group work.  Some people are just not comfortable working in groups and prefer the experience of attending sessions on their own and absorbing content singularly.  We even had some conversation about allowing people to opt out of the case study groups, but in the end decided to just go for it and assigned everyone to a team.  If people chose to not participate, we felt it would be their choice, but their loss.

To our pleasant surprise, there was nearly 100% participation in the group case study work and in the game.  To me, this exhibits that audiences are indeed looking for something different in their event experiences and are willing to work more collaboratively to create a great learning experience for each other, new ways of networking and increasing their connections and having fun at the same time.

The game was delivered through a great mobile app created for us by QuickMobile.  Team leaders had a pre-loaded iPad that had the case studies for each team, a leaderboard (points could be amassed by posting on twitter – through the app – blogging, attending sessions and getting scanned, visiting and talking to exhibitors and getting scanned and entering data about their case study into the iPad app), a twitter feed, the overall conference schedule and profiles of each team member.

The case studies were actually fairly involved, with both business requirements to consider as well as sustainability goals.  The focus of GMIC is, after all, on mainstreaming sustainable events and the ultimate outcome of the game and the conference was learnings on best practices for running a sustainable event, meeting or conference.  Thus the game and the conference all had a sustainability lens to the design of it.

The game actually ended up taking on a very organic nature to it.  We were also live streaming the keynotes and general sessions through the Sonic Foundry webcasting platform and some of the remote attendees ended up joining the case study teams via Skype and participating in the game.  It was a whole new level of hybrid engagement, where we really broke down the wall between remote and live attendees.  Sam Smith wrote a great summary of his experience on his blog.

There is much more to go into on the conference content overall, which I will do in a subsequent post and many members and attendees have already been doing.  But, for me, what we accomplished this week is the start of a good model for a truly effective meeting that combines great learning, great networking and fun all through a lens of sustainability.

Game On event industry!

Fuzzy Math?

Let me start with a disclaimer:  I am an advocate, supporter and evangelist for the event industry, especially face to face meetings and events.

Because of that, I have to admit that I found the report put out yesterday on the economic impact of the meetings industry somewhat self-serving and ultimately a misrepresentation of the real impact of meetings and events.

I know the industry is still suffering from the AIG effect and public perception of the value of events, but did we really need this report to tell us that meetings and events, especially well designed meetings with clear business objectives and measured outcomes are vital to supporting business activity and providing forums for education, collaboration and building relationships?

While it is good to have these numbers in support of  the industry, it’s kind of too bad that they chose not to compare the numbers as a percentage of the total US Economy.  The total US economy is estimated at $14.7 Trillion dollars in 2010, which makes the $106 billion contribution to GDP a drop in the bucket and somewhat of a statistical anomaly.  If you factor in the other numbers the overall contribution to economic activity is better, for sure.

What would have been great, if the industry had a way to actually measure what impact they have on other economic activity from their client base, is to tie in how much meeting impact leads to direct revenue for corporate America that ends up driving more economic activity for the overall economy.

The other thing this kind of highlights, it seems, is how much the industry is really a function of the services sector. It doesn’t go into looking at overall labor productivity or wealth creation that might boost economic activity overall or create the millions of jobs the US needs to start getting back to something close to full employment.

What might have been more important or more interesting to look at and spend research dollars on would have been some of the impacts of the meeting industry.  On the positive side, a far better measurement would be how meetings generate innovation and breakthrough ideas that lead to new ideas,  new companies, new research or just better productivity in the economy. On the negative side, what the industry is still not taking seriously is the impact it is having on communities and the environment.

I’d love to see the research on the impact meetings have on resources and the environment and how much carbon gets created so that we could have a discussion on not only how much economic activity we think we generate, but how we are going to sustain that economic activity and balance it against the fact that the meetings and event industry is the 2nd largest generator of waste behind only construction in the US.

A broader strategic approach to the triple bottom line would mean closer attention to all the positive and negative impacts of a meeting—not just the jobs it creates, but the community benefits or costs flowing from the decisions and conclusions participants reach. That, in turn, would challenge the industry to think about the value and impact of the content a meeting deals with, alongside the operational aspects that get assigned to the meetings and events team.  This is from my friend, Mitchell Beer.

Not trying to be a buzz kill here, just trying to bring a dose of reality.  Good to have the research, but I’m not sure it will actually change anything at the highest levels.

Three Days, Two Conferences – Some Thoughts

I know I am a way too infrequent blogger.  Really, I will try to be better.

This past weekend I attended EventCamp’s National Conference in Chicago (note that the online on demand stream is now available) and yesterday I attended the ReThink Forum in New York.  I thought I’d share my thoughts on both.

EventCamp:

Well, relative to blogging, I did have one great takeaway just from a very serendipitous moment (which are always great at any conference or event).  I happened to be sitting in the small studio set-up where Glenn Thayer was to interview me after my own presentation on Sunday morning.  He was just finishing up an interview with Liz Strauss, one of our great keynote speakers from Saturday.  She was commenting on her blogging process and said that she didn’t always have time to finish blogs in one sitting and that she kept a running notebook of potential topics that she came back to over and over and even worked on blogs a lot before posting them.

That was good for me to hear.  I tend to always want to just be perfect and without always having the time I use that as an excuse to just not write.  I’m really going to try and do as Liz suggests and keep a list of topics and try and write on them over time.  That’s my email to myself that I’m going to put in action, which was Liz’s homework assignment to all of us.

Overall, EventCamp continues to be one of the most interesting events I’ve attended.  It’s a great laboratory for experimenting and sharing ideas on how we could transform the event industry to make it more about engaged learning, how we can develop and use social tools and hybrid/virtual technologies to bring people together in new and interesting ways.

Here is one thing I want to challenge our EventCamp and #eventprofs community on though.  I’ve seen a ton of tweets showing a lot of love to EventCamp, including from me, but we need to also call out things that don’t work.  Constructive criticism is really vital for any community to learn and grow.  Not everything is perfect with EventCamp.  I share the high and the energy that came out of EventCamp, and I hate it when that energy gets dispersed so quickly at the end of the event, not only with everyone leaving, but with not enough immediate feedback on areas of improvement.

There are some good notes from the event that Liz King put together on her blog, so I’m not going to use this post as a recap, but more some personal insights and reflections on why this is a great event and how we might make it even better.

One of the things that makes it successful is the size of it.  We can do more, I think, in this more intimate setting, with fewer people, while still reaching a (slightly) larger audience virtually.  Small audiences seem to get more done in a shorter time.  I hope we continue to explore new things and keep this more of a laboratory than an event where we feel the need to expand audience size.  The model of having offshoot EventCamps is a better way to reach more people at an affordable price.  I’d also like to see us explore even more hybrid/remote models of engagement, though I think that EventCamp is ahead of the curve on that front compared to most of what I have seen from other events.  There were a number of good suggestions from both the F2F audience and the remote audience on this topic – things like more cameras focused on audience and more collaboration tools that we could possibly use to work together more efficiently.

I applaud the planning committee of EventCamp for outdoing themselves, again, in providing inspiring speakers and content in a very interactive, engaging way (and not just saying that because I was one of them).   Almost all of them were great presenters with a sense of storytelling that keeps the audience not only engaged but inspired, and that is one of the main reasons I take the time to go to events or conferences in the first place, looking for those elusive moments of inspiration and provocative thinking that gets me re-engaged with the whole lifelong learning process we should all want to be on.  Chris Brogan, Hank Wasiak, Lindy Dreyer, Liz Strauss, Scott Klososky, Erica St. Angel, Brandt Krueger, John Nawn – just a really stellar line-up.  They all made me think in some interesting ways.

Chris Brogan re-taught me the importance of authenticity and just being personable when speaking.

Hank Wasiak re-opened my eyes to how to change the way I see and how I think differently, and made me think about the four people I would put on my own Mt. Rushmore (a tough task Hank to narrow it down to just four – still working on it).  Hank was my personal favorite of the weekend – maybe because he’s older than me and still can inspire a bunch of younger folks, and because we old guys need to stick up for each other.  And, since I was pretty active on twitter, it got me his book as a reward, so that asset based thinking must work!

Lindy Dreyer gave me some good new insights into how to think about content and not to be afraid to explore new modes of publication and to empower our audiences to be co-creators with us.

Liz Strauss reinforced the power of storytelling and humor as a way into content, not to mention getting me inspired again to do some more writing beyond the microposting I do almost daily on Twitter and Facebook and the ocassional commenting on other blogs or discussion forums.

I didn’t actually get to see most of Erica St. Angel’s session, but I did walk in at the end and that was enough time to get one great takeaway about hybrid events.  You should design and execute your hybrid event to be so awesome an experience that it will be talked about even by people that didn’t attend either physically or remotely.  Something to think about there, for sure.

Scott Klososky literally made me afraid, and that was a really good thing.  He presented some concepts that take all of what we know now about how interaction happens at an event and kind of turns it upside down and inside out.  I’ve been reading a fair amount about gamification, but Scott took it to a whole new level for me.  It feels a little like Big Brother in some ways, but I think he is right.  All of this immersion and location tagging and the like is coming and we should be thinking now about how to make best use of it at our events, as well as starting to educate our attendees on the advantages of it for their own experiences.

And, of course, I can’t neglect the contributions of the remote audience.  Cameron Toth provided some especially useful insights for me in my session as did Dennis Shiao.  I haven’t read through all of the comments yet, but I really, really appreciate the feedback and idea sharing that came out of my idea hunt for Oracle OpenWorld.  I know some of you were kidding about my using all of you to help design the hybrid experience, but I would never want to take advantage of my audience in that way.  I do like the idea hunting model though and as long as the audience has given permission it feels ok to me, and I did ask for that permission, which was nicely given.  Thanks again to everyone in the room and online that threw out some great ideas.

We’ve been talking a lot in various forums about the idea of “environment matters” in choosing a venue and how you set it up.  Catalyst Ranch was an inspired choice for this EventCamp.  it provided a lot of visual and creative stimulation, had windows to outside and a great staff that made the experience seamless and let us really get our work done.  It was a real plus for this kind of lab feeling that EventCamp is to have an environment/venue that shares those qualities.  Would that every conference and destination and venue thought more about how the environment they provide made learning, networking and fun a pleasure rather than a depressant.  When you’re trying to have a unique experience it’s enormously helpful to have a unique environment to have it in.

So, how could EventCamp be any better?  Well, that really depends on the community to practice what it preaches (myself included).  We talk(ed) a lot about the need for an event to have a robust pre, during and post event strategy and components of engagement.  I would say that right now, the structure is there to do it, but the community, speakers and attendees haven’t quite arrived.  Both last year and this year the level of pre-event activity was relatively low in terms of spurring interesting discussion and feedback.  The idea to crowdsource and vote on a few sessions was great (thanks to all who voted on mine), but the number of votes was relatively low considering the size of the #eventprofs community.

There were also few discussions started or really promoted through the various channels we all use – the website, Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.  Don’t get me wrong, I am very aware that this is a labor of love for a small team of people, and busy people at that, which is why this is more of a community practice what we preach criticism than one directed at any individuals.

Now that we have reached the post part of the event, I’m not sure what will happen.  Yes, for sure we have our regular tweetchats and just general activity on social channels, as well as planning for other offshoot events in Twin Cities and West Coast (and maybe more I don’t know about).  The question is, do we continue any conversations and energy around this specific event or not?  I’ve already seen a few other blog posts and some photos posted and the on demand stream.  Are we, or should we aggregate any of that content into one place so that all relevant content is easily found?

I’ll defer to the organizers here, because maybe this is happening and I’m just not aware of it, but some kind of plan to capture relevant content associated with the event and one place to find it would be enormously helpful for me.  As would follow-up chats or some kinds of ways to keep the conversation going.

Beyond that there are minor improvements we talked about – camera for the online audience to see the room more – is one example.

In essence though, EventCamp is a home run and an ongoing sanctuary for great thinking and great networking and I look forward to how this all progresses fr0m here.

ReThink Forum:

On Monday, David Adler of BizBash teamed up with Flemming Fog to produce the ReThink Forum in New York.  It was advertised (in the invite anyway) as wanting to get together 100 “radical thinkers” in the event industry to do a kind of global meetup and brainstorm about how to multiply the value of conferences.  It wasn’t clear to me if that was entirely successful in terms of who ended up in the room, but it was certainly flattering and got me interested enough to attend (plus, I was already in Chicago, so why not hop over to New York).

The event was set up as a fairly robust hybrid event with links into groups in Minneapolis, Paris and Copenhagen as well as a stream for people to participate remotely online.  There was a satellite link or video conference set up through Stratosphere and there was a host(ess) for the online stream who was talking to the remote sites, talking to the virtual audience and monitoring the twitter stream.  A lot to do for one person and not sure she was handling all of it.  There had not been a twitter hashtag promoted in advance, which created some confusion and probably led to much less online conversation than there could have been.  I think they were actually surprised that there was back channel happening at all.

Flemming Fog is part of Wizerize, which is kind of an audience engagement system that gives every attendee their own laptop computer as a feedback tool to engage with each other, answer poll questions and input ideas, comments and questions that then feed into a reporting mechanism to aggregate and report data.  It’s a little bit like an audience response system on steroids.

The problem, for me, is that it felt like too much technology in a way for a brainstorm session and I found the netbooks they used to be difficult to use and kind of clunky and awkward to type on and navigate on.  I would have rather it be simpler, maybe mobile-enabled so I could do everything on my phone and more focused on the content and audience ideation than the technology.  It came off too much like a commercial for the technology and less like an idea-sharing forum.

From a content perspective there were two parts to the day.  Part one was themed around ideas that multiply the value of conferences.  There was some context setting by Mary Boone, which for me was merely confirmation and repeating everything we’ve already recognized and been talking about for 2 years or more.  It was well presented and clear, but ended up taking time away from actual idea generation activities.  I think the content is available on demand, so you should go watch if you want and comment rather than me trying to recall or repeat what was said.

The second part of the day was focused on the theme of why so few conferences deliver maximum value and looking at the forces for – and against – bringing innovation into our thinking and what are some ways to accelerate change.

In both cases there was a short period of time for the attendees to work at their table, in groups (or individually if you were a virtual attendee) and discuss the topic, then you voted on some questions they posed in their computer system and then you could also individually write some ideas.  The time was very short for these activities which limited what you could actually discuss, and it felt like it limited the discussion more to what people had done rather than any breakthrough ideas on how we change things.

Admittedly, this was only a 3 hour forum so there is only so much that could be accomplished.  If this continues as an ongoing F2F forum of some kind, I would hope that they consider making it longer and working on more specific problems.

Interestingly, what might have been the most provocative and mind-bending part of the day was having a mentalist (can’t quite remember his name) perform his mental acuity and energy skills during a break.  He did things like bend spoons, write down (accurately) names and numbers that people were thinking, etc.  They kept a hand held camera focused on him during it so people online could also see what was happening.  I think he kept people almost more engaged than the rest of the content.

All in all, I would say this might have been the start of an important discussion and affirmed for me a lot of what we’ve been doing for awhile now and what we are thinking about within the event industry.  What will be interesting to watch is what happens now.  They have created a website for attendees (but it is actually open to anyone with an invite,  so let me know if you want to be invited to participate or check it out) that is intended to expand on what was done at the forum by sharing feedback, result sharing from the organizers, idea hunting and then networking with other members.  I’ll be interested to see what kind of uptake they get.

So, packed a lot into three days.  Lots of it was stimulating and energizing and I hope we all carry this energy forward.

Now, it’s off to the Green Meetings Industry Council’s Sustainable Meetings Conference in Portland next week.  Will try reporting as much as I can under the hashtag #gmic.

And, if I get my act together, maybe even another blog post.

Thinking About Thinking at Events

I’ve been reading a few articles about neuroscience, thinking and just general distraction from the daily flow of information recently, including this post from the New York Times.

All of this got me thinking about how we think at events and how we design events to allow for thinking time.

Much has been written about in support of attendee engagement, using channels like Twitter to increase engagement and open up conversation, more opportunities for remote engagement through hybrid event methodologies and adding virtual components to a live event, including the addition of social media integrated into that experience so that remote audiences can both engage with the live event and with each other.

So, let me first say that I have been a proponent of all of this as a new avenue of both attendee engagement and more active participation as both an audience member and as a speaker.

But, I will also tell you that it worries me.  It worries me that we are not yet at a place where our brains are so rewired that we can fully pay attention to the content of a presentation and try and write about it, tweet about it or anything else simultaneously – and that we are, in fact, doing ourselves a disservice in terms of acquiring knowledge and leaving our brains open to thinking about big ideas or concepts being presented when we are trying to multitask our way through oftentimes dense subject matter while attempting another activity.

I know this will likely be controversial to my social media friends.   Heck, it might even be controversial for me as I’ve become accustomed to being able to comment on presentations and conference attendance in real time.

One way around this is something I’ve talked to a number of event professionals I converse with regularly.  That is the concept of “white space” or just thinking and discussion space that would take place just after a presentation, especially a major presentation like a keynote.  It might be possible to just take that time, whether it be 45 or 60 minutes of a keynote, put down all the digital devices and really just listen and pay attention.  Then, if we could create time to have small groups of people come together immediately afterwards to talk about what was just heard and either take notes then, or whiteboard them out, then we could all get back on our devices and post our communications and further the discussion, possibly with far more purpose and insight than a half-listening tweet might produce.

Part of the problem is that event organizers and program designers often feel the need to fill up every available moment with more and more content.  So much so that there is no room to breathe or really absorb what is going on around you.  There is no consideration for fresh air,  meditative thinking space or any kind of space that really gives room for real learning or memory or retention of information.  The question I always have is, is all that content really necessary?  Would we serve our attendees and learners better with less content and more time for discussion? Are we, in fact, actually contributing to higher levels of overload, frustration and even depression by providing too much information?

I’d love to try an experiment – this is a hint to my friends that run Event Camp – where we do one day of a conference with all the usual devices and tons of content, and another day where we all agree to leave the devices home, just bring our brains and truly network with each other by talking about what is presented.

What do you all think?

Welcome, New Blog

Welcome friends to the new blog.  Many of you have been asking why I don’t blog, and I will admit that I have been focused more on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for awhile because I’m kind of busy and a little lazy sometimes and those channels are so quick and easy.

I’ve reached a point again though where I am so involved in so many things that sometimes 140 characters is just not enough to voice an opinion or share some thoughts and knowledge from my 35+ years in the events and meeting industry and 11 years of doing marketing, strategic communications, event strategy and leading the efforts on sustainable meetings at Oracle.

This blog will primarily be focused on the related areas of events (and all the aspects that make up the event industry), social media, especially as it relates to events and marketing (but general engagement and interaction as well), and sustainability and my involvement in the transformation of the event and hospitality industry by being more responsible in the design and execution of events and running truly effective events.

For those of you who know me, apologies for this little background.  For those who don’t, here’s a little more background on what I do and a little of what I think.

I’ve been primarily in the event and meeting industry since 1974, working first for a staging and lighting rental and production company in San Francisco, after being a Theater Arts major in college.  At the beginning of my career I worked mostly as a lighting designer and production manager, while also running the production department at Holzmueller Productions.  This led to moving into the area of event producer and executive event producer as a freelance producer and at Maritz Communications.  Eventually I created my own company, Paul Salinger and Associates, which allowed me to expand my “sphere of influence” and develop clients and a network of people that I worked with to design events and produce them.

When I decided to go back to working for a production agency (stabler income and all that), I was fortunate to connect with InVision Communications.  This gave me an opportunity to work with some great clients, primarily Oracle, and to work with some great people and develop more skills in the areas of creative direction and strategic communications.  After working 6 years where Oracle was my primary client, it was a natural move to make the jump to the client side and really move into marketing as a way of furthering my career.

All of this is to say that it has been a really nice trajectory to my career – starting on the production side, moving into event producer roles, moving to a creative direction focus and role and then on to marketing and the client side.  Having worked on both the production side of meetings and events and now on the client side gives me some insight into both sides and the ability (hopefully) to work in both worlds and bring a lot of years of experience to my current role within marketing at Oracle.

So, now?  Now I’ve got a great and unique job in marketing at Oracle.  I’ve been describing it lately as “…I generate ideas that others get to go and execute…”.  It’s what I really like to do, be a creative thinker, take others ideas and extend them, come up with ideas that I think can help us in marketing and event marketing, draw on my experience, draw on my many interests (music, dance, art, literature, design, architecture, etc.) and bring that into a strategic communications and creative concepting role.  I work a lot with our event marketing folks helping them on event design and strategy, agenda development and overall creative for events.  I still work a fair amount with our production agencies (since that is my background after all).  I work with some really smart folks focused on social media and social marketing to look at how we best incorporate those methodologies and tools into our events and into our marketing.  And, finally, but maybe most significantly, over the last 4 years I’ve taken on the role of sustainability champion and leader for Oracle events.  This is the trend in events that is my top one right now.

To that end I am on the Board of Directors of the Green Meetings Industry Council - http://greenmeetings.info/, and am the President-Elect for 2011.  I also just joined the MPI  CSR Executive Advisory Council as well as the MPI Executive Advisory Council to help define the value proposition for meeting executives.  My particular opinion is that CSR should really stand for Collective Social Responsibility and that an Effective Meeting is really one that starts with delivering value based on audience concerns, integrates strategic meetings architecture and integrates sustainability as one holistic process that is very systemical in thinking and execution.

So, sorry for so much about me in this post.  I felt that it would be good to provide some context for those that might want to read this blog, which I hope will now be on a fairly regular basis.

Just to close off this first post, I wanted to give a little taste of some of the kinds of content I look for ans hope to both share and comment on (along with my own opinions, of course).

This is one of the interesting posts I’ve seen in the last few days – The Case AGAINST Viral Video for E-Commerce and Business.  It’s a nice little interview with Dr. BJ Fogg, Director of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab.  Dr. Fogg makes some interesting arguments, though I’m not sure he really makes the case against viral video.  He does, however, make a good argument for having real objectives and real outcomes for video as a marketing and persuasion channel as opposed to viral for viral sake.

This is probably my favorite part of the interview:

Grant: What is one of the most exciting things you find right now with online video as it relates to e-commerce?

BJ: Wow – video! #1 thing for effective video in changing behaviors – it doesn’t have to be top-notch quality. It seems like if the quality is super-good, it might actually hurt it! Anybody can produce it, and you can do it fast. Authenticity matters – so if you mess up or stumble, it doesn’t necessarily have to be edited out. Also, if the video’s good, people will share it. It’s sort of like this cost-effectiveness, this low barrier to entry, and high impact. There’s nothing else with quite that mix of things.

Grant: What do you find to be one of the biggest challenges with understanding, trying to comprehend, user behavior and how businesses should take advantage of that with online video?

BJ: Probably the biggest challenge I’m seeing, when I work with brands or large organizations, is that they’re afraid to dive in. It’s not with video itself; it’s that they’re afraid of doing something and not having it be perfect. So you’re seeing the smaller, more nimble companies succeed (with video), or you’re seeing the more innovative companies [do that]. When I work with a brand, they say, “Oh, we can’t do that,” or “what if we make a mistake?” It’s frustrating. Not so much as video with a channel, but institutionalized calcification – just moving people forward.

I especially love the term “institutionalized calcification”.  It’s such a great description of much of what I see in the corporate world and a lot of what I see in the meetings and events industry – that mindset of  “this is the way we’ve always done it”.

The other thing you should take a look at in the post I’ve linked to is the chart Dr. Fogg has on persuasion (the Behavior Grid).  I think there is a lot there that could be used in the ways we think about event design and how we want to move people, get them to make a fundamental shift in what they think, know, do and feel and deliver value and an effective meeting.

So, end of first post.  I welcome your comments, ideas, feedback, thoughts.  I look forward to sharing with all of you.