Sparksight, Inc.

The main topic of the recent MTO Summit in San Francisco was social media in the meetings industry. However, the real buzz around the coffee and Danish table was about the future of face-to-face events. With the economy, green movement, corporate travel bans and bad press bearing down on the meetings business, high-profile presenters such as R.D. Whitney, CEO, Tarsus Online Media, Rick Calvert, CEO, BlogWorld, and Christopher Justice, CEO, Sparksight, offered summit attendees a mind-numbing dose of education, perspectives and a little controversy.

R.D. Whitney opened the summit with a presentation on “The Great Marketing Shift,” during which he discussed the transition from traditional marketing mediums, including email, to social networking platforms. For example, the industry’s involvement in the green movement has increased the amount of email being circulated while spam filters have contributed to a decrease in email open rates to 10-12%, says Whitney. The resulting ineffectiveness is driving interest in social media marketing. He suggested the following:

• Spend one hour per month talking to staff about the organization’s social media success stories.
• Choose two or three existing social media sites and engage participants regularly.
• Refrain from using the excuse “my customers don’t get social media.” Search LinkedIn, for example, for the number of groups or people associated with any industry. The numbers are high.

A lively discussion among panelists on “Putting Yourself at the Center of the Conversation” involved Bob Roan of Knowledge Flows, Brian Halligan of HubSpot, Mark Sylvester of introNetworks and Nicole Buraglio of Hanley Wood Exhibitions. The topic covered techniques for harnessing the power of social networks to get the marketing message out. The challenge, says Halligan, is to learn how to “interrupt people who don’t want to be interrupted and aren’t paying attention.” Panelists offered a variety of suggestions such as participating in social media conversations, monitoring what customers and competitors are saying on social media platforms, following what’s being said about the industry, developing Web content that people want to read, optimizing content for search engines, promoting (not selling), and measuring progress.

Christopher Justice, Rick Calvert and Warwick Davies of The Event Mechanic! engaged in a lively discussion about the “Future of New Media.” With some disagreement among panelists about whether traditional media is working at all or in part, it was agreed that bloggers are attracting attention and virtual events are gaining momentum. Rick Calvert commented that virtual events should be integrated into the live event life cycle but will not replace face-to-face events. Calvert’s BlogWorld live streams some event content. He reported that 600,000 messages were tweeted during his conference. The #1 subject on Twitter, he says, was lamentation from tweeters about not being at the live event.

The session on “Cloud Computing,” was challenging for some audience members to comprehend as Bob Roan and Pat Pathade of Fantail Consulting described the next wave of innovation for the meetings industry. In a virtual trade show environment, applications built on cloud platforms will offer the following features:

• Device independent
• Location independent
• Able to handle large numbers of users
• Interoperable with other platforms

In addition to virtual event platforms, cloud computing holds promise for a multitude of applications including attendee registration, online booth sales and social networking, Pathade explained. “It is what is under the social media hood,” he says. Event organizers can benefit from the significant economies of scale and lower costs for solution development allowing them to stay focused on their businesses, risk less, and fail faster, says Pathade.

Warwick Davies and Christopher Justice closed the MTO Summit with a discussion on “Five Steps to Social Media Success,” suggesting that six months going “full bore” on a social media campaign should get measurable results. Audience members looking for social media success were advised to commit to making the marketplace bigger and better, create valuable content at no cost, help people to connect to each other (not just to event organizers), engage in social media practices for “the long haul," engage customers in conversations to find out how they are doing (not just to sell to them) and know the customer well enough to offer information to suit their preferences.

The summit was not without controversy and conjecture. In an attempt to address the issue of antiquated pricing models for meetings, Christopher Justice suggested shifting the cost burden away from attendees toward exhibitors and sponsors. Rick Calvert countered with strong comments about the perception and risk of offering content and live events for free. The coffee table chatter focused on whether the industry will come back to its “glory days” or remain forever altered by the recession and how the industry has been forced to re-tool while waiting for the recovery. While several in attendance bought into the social media promise, tweeting the proceedings out to the rest of the world, some in the audience were undecided on whether social media is a savior or yet another hurdle to jump over.
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Author:  Michelle Bruno is a writer, blogger and event professional based in Salt Lake City, UT. She blogs about new media and face-to-face events at forkintheroadblog.com.

Source:  www.plannerwire.com