Feed the people!!

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

 - James Beard

According to research from Successful Meetings magazine, when faced with budget cutbacks 49% of meeting planners cut the F&B budget first. 

And yet anecdotally, next to conference rooms being too cold, food is the top complaint from attendees on post-event surveys. 

As a conference organizer, I understand that budgets are not always based on the realities of an optimal customer experience. Most event managers (and their leadership) view food as something you have to provide, but fail to consider it as an integral part of the experience.

Since the intent of this blog is to wax philosophical about ideas (rather than prescribe how things "should" be done), here's my idea: Why not revolutionize the way conference food is brought to attendees?

Cruise ships excite their guests with massive buffet options. Food courts satiate mall-goers and air travelers with variety, speed, and price. And stadiums have even begun to wow their sports fans with amazing offerings. So what can we learn from these large-group-serving colleagues? It's about expectations and the experience. 

When you go on a cruise, you know you're getting crazy buffets with mounds of food and a variety of restaurant offerings to choose from, usually included in the price of your ticket. 

When you go to the mall or the airport, you know you'll get fast food, quickly, and you can pretty much bet that you'll have a choice of greasy fried food, salads, Asian options, and probably that ever-pervasive smell of warm pretzels.

And when you go to the stadium you may get that Club level food court, the hot dog & nachos stand, or the sit-down sports bar. 

Right now, as you think about conference food, you are probably conjuring up lines of chafing dishes with food that started out great, but has deteriorated as throngs of attendees attempt to dig into the now-crusty casseroles. Or maybe you're thinking of the box lunch with the rock-hard sandwich, itty bitty whole apple, package of chips, and individually-wrapped pickle. Or if you're a vegetarian, you're remembering that every time you make it to the only vegetarian option on the buffet line, it's already gone because (shocker!) meat-eaters eat vegetables, too!

What if you looked forward to meeting a colleague for breakfast because it was like a coffeehouse with some proteins, some sweets, some hot tea, and some coffee, and the environment elicited a cozy atmosphere, rather than that of an aircraft carrier?

What if you were excited to get to lunch because you could sit with colleagues (not yell across a 72" round with strangers), or join an informal education session, or even hang out in a TV room to catch up on CNN headline news (a la The Varsity in Atlanta, GA)? 

There's bound to be a creative way to bring the enjoyment back to conference meals; even for those 20,000+ person events. I encourage you to work with your conference facility team, your logistics teams, and your chef, and make food a universally AWESOME experience again!

Optimizing Your Event Portfolio

This is a guest post that was posted on Goombal's blog. Take a look at the other great content posted there!

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement. 
  - Ben Bernanke

---

As your organization grows, you are beginning to manage a lot of events. You are being asked to report on results, return on investment, pipeline generated, revenue closed as a result of your events, and your team is spending more and more time evaluating opportunities for your next event engagement. So how do you make sure you are making the right decisions?

Like most companies, you probably go to some events because your sales team needs to support a customer, or an executive is interested in launching a product during a keynote, or someone just really likes to play golf with their customers, or you have a group of competitors going so you must be present (even though you don’t have a track record of ROI at the show).

You probably also have all the events where lead gen is job #1 and you have a solid track record of highly qualified leads (or a least a lot of leads). And then there’s that set of C-level events that your execs want you to run… So how do you know if you’re choosing the right events for long-term success?

I like to describe event portfolios as bouquets of flowers. The roses are your C-level events. The carnations are your lead gen events. The baby’s breath are those corporate sponsorship activations that keep the brand top of mind. Together, the flowers make a great bouquet, but individually, each flower has its own attributes; a.k.a. success metrics.

The secret formula is to start by identifying your corporate (or business unit) objectives.

If you are in awareness mode with your brand or product, you might focus more on brand awareness sponsorships and lead generating activities, and maybe some thought leadership events with the C-suite.

If you are in acquisition mode, you’re pretty much targeting lead generating activities for your sales team.

If you are in development and retention mode, you may focus on sponsorships and C-level activities, and opportunities to bring your customers together for upsell or loyalty.

But all of your events must tie to key metrics in order to know what to focus on.

Ideally, your C-level events are going to come with long-term pipeline and revenue numbers by associating those campaign members with active opportunities in your CRM system. If you are not currently using a CRM system to track the success of leads and relationships generated from your face-to-face events, then you’ll want solid sales anecdotal reports on the effectiveness of the engagement.

If you are unable to tie real opportunities or revenue to a C-level event, you need to get data to prove deal acceleration as a result of your event. in other words, was a deal pushed further down the sales funnel due to the content or relationships built at your event?

For your lead gen events, if you are using any kind of CRM system throughout your sales teams, this should be relatively easy to tie to pipeline. Once an attendee (or campaign member) is associated with an opportunity or revenue, you begin to see the value of the event.

If you are not using a CRM, or have dissimilar processes across your organization, this is an organizational challenge you’ll want to tackle first. Without the ability to measure the value of the leads you are producing, you won’t be able to evaluate your event’s effectiveness.

Sponsorships are a little more tricky. If it is a sponsorship in name and logo only, then your best hope is to measure using standard media metrics of impressions. However, if you are able to activate that sponsorship with an experiential element, you can get more detailed with leads, social media conversation density, or other engagement metrics.

It’s highly likely that you’ll end up with a balanced portfolio of lead gen, executive, and brand awareness events, but you may weigh more heavily toward one event type as it aligns to your corporate objectives.

No matter what your bouquet looks like, the most important piece is that you have some sort of consistent measurement in place by event type so you can reconcile your spend against investment or objectives.

You’re sure to have a few misses amongst your portfolio, but just weed out those dead or dying flowers and keep your bouquet looking fresh and beautiful!

For some tips regarding how you can go about doing this with a data-driven approach, read Vinay Iyer’s blog titled, “A Data-Driven Approach to Event Portfolio Management”. Vinay is the founder of Goombal, an Event Lifecycle and ROI Management solution, and he has an innovative solution that makes me excited about the future of event marketing!

Finally! An app that makes sense!

Update: We have launched a community in Skoop for Event Marketing Professionals - join us and try out this great new tool to keep up-to-date and in touch with other professionals like you! Download Skoop for Events and look for the "Event Socialshpere" community. To get the passcode, hit me up on Twitter @lizlathan

Eureka! - I have found it!
 - Archimedes

As you've seen me say many times (like here, and here, and here), I believe that events and social media are intertwined like lattice. I like to say that events were the original social media, since it's where people can join their tribe, meet up with like-minded individuals, and share experiences and stories together.

I've also talked about mobile apps (like this adorable post from 2010 where I saw my first event app! and this one where I talked about vendor selection), but apps have evolved and it's time to leverage that evolution for the benefit of your attendees.

Check the apps on your phone. Is there an event app on there? Probably not. I'm guessing you deleted it about 24 hours after you left that last event.

But do you have Facebook? Instagram? Maybe you have something like WhatsApp or Slack? Why? Because it keeps you in touch with the people you WANT to be in touch with and the goings-on of their lives and your community.

So how do we make event apps more relevant for us, and solve that problem of year-round communication, riding the wave of an enthusiastic community long after the event?

Enter Skoop for Events. They've recently been spotted at shows like Expo! Expo! And Event Tech, and they are excited to be the new kid on the block, with what they think is the solution to this challenge!

I'm not here to give a product pitch, but I do want to share some of the features that I think will revolutionize how we look at event apps. It does all those event-appy things like bring in the schedule, the sponsors, the expo details, etc. But then it goes further... no longer are those contact you meet at the event stuck in an app, forcing you to only communicate through it. Now, anyone you meet can exchange contact info with a shake of the phone (literally!) and you can put them in your contacts or even connect with them on LinkedIn!

I know that seems like the perfect reason to uninstall the app after the event, but here's where it gets useful: You can create subfeeds within Skoop, so if you meet a great group of folks in a breakout session and you want to continue the conversation, you can add them to a group and keep it up long after the event is over. Boom. Your own community right there. And now you have your tribe.

Just imagine all of your event attendees creating conversations on your event app and getting to know each other throughout the year. They get EACH OTHER excited about registering for next year's conference! You can leverage this community for polls about content, music, etc. You can ask this community to contribute photos, videos, quotes - right in the app - and crowdsource your conference highlights throughout the year!

Just thinking out loud here... If your event is one in a sea of shows that attendees go to, they may even use the communities they've formed in YOUR event app to meet up at other events. And you can keep an eye on the conversation and perhaps run a meetup or other gathering there.

I look forward to seeing what changes Skoop brings to the event world! http://grabskoop.com