Why offsites are imperative

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Fun is good.
   - Dr. Seuss

It takes a certain type of person to love event marketing. You have to thrive on tight deadlines, chaos, ambiguity, and late nights. You have to have a family who can support your travel, your need to be connected at weird times and in weird places. You have to want to be a workaholic.

And it takes a certain type of company to invest in these kinds of people. I’m not talking about salaries or massages or even vacation time. I’m talking about offsites. And again, I don’t mean scavenger hunts or movies with the team. I mean real, meaningful time together with the team to talk, share, laugh, think, plan, and gear up for the future.

During my time as a manager of a team of 18, I made it a point to hold an offsite every quarter. Yes, it’s a day or two out of the office which is a huge challenge for most people. Yes, it cost $500 or so ($25/pp). But YES, it is worth it.

My formula for a successful offsite is simple:

• Spend a little money on an excellent facilitator; I hire two improv comedy instructors to lead us in creative thinking games and help get us through the day with levity and skill
• Plan problems that need to be solved
• Give groups time to solve the problems and present to the other groups   
•  Intersperse the right meaningful activities for some fun and to get everyone’s juices flowing

Feedback from these offsites has been tremendous! Not only do we get a few hours to get our heads out of email and thinking about the future, but we get to play. Remember the FISH! guys from Seattle? They totally had it right – making sure your team gets a chance to play together while actually solving real-life problems produces AMAZING results.

Try it sometime! And let me know if you need a GREAT facilitator. I know a couple. :-)

Top 5 event things I'm ready to see evolve

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

 - George Bernard Shaw 

5) Registration websites: you know me, you know my company. Why do I have to fill out the same information again?

4) Registration lines: They are the first impression of a conference. Why are they so hard to get right? Why do I have to wait so long, only to get something I then have to go into a corner alone to read and figure out what to do next next?

3) Plates and cups and not enough places to put them: The conference grab-and-go breakfast; the evening reception with appetizers. Never enough high boys, and no event venue uses those AWESOME plate+cupholder things that I can take to a tailgate party! Come on people! I need a free hand to shake/eat/social media with!

2) QR codes: I tried to like them. Really, I did. But I'm convinced they are mostly useless.

1) Badges! I hate where they hang, I hate waiting in line to get them, I hate that they flip around and do not serve their purpose for identifying people 100% of the time!

What do you want to see evolve?

The zombie apocalypse and my skills

You're a great friend but if the zombies chase us, I'm tripping you.

  - Anonymous

So I’m reading this book about the zombie apocalypse (I know, completely silly… it’s called World War Z – TOTALLY recommend it), and it’s presented as a historical account of the zombie war. One chapter talks about the skills of the population in the face of this unique society-rebuilding challenge. It calls out the service providers versus the workers, and gives a fictitious example of a maid having to be the manager of her former employer because the maid has actual useful skills, as opposed to the former employer who was something like a marketing executive in a corporation.

The topic really piqued my interest as I’ve been thinking lately about how I really don’t produce anything anymore. I manage people and I manage projects, and I write words electronically, but I don’t MAKE anything. What useful skills do I have that would transfer into a post-apocalyptic world? I could maybe cook something. Or lightly mend the mildly wounded. Or nail some boards together, if asked. I learned to make a pillow in my 8^th grade Home Economics class.

Zombies, aside, what skill could I learn that would make me useful outside of the corporate and computerized world?

Mining your networks for a cause

The way of the world is meeting people through other people.

  - Robert Kerrigan

Social media buzz – loads of fun, keeping up with friends, updating your resume, posting pics of the kids. But where’s the value? I have a real-life case study of the value of my LinkedIn network. I hosted a Corporate Event Marketing Association event in Austin and, not knowing a whole lot of event marketers in the area, I began leveraging the network.

First, I posted about the event to my network, and asked them to share with their network.

Next I started using the search bar to locate networked friends of mine in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

After that, I searched on the terms of interest like Events, Tradeshows, A/V, and other key terms.

LinkedIn doesn’t let you spam people you don’t know, nor does it let you put a URL in a message to people not in your network. But it does let you send an invitation to connect. Through LinkedIn, I was able to connect with more than 50 people who were not originally in my network to invite them to the event. And in the process, got 50 new connections in my world to share information with in the future!

I absolutely do not advocate spamming random people. But if your goal is to build real connections or a tight community of like-minded folks, using the network of your network you already have is priceless!

Thank you, American Airlines

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.
  - Herbert Croly

While sitting on an American Airlines flight on my way to a site visit to Vegas, I witnessed something that warmed my heart. Say what you will about the airlines, but I just saw a flight attendant gift a U.S. Army serviceman an upgrade to first class when there was a seat left. I absolutely love seeing things like that! Congratulations to American Airlines for considering our servicemen and women, and thank you to those who serve our country!

CEMA Forum: Austin - 9/19 Roundup

Everyone has a 'risk muscle.' You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don't, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day.

  - Roger Von Oech quotes
 
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to host the Corporate Event Marketing Association's first regional event with content in Austin, Texas on September 19th. CEMA is a California-based industry association for corporate event marketers, primarily in the high tech sector, but expanding to other corporate areas as well. The majority of our regional events have been social in nature, so we tried an experiment with a half day of content at the W Austin Hotel. Nearly 50 attendees from all over the country joined us!


Our day began with a roundtable lunch with table topics that attendees selected when they registered. Gathered together by a common interest, conversation could flow freely at the table. By all accounts, few tables actively pursued their table topics, but having a common interest to seat attendees together was a great start to the day.

I kicked off the meeting with my favorite reminder of corporate life: Dave Grady's The Conference Call.

THANK YOU
Carlson Marketing was our underwriter for the event, and they shared a great video about their services. Opus Solutions managed registration for our event. PSAV supported us spectacularly with their A/V set and personnel. Love those guys! And we can’t forget Vivastream – a new social network and mobile app that let our attendees connect with the people who match their interests. Anyone who didn’t attend in person can still sign up for a Vivastream account and join in the networking!

Opening Keynote
After lunch, the content began with Michael Gale of PulsePoint Group. He is a recognized industry expert in integrated technology marketing, having founded Strategic Oxygen in 2001, which is widely seen as one of the technology industry’s primary data toolset for marketers. The company was sold to Forrester Research in 2009.

Michael shared industry insights into how executive engage at face to face and virtual events. Notably:

• 65% of C suite go to vendor events based on a personalized sales invite
• 30% of Tech influencers who have gone to one physical event will go to another
• 25% of the follow up from an event involves a hook type of marketing
• Virtual event only (and not physical event as well) is three times more likely than physical event only
• Physical and virtual events work equally well (or badly) at each of the awareness – consideration and purchase stages
• Over 40% of occasions C suite are looking for customer and industry based insights at these events
• Social and events link extremely well through what we call the Social engagement quadrant
• C suite and IT only share about 38% of the physical event experience but some 65% of the virtual experience
• Do not extrapolate from the US to the rest of the world – Asia, EMEA and LATAM - Events

Case Studies

Rinse and Repeat: How Dell prioritized the globalization of event content
The first was by Denise Michaels, event content strategist for Dell’s Small & Medium Business division who has been driving the global rollout of their content consolidation program. They began their content journey in March 2010 with events managed and executed locally, with no centralized view or standardization.

As they audited the presentations that were being given to customers, they labeled them “Frankenstein Presentations;” local sales teams were building their own slides with content pulled from various (not always current) sources.

Event managers were also on their own for events in their region. The regions were disconnected from each other and they were each reinventing the wheel for every event.

To tackle the problem, they broke the plan into four areas:

• Listen & Learn
• Connect to customers and providers
• Recognize pains/needs
• Solve & Simplify
• Create reusable, relevant content
• Make easily accessible
• Socialize and Market
• Network, network, network
• Communicate value constantly
• Rinse & Repeat
• Listen, improve
• Communicate

About a year and a half later, they have now completed the creation of standard invitation, event leave-behinds, standards for room dress, event content, and have begun the roll-out of speaker training. Next stop: the online content portal and event measurement consolidation.

How do you L.I.K.E a company?
Ryan Lewis, social media strategist with The Ferren Agency shared some tips and case studies on social media in live events. He used the acronym L.I.K.E. to showcase his points:

• Linkable: Content and Understanding/Sharing Ease
• Using a URL shortener like bit.ly, you can make links usable in social media. But by customizing your URLs, you can give people a clue as to what you’re about to link them out to see (check out this cool short How To video here).
• Incentivized: Making Tasks Fun
• The gamification of event content makes engaging with content rewarding! “Game the mundane!” Earn points or baubles that you can redeem for prizes through various interactions like downloading content, checking in to a location, etc.
• Knowledgeable: Is Learning Easy? Complex Theories?
• Making difficult concepts simple with infographics and analogies makes attendees more likely to share with others.
• Exclusive: What Is The Reward For Action?
• Attendees like to feel like they’re getting something exclusive. Offer things just to them for attending, or offer to them first and let them share with friends and colleagues. Feeling like they are “in the know” is a great way to bring exclusivity to the masses.

Virtually Perfect: Putting Content when and where attendees want it with hybrid events

Chris Meyer, COO of INXPO, shared some great industry insights on virtual and hybrid events. Some snippets:

• Virtual events are rated as more influential than many social media marketing tactics
• Hybrid meetings are not a threat to face-to-face, but an opportunity to raise the bar
• Getting content to attendees who can’t travel is a vital part of a marketing campaign
• Cisco saved $19m by making their global sales conference hybrid
• 42% of virtual event attendees are international
• Data from SAP Sapphire and Cisco Live! shows face-to-face attendee growth driven year over year by offering the content virtually

After our case studies, we tried a fun Town Hall format. Tom Booker and Asaf Ronen from The Institution Theatre led us in some great audience discussion on the topics of:

• Tradeshow Property: Rent or Buy?
• Event Apps: Custom build or buy off-the shelf?
• Roadshows: Dead or Alive?

While there were no definitive answers from the crowd, most prefer the idea of a custom rental for large tradeshow property, they agree that event apps are mostly overrated and don’t provide very much useful engagement beyond the agenda and some feedback mechanisms, and roadshows only work when actively planned and managed by a consistent program leader.

Closing Keynote
We closed the day with GasPedal CEO Andy Sernovitz. With his bag of tricks (ranging from chocolate to Facebook and Twitter earrings to fake mustaches to autographed copies of his book Word of Mouth Marketing, Andy closed out our day with a bang. He shared stories about how to harness the power of the buzz to keep event attendees talking about your event and telling others why they should go.

Some pointers from Andy:

1. Give people a reason to talk about your stuff
2. Make it easy for that conversation to take place

Before your event:

Find Big Talkers

• Get your VIPs in early – celebrity bloggers in your industry
• Other stakeholders in your event – sponsors/partners

Give them reasons to talk

• GasPedal gives attendees a welcome box mailed to them including signed copies of books by presenters at the conference
• GasPedal gives speakers customer shirts with a custom URL – speakers video themselves wearing the shirt and put it online
• Give sponsors extra passes to share
• Do audio previews of each speaker and share them online

Give them tools to share

• Tell-A-Friend campaigns for attendees, speakers, sponsors, VIPs
• Tweet interesting things that can be retweeted

Give them status

• Discount code campaigns where you tell people they have “the inside deal” to a discount and let them share it with the people they think should get it
• Passes to share

During your event:

Social media support

• Live blog it – so people can just re-blog/re-tweet instead of trying to write while they try to listen
• Twitter: Hashtags, constant reinforcement, have staff tweet easily retweetable content

Reasons to Talk

• Surprise your attendees constantly… but not with bad things (like a naked lady covered in sushi as a centerpiece)
• Half-time show: every heard of BlendTech? What if they did a demo in the middle of your event? Blend a cell phone! Now THAT would get people talking.
• And, of course, always have great content

Buzzworthy Swag

• Make sure you are giving away stuff that people will keep like:
• A genuinely good bag
• Signed copies of speakers’ books
• All swag must be travel friendly

Plant post-show conversations

• Book signing with author + photos shared online
• Photo booth, other sharable memory-makers

After the event:

The conversation is just starting when the event is over. Capture as much buzz after the show as you capture at the show to build demand for next time.

Post-event content

• Assign photo album staff and allow it to be user-generated, too. If you get everyone tagging and sharing, you can spread the buzz far!
• Summaries, trip reports, wrap-up videos that share the content make it super-easy for attendees to reuse or share
• Record sessions and share snippets to start word of mouth for next year 
• Share slides from every presentation on slideshare

Post-event community

• No one has time for a community created just for the event. We’re too busy. But if you keep the conversation where people already are, you can keep the buzz alive
• Keep it to FB and Linkedin group – often the best because 100% people are there already
• Share speaker Q&A, discussion of sessions, and networking in those areas or through smaller in-person get-togethers

Post-event experiences

• Ship the giveaways/handouts/gifts home for the attendees
• Have videos and content to share with non-attendees

Amazing thank you’s

• Send something nice to your speakers. GasPedal sends a Carnegie cheesecake!
• Thank your sponsors with something nice – food! Include the booth workers.

Remember that happy customers are your best ads!

So as you can see from my wrap-up, I was blown away by the stories shared at this event. The networking was great and the content was wonderful. Thank you to our sponsors, our attendees, and our speakers for making this a truly spectacular engagement. Please contact me if you have an interest in learning more about the Corporate Event Marketing Association, our future events, or any of the content we shared.

Is it worth the risk?

No power in the 'verse can stop me.
  - Kaylee (Firefly) 

Life is about choices. Do I want to fight my 3-year-old to get dressed faster, or do I want to play with him and have a really fun morning, but be 10 minutes late to work? Do I want to take that new job, or stay comfortably where I am? Do I want to be a keynote speaker at a conference, or say no and attend like my peers?

This Harvard Business Review blog post got me thinking about risk... and I don't think I take enough of them. I have definately taken a few, and they have all worked out perfectly. Some ended in massive failure, but what I learned from that failure prepared me for another task later.

My first big risk was college. Upon graduating high school, I left my home state of Georgia and moved over to Texas, finding a roommate from the university's off-campus housing department (because all the dorms were full). Best risk ever.

About a year out of college, I quit my high tech marketing job to work at a high tech recruiting firm. It was a blast! Then the economy tanked and there weren't any jobs to recruit for. So they asked if I would like to spend a week in Boca Raton getting trained on how to become an account executive and recruit jobs (instead of people). I'm no salesman. I couldn't sell girl scout cookies to my own mother. But I figured it would be interesting to take the class, so I did. I made sales calls for about a month after that, to no avail. The company closed about 3 months later. FAIL. But what did I learn? Well, I definately reinforced to myself that I'm no salesman. :-) I also learned that I enjoy solving problems. When the problem was no jobs to recruit for, I decided to try and solve it by learning how to get more jobs for the company to help with. I learned that as a salesperson, marketing is vitally important. Even the basics! If I didn't have any collateral to give my prospect, there was no way they'd ever think of me when they needed to hire someone. Actually spending a couple months in sales was really the best marketing experience I could have gotten.

I've been at my current company for more than 6 years now, and have taken relatively few risks, but have been fortunate to have opportunity find me. I did take a professional presenting course through our Executive Briefing Center, and was encouraged to go take an improv comedy class. That was a spectacular risk! Standing in a class with 15 other people being spontaneous for 2 hours a week, enouraged to fail. We were taught that "there is no such thing as failure, just unexpected results." Most fun I've had in the last 5 years!

Recently, I was asked to keynote at a user conference. It's only 50-75 people, but it will be my first time truly in the spotlight telling a story. It's a risk. I'm SUPER excited about it... but this time, failure is not an option!

As the article I referenced above mentions, the key to risk is preparation. So I've hired my professional presentation instructor to help me prepare for my keynote, and my improv training will undoubtedly prove very valuable. In this instance, there should be minimal risk of failure. I'm ready!

Are you a disruptor?

Change before you have to.
   - Jack Welch

I caught this link on a Twitter feed on the #eventprofs hashtag and identified with it immediately. Sometimes I get frustrated trying to implement and manage change at work and revert back to the easy path of "follow the rules, do what your boss says, and don't make waves." But my nature is to push the envelope. I'm no Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, but in my own little world, I'm known for making people think beyond what they are comfortable doing. I want to find efficiencies and foster creativity.

In events, this means making more meaningful engagements happen in more surprising ways. Like I mentioned in a previous post, it's important to create memorable moments throughout your engagement.
People are at your event for the session content and the networking, so taking opportunities to surprise and delight them in unexpected ways is what disrupts their view of "yet another business conference."

I'm a huge advocate of disruption for the sake of breaking status quo (not disruption without purpose). I was an early adopter of eTouches registration tools, for examples, because I believed they were truly thinking from an event marketer's perspective, with a software hat on, rather than thinking from a software perspective with an event marketer's hat on. They get events, they get social, and they get the need to customize things for each customer. They are disruptors like I am.

Innovation is the buzzword of the moment, and it's a good one. Disruption is the activity we must do to pave the way for innovation.

How to not work

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  - George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

I love the book The Four-Hour Workweek. I love The Energy Project. And I love this Harvard Business Review blog post.

The gist of these grand tales is that we should stop working so much, and start prioritizing our lives to be what we want them to be. The risk inherent in this, of course, is that a) we fail to meet deadlines, b) we fail to look like we're working as hard as other people, c) we fail to get as much stuff done. So I think we're seeing that it's a fear of failure here (at least it is in my world).

But I like the principles and I am learning from my new manager (of about 6 weeks now) that this is actually possible. If you ignore the chatter of the silly, you can focus on the challenges that matter. One more book for you: Long Fuse, Big Bang. This one has a great quote that really stuck with me - "Don't let the tyranny of the urgent stifle the pursuit of the important."

Set aside time to think. Prioritize prioritization. Calm your mind and reflect on the day behind you. Then calm your mind and prepare your head for the day in front of you.

Now, to get to that 4-hour workweek... (though I'm fairly certain I could never really just work just four hours a week as I would be bored out of my mind...)