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On today’s round table meetings podcast show we discuss: inexpensive ideas for events, best practice for building a community online, some fun Las Vegas Venetian quotes and finish off with some green meetings and events talk.
Some relevant links:
http://www.exhibitoronline.com/topics/ecoitw.asp
http://meetingsmags.com/article/setting-record-straight
http://meetingsmags.com/article/best-practices-building-online-community-your-event
http://meetingsmags.com/article/parties-shoestring-%E2%80%93-tips-planning-great-holiday-celebration
Transcripts!
[0:00:00]
Mike McAllen: This is Mike McAllen with Meetings Podcast. I wanted to thank you again for tuning in. We’re very excited because today’s podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. You can get a free audio book download at www.audiblepodcast.com/meetingspodcast. There’s over seventy-five hundred titles to choose from. You can listen to them on your iPod or your Mp3 player, and we’re very excited. So, check that out, and I think you’ll really enjoy Audible. I know I do.
Unknown: Welcome to the Meetings podcast. The meeting planner’s podcast for what’s new in meetings and events industry. Meetings Podcast with a variety of voices that looks at events, meetings, and media, and the changing world around them.
Mike McAllen: Welcome back to the Meetings podcast, this is Mike McAllen with Grass Shack Events and Media, and of course, as always, Jon Trask Alliant Events. Hi Jon!
Jon Trask: Hello! Hello!
Mike McAllen: I guess, I should say Tom’s not here. [Laughter] Tom hasn’t been here for a while now, but Tom is not here. It is – what day is it today? It’s Friday like the twenty…
Jon Trask: Twenty-second.
Mike McAllen: Twenty-second of October. The year has flown by.
Jon Trask: I know. We’ve got to count how many of these we have done, because we’re going to hit some significant number at some point.
Mike McAllen: Yes.
Jon Trask: And, we have to have a party.
Mike McAllen: Right. Big party. We can hire the Rolling Stones or somebody.
Jon Trask: We’ll have a Tweetup. [Laughter] As a matter of fact, I should mention, I met somebody yesterday at my MPI chapter meeting that who was at our Tweetup in Vancouver. It was very cool.
Mike McAllen: That is very, very cool.
Jon Trask: We didn’t actually immediately recognized each other. It was one of those things where we started talking and it’s like, “I know where I know you from. You were in Vancouver.”
Mike McAllen: Oh, that’s so fun. Who was it? Do you remember who it was?
Jon Trask: Elizabeth Clau. She’s a social media person down here. She actually is a consultant who helps people work with crafting their social media personally – not a company-wide thing, but a personal management of that type of strategy.
Mike McAllen: Very cool. Very cool.
Jon Trask: Yeah.
Mike McAllen: I don’t remember meeting her, but there were a lot of people there. Pretty cool though. The social media works, see?
Jon Trask: Yes, and I actually have something about social media, and I have something about parties.
Mike McAllen: Excellent.
Jon Trask: I’m like dead on with the intro.
Mike McAllen: Let’s get started.
Jon Trask: Well, the first thing that I had was for Meetings Magazine – Northwest Meetings and Events, or Meetings and Events magazine. They have a bunch of different volumes. They have a lot of kind of best practices areas and things.
So, I went there today looking for some ideas. One of them that I found seemed really relevant because we are coming in to the holiday season and folks are on a budget. So, this is an article of parties on a shoestring, tips for planning a great holiday celebration. This was written by Terry Fischer from Five Star Talent and Entertainment.
Basically, she says, “Remember the main objective of a good party is to get people talking, laughing, and their everyday concerns. So, don’t stress about budget. When you’ve got barebones, you can still have a memorable party by just having the office team bring in their favorite dish. Make it a pot luck, and buy a tree, and have everybody bring in an ornament to decorate or something like that.
But, some of the ideas that she mentioned that were relatively inexpensive was, of course, having a DJ, making it sort of a dance party. Ways of approaching that were to, maybe, bring in like a really good Hawaiian guitar player, and turn it in to a beach party, and have people wear Hawaiian shirts.
Mike McAllen: Well, that’s a fun idea.
Jon Trask: Or she said, “Bring in a dance instructor. The dance instructor can provide some entertainment for the whole crowd, because teaching people to dance and that sort of thing can be a real, big ice breaker.
Mike McAllen: That’s great. Those are great ideas.
Jon Trask: One of these was set up a fortune-telling booth, and bring in a palm reader or tarot card reader, or a hand writing analyst, or a magician. They talked about bringing in someone who knew magic and illusions. Ordering temporary tattoos. So, letting everybody get a temporary tattoo.
There are sort of traditional things – having Santa Clause come in or having strollin, Victorian carolers, or things like that. I thought there was some really interesting ideas there that didn’t have to cost a lot of money, and would be real good icebreakers. Again, keeping the focus on fun, and the idea with a holiday party that you just want to break the ice and get everybody laughing and talking, and forgetting the day to day work stuff.
Mike McAllen: Yeah, it’s very cool. It’s great, cool ideas.
Jon Trask: So, we’ll definitely… We got links to all these to put on the website, but this was for meetings and events magazine under their expert advice.
Mike McAllen: Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, it’s very interesting, specially now, I know my wife is getting… They’re getting a lost of requests for the restaurants for doing holiday parties but not making them non-denominational kind of a thing.
Jon Trask: Right.
Mike McAllen: Just holiday, but not… Anyway they’re having no Christmas involved anyway.
Jon Trask: Right.
Mike McAllen: Interesting. Good idea to just, maybe throw something completely different at it – like a Hawaiian party. [Laughter]
Jon Trask: Yeah. That seems like an interesting direction to take. Let’s see, a little bit on… A couple of articles on there from Pathable, Jordan Schwartz and Jeff Hurt from Velvet Chainsaw co-authored an article for best practices for building an online community for your event.
So, some of the highlights of that – setting goals at the outset is critical, choosing the right social media platforms that make sense for what you’re doing, defining and using metrics, choosing your champion. To new users, online communities might look self sustaining but they’re not. You need people on there to manage the community and champion it.
Know the tone of social media. Expect that things are going to change, nurture the community. Then, troubleshoot the risks that come with it and be aware that you may have to be clear/upfront about expected behaviors and such.
Mike McAllen: Right. You would really have to have a kind of a terms of service, I guess, in there. You just don’t have people selling their stuff constantly. I know that happens a lot to this things. A big no, no to start [0:07:00]
Jon Trask: Right.
Mike McAllen: Services. You kind of have to be… I’ve had a conversation yesterday with somebody who’s very in to LinkedIn now. They’re going in and just doing the questions and answers kind of thing and the discussions in the different communities.
Jon Trask: Right. Right.
Mike McAllen: But, they’re trying to be very, very careful about not trying to sell. But, obviously, everybody who’s in there is basically selling.
Jon Trask: Right. It’s the same thing with MPI. When you go to an MPI meeting… If you’re coming in to speak on a topic for example, as you and I did a while back, you have to be real careful that you’re not there just representing your company, your there as an informational resource.
The same thing applies in some of these communities. I think the big thing that I’m distilling out of this is, you really need to moderate it. You really need to sit down, come up with a strategy and a plan, because these things don’t just organically happen. You really have to be on top of it.
Mike McAllen: Right. Yeah, the analogy of it. All of these online communities being treated like a cocktail party. So, you don’t walk in to a cocktail party with a bunch of people and start handing out your cards and talking about what you do. You ask questions of other people and have a normal conversation. So, you have to act that way too.
Jon Trask: Right. Right.
Mike McAllen: In these communities. I know… I’ve seen a couple of people – Laura [0:08:16] the one who started the event [0:08:19] on her full name. She’s here ready to spark. She started a community recently on LinkedIn. I signed up for the… Usually I don’t sign up to get the daily things or the daily updates of what’s going on, but she’s been really working hard at that.
Jon Trask: That’s the key thing what you just said there, it’s somebody who’s really working hard at it. It’s another thing that you… If you’re going to do it, you’ll have to take the time to plot it out and to do it right.
Mike McAllen: Right. People are learning nowadays that the social media stuff is part of their marketing. It just has to be a portion of the marketing. It doesn’t take over what they have been doing for the rest of the time, but it is a nice addition to really be able to connect straight away with people. So, that’s very cool. I like to read that article.
Jon Trask: There was a Dilbert cartoon that just happened this week. When you mentioned marketing – where he described marketing liquor and lying, and it just stuck with me.
Mike McAllen: Well, you watched Mad Men or any of those things. I guess, they’re advertising, they’re trying to market all these things. It seems like that’s what’s going on on that show too.
Jon Trask: So, well in the end… Another thing that jumped out of me here is something… We’ve talked a lot of the economic pain of the industry right now. There was somebody – a lady from the Venetian – who wrote a column called, “Setting the record straight.” This is also on that website. I just loved a couple of her comments. I found them kind of fun and interesting. So, I wanted to read a couple of those.
Basically, she said people keep calling, looking for deals. Every other person wants to know, “What can you do for me? Where can you cut my budget?” And so on. A lot of things that she wishes she could say would get her fired, but these were some of the more general responses.
If extend a 25% discount, do you expect to be satisfied with 25% less food, or 25% less service?[Laughter] If you need an operation would you prefer to go to a leading John Hopkins doctor to perform surgery or somebody who got their medical degree in a third world country? Wouldn’t you like to go to the grocery store and tell the checker the store down the street is charging you less, so you want to pay less at their store too? Or to go in to the Apple store and say, “I want to buy that iPad for 30% less since that will be the going price in a year? [Laughter]
Mike McAllen: Yeah. [Laughter]
Jon Trask: So, those were just a couple of her little comments that I found sort of amusing. The point is, we all provide a value in this industry. We need to make sure that the clients recognize that’s what were bringing to the table with them – we’re giving them some value.
Mike McAllen: Yeah. That’s really true.
Jon Trask: That also came out of Meetings and Events Magazine. The last thing that I had for today was a couple of green ideas from Exhibitor Magazine. They had an area of green ideas of things that people had done at their exhibit and tradeshow booths. A couple of these jumped out at me as being sort of fun things. So, I wanted to bring these in.
The first one was a [0:11:51] which is a technology, computer related show. An instrument company gave away luggage tags. The luggage tags were made out of recycled computer mother boards that were cut to size, drilled, and a card holder was put on them, and the company’s name and phone number, and website was put on the other side.
I thought, “That’s a really cool luggage tag.”
Mike McAllen: That’s very funny. What a funny idea.
Jon Trask: That’s recycling something that’s out there, and that there’s not really not a lot of good uses for. So, I thought, “Very clever.”
The other one was kind of a neat, almost a charity kind of thing because of this art guild. Avalon exhibits sent their pre-registered attendees a mailer, and asked them to come to the booth to take a step toward going green. So, when the attendees showed up at the booth, they gave them a branded pedometer, and told them that if they wore it throughout the show and then brought it back to the booth at the end, the company would donate $1 per mile walked to the association’s green initiative for running sustainable design and construction in the tradeshow industry.
Mike McAllen: Wow. That’s a cool idea.
Jon Trask: Then, there are all kinds of ways you could play off that idea. I’ve seen people give out pedometers before, but I’ve never seen people do a charitable donation based on the mileage walked.
Mike McAllen: How funny. Yeah, it’s a great idea. They always do that at those MPI meetings and PCMA. They have those pedometer things.
Jon Trask: Right.
Mike McAllen: Then, you realize how far you really walked.
Jon Trask: Yup.
Mike McAllen: Which is amazing. Remember that old commercial about John Ascuaga up at, I think, it was a nugget up there in Reno. He used to have a commercial that he’d wear the pedometer. Maybe you didn’t see that because you’re in Southern California.
Jon Trask: Yeah, I don’t think we had that down here, but I do remember the casino you’re talking about.
Mike McAllen: He would… The commercial was him walking around saying hello to everyone. He’s day of walking that he had a pedometer. Then, he looked at it in the end, and he was all, “Oh!” [Laughter] He walked, you know, thirty miles in the day or something. It’s a crazy amount.
Very interesting. That reminds me too of the greenest of that set that you did with the cardboard. That’s a good way of recycling stuff.
Jon Trask: I was just talking to somebody about that last night, as a matter of fact – describing what we have done. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage talking about that. It’s really… Because, people are very intrigued by the idea of using cardboard boxes to build a set.
Mike McAllen: Yeah. It is amazing – just all of the green stuff hitting us all the time. You’ve got to be green… When we were up in Vancouver, that whole lead-certified convention center was just a good example of…
Jon Trask: Kind of where things are heading.
Mike McAllen: Yeah. Then, our… Recently, when we talked to Patrick with the mobile applications, what savings that is too. You know, not getting the big guy – the conference guys anymore.
Jon Trask: I was talking with Elizabeth about that yesterday at the lunch. The nice thing about what MPI was doing there is they were really pushing the boundaries. They got some people out of their comfort zone, I think, by not doing like a printed program. There were people who certainly really wanted that.
I think she was sort of lauding the idea that they were pushing the envelope and trying to do new, and different, and interesting things, and bring that back to the meetings community.
Mike McAllen: Yeah. It’s interesting because even nerdo me, when I was at Blogworld last week, they had, you know, everything’s online there. I had one inmy hand, all folded up, encircled. Still, the conference guided my hand walking around. [Laughter] Here I’m at it like a social media kind of blogging. For instance, I’m still walking around with that thing. But, you know, I’m not young too, so I’m used to have… I kind of like the security of having that in my hand for some reason. I don’t know why.
Jon Trask: Well, I think that’s about all the time I have today for the podcast.
Mike McAllen: Okay. Thank you, again, John. If anyone has any questions or comments, please e-mail or call us. E-mail at meetingspodcast@gmail.com, or comment on the website, or give us a call. [Laughter]
Jon Trask: Anytime.
Mike McAllen: Yeah. All right, John. Thank you so much. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.
Jon Trask: Okay. Bye bye.
Unknown: We appreciate and thank you for listening to the meetings podcast. Please e-mail with any questions or comments to meetingspodcast@gmail.com. The Meetings Podcast theme music comes from the Delgado brothers which can be found at DelgadoBrothers.com. Special thanks to Riptide Graphics for graphics and audio editing of this podcast.
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