I found myself saying several times a day, that I was having a great time at PCMA because I was learning so much. I think this is the conference to go to for suppliers breaking into the industry. The educational sessions are great and the other attendees are incredibly open. I think the education here is actually the most valuable thing I’m taking away–which says a lot given how much exposure our product has gotten.

Targeted Marketing
My favorite session for Tuesday was a panel for Maximize Attendance With Targeted Marketing. In particular, people should pay attention to what the Chicago Convention and Visitors Bureau is up to with social media. Check out their Twitter feed. The cool thing that they do is work directly with their biggest shows on social media strategy. And the strategy work they do is good–it works, they measure it, and it’s innovative. I was definitely impressed.

Return on Time (ROT)
There was some talk about how to make short heavy-impact meetings that fit into people’s busy schedules. I think of Return on Time (ROT) as Return on Investment (ROI) mixed with opportunity cost. It’s more of a concept to get people thinking about shorter meetings than it is a rigorous measurement methodology. The concept jives with the underlying goals of CrowdVine, to give more impact to time spent in networking and education by providing tools for intelligent preparation.

Facilities Fees
There’s a lot of stress between hotels and event planners due to the down economy. I hadn’t really understood until now that a lot of the facility fee is paid for with attendee hotel rooms and the event planner makes guarantees about hotel occupancy when they sign their contract. This seems sort of convoluted to me, why not have the entire facility fee be part of registration, but this is an area I really don’t know much about.

Generation Gaps
The Twitter back channel had a lot of chatter about generation differences and @jessicalevin had some of my favorite takes on this matter:

Everyone likes to mock Gen Y. Aren’t they a result of parenting by Boomers?

She also contradicted a favorite Gen Y stereotype about them being distracted multi-taskers. Maybe what looks like distraction is just an result of another Gen Y stereotype. They are demanding, and when you’re being boring, they demand something more interesting, something that just happens to be located on their phones. All this generation talk made me want to look up the definitions on Wikipedia. I’m at the tail end of Gen X, which means I have no excuse for checking my email during a slow session.

Big kudos to everyone involved in putting together PCMA. It was a huge production. I haven’t even touched on the entertainment side of the event.

Inspirational speakers
Monday started with a show by the City of Dallas and then an great inspirational speech from Nancy Brinker on the power of one person in social causes. My favorite speakers are information-dense, but I’m observing that the best conferences make sure to bring plenty of inspiration. I was at a session later in the day on engaging educational experiences that touched on the need to hit people at multiple levels. Having a mix of speakers, some who can touch you emotionally, and some who touch you intellectually, definitely seems like something program committees should be consciously aware of.

Freeman Experiential Meeting Design
One of my rules of thumb for conferences is to avoid vocational sessions. If the topic is something I’m already doing, then the session is almost definitely going to feel to slow. Instead, I like to go to sessions that are completely outside of my expertise. On Monday, Freeman, the leading show production company, was giving tours of the setup they used for that morning’s general session. They had three 18′ tall HD screens, touch screens for the speakers, and individual staff for sound, lighting, set design, teleprompting, video cameras, video camera switching, video, graphics, and speaker prep. There are more details than you can imagine, and we got a nice explanation from the set designer of how little things like the color of the carpet on stage effect the overall experience.

Law of Two Feet
I found myself wondering what the etiquette was for leaving sessions. Unconferences and open space have a clear rule, The Law of Two Feet, which I love:

If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

Without a clear guideline, it feels like people would perceive you as rude for walking out in the middle of a session.

Meeting people
The CrowdVine find-people-via-your-address-book feature came in handy for me today. It turns out two of my favorite customers were at the meeting and I wouldn’t have noticed except that they popped up in my search. Monday was the first time we’d ever met face-to-face.

Tweetup
PCMA has come on strong with Twitter usage. They launched their Twitter account in June and now are big into it. We had a Tweetup with sixty or so people, including plenty of the PCMA staff. It’s nice to see the staff come out because they’re so busy and hidden during most of the conference.

Here are the official news highlights from PCMA TV: http://brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid60972845001

Great first day for me–met lots of people.

Social media kiosks.
I got to the event early to volunteer in the social media kiosk booth. There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic, but the people who did come were mainly interested in CrowdVine (self-serving but true!). We do well with social media newbies because we can say what our purpose is.

New Member Orientation.
PCMA does a great job of welcoming new members. My local NorCal chapter didn’t just ask that I come their last chapter meeting, they demanded. Then when I got there the president-elect immediately introduced me to ten people. I think that’s so important–I arrived at this event knowing people. Sunday we had a new member orientation with two parts. The first was specific to suppliers where we got an entertaining lecture in how not to scare meeting planners. That advice was promptly ignored in the second half of the session when we actually got to mix with actual planners.

NorCal reception.
I ate a lot at the reception not realizing there was even more food to come. NorCal has a ton going on! I talked about Twitter with a lot of people. There’s definitely demand for another Twitter webinar if Jessica Levin will oblige.

Opening Reception.
Dallas went all out to impress the meeting planners. Did you know hockey has cheerleaders? They do in Dallas. I met all my social media and #eventprofs friends finally.

Other notes:

I have a hot tip for amazing cheese burgers: Twisted Root. The PCMA staff picked this up as a tip from the visitors bureau, tested it, and loved it.

I asked a lot of my questions from yesterday’s post, “Things I don’t understand.” Turns out those were things that nobody understands, especially the fragmentation of suppliers. It’s amazing that the average planner can’t say who the leading online registration provider is.

I heard great things about this upcoming webinar for March 3, Using Social Media in Meetings.

I think it’s fun how much pull the meetings industry has when they come to town. Lots of people give us freebies. One of my favorite scenes from the day was a bus load of folks returning from a successful Neiman Marcus shopping trip with massive discounts.

I often feel like an outsider to the conference industry because all of my expectations were set by being in the worlds of consumer web startups and open source software. There’s good and bad in that.

I didn’t get sponsors and that was a good thing
The upside is that it’s easier to have a fresh perspective and to see opportunities for improvement.

For example, there have been two waves of event social network providers. In 2006 I covered Dreamforce as a reporter and joined their social network. There were ten-thousand attendees at the conference and three people on the network. All three immediately tried to sell me their products. The first wave was based on the premise that social networks were a good way for sponsors to contact attendees. For sponsors, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Unfortunately, the fish didn’t want to be in the barrel.

The second wave, which we kicked off in 2007, and now has (I believe) seven competing products, is characterized by being attendee-centric. We figure out what the attendees want (better networking, discussions, interaction with speakers, control over their schedule) and then make sure they’re happy. We see adoption rates in the 30-70% range. In other words, we would have expected at least 3000 people on that Dreamforce social network. We didn’t come up with this approach because we were smarter, we came up with this approach precisely because we were less-smart. We’d mainly experienced conferences as attendees of high-energy, high-passion, tech-centric conferences. We built the tool we would have wanted as an attendee. Sponsors weren’t part of the initial tool is because, well, we’d only had the attendee experience of trying to avoid them.

Things I don’t get
I know a lot more now than I did in 2007, but there’s still plenty of things that leave me confused. I’ve just arrived at the PCMA annual meeting for four days of conference-industry educational sessions and lots of networking with meeting planners (PCMA used CrowdVine). And I’m on a mission to get smarter. Here’s what has me confused:

Why are suppliers so fragmented? The most glaring example is online registration providers. I’ve heard there are more than 190. In our customer data, the biggest registration provider is EventBrite with maybe 5% of our customers. Really? This isn’t software that could be standardized and commoditized? I think this is bad for everything except keeping salespeople employed. It’s bad for decision makers. It’s bad for software quality. It just seems like a backward dynamic. Why don’t meeting planners pick and promote winners?

Why is customization so important? One of the reasons I’ve heard for the the industry having so many reg providers (and every other type of provider) is because every event has such different needs. Really? Wouldn’t many events benefit from working with software that has smart sensible defaults? One example I’m thinking of is event websites which often are extremely cluttered and hide the most pressing information (I often can’t find dates, location, or even the conference topic). Ask yourself how many navigation links on your event website and then compare that to the event Information Architecture annual summit (basically an association of experts on such things). They have seven navigation links. Your website probably has 20.

Where are the opportunities to make real impact? When the economy crashed, meeting industry leaders made a big PR push to make sure that everyone knew the value of conferences and events. Their biggest talking point was how many people the industry employs. I know the people who have jobs in this industry appreciated it–but I thought that talking point was incredibly demoralizing. Is this industry a giant high-carbon-footprint make work project? We love conferences because of the energy they generate and the way they spread new ideas. Those types of conferences have impacts on the world that we get excited about. I want to find more people that think that way and ask them how can we have more, better, more world-changing meetings? Can software help?

Why is everything so expensive? I once paid $200 to plug in a monitor for two hours. I know a company that charges $5k to turn on their API (consumer web app companies turn this on for free). Lunch is $80 per person. On the software side, I think this goes back to the point above, supplier fragmentation. All the suppliers have to rely on sales teams because each customer is won through one-on-one efforts. Those sales team salaries are paid for by meeting planners and attendees. I think this is a major road block for new meetings and independent organizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we measured IQ points added?

Expect plenty of blog posts and tweeting over the next week as I take my open source, tech-startup ideals to the experts. If you’re going to PCMA 10, here’s my CrowdVine profile. Make sure to say hello.