The “view from the top” of corporate America looks very promising for the continued integration of mobile apps and meetings. One of the major providers in this space, QuickMobile, has seen a surge in adoption over the last few years by top-tier corporations, notes Craig Brennan, CEO.

“If I take about six customers that we have, companies such as KMPG, Oracle and Deloitte, in 2013 we did 105 meetings and events with them, last year about 280, and this year we think it’s going to be over 600,” Brennan says, adding that the growth in the use of mobile meeting apps is taking place in two dimensions: size and type of meeting. QuickMobile’s initial corporate accounts were large, customer-facing events, but now the event size ranges from about 50 to 50,000 attendees, and even smaller gatherings. Types of events extend well beyond client-facing meetings to sales kickoffs, trade shows, employee training, leadership summits, employee onboarding events and more, Brennan observes.

But it isn’t just host companies and planners driving the use of mobile meeting apps, it’s the attendees themselves, particularly in the case of trade shows. As Jordan Schwartz, CEO of Pathable, notes, “The ubiquity of mobile phones, iPhones or Androids, has made it so there’s an assumption on the attendees’ part that they will have access to the agenda, maps and exhibitor listings so they’ll be able to preschedule meetings. Whereas before I think a meeting planner could ‘wow’ their attendees by offering them those features on the mobile phone, now it’s a given, and when it’s not offered they’re going to complain.”

Vanishing Ink

On the meeting host’s side, mobile has certainly alleviated one source of complaint: the time and money expenditures of printing and distributing meeting materials. According to “Event Planning & Mobile Technology,” a May 2014 survey of 298 event planners (26 percent corporate) by the IMEX Group and QuickMobile, “reducing/eliminating the use of paper” was the second most important reason for having a mobile app, behind “organizer-to-attendee communication and sharing.”

“The biggest breakthrough was when you were able to stop producing hard-copy handouts of presentation slides because you assumed most people could follow along on a mobile device,” recalls Rhonda King, CMP, registration manager with San Jose, California-based Align Technology Inc. King, who says she printed conference guides “the size of phone books” in the days before mobile, has shifted her focus away from “being an expert on print” and needing to know printer scheduling, costs and so on. She now focuses on how to best provide the information through an app, specifically EventMobi.

Not only are printing costs saved, but the information also can be updated as needed. “We find that the accuracy of the data is the biggest benefit for using mobile event apps,” she says. “You can make real-time changes to the presentation slides. And if session rooms change, you can get that information out quickly and accurately.” In addition, King has been able to eliminate the pocket guides that fit behind name badges and reduce the amount of personal information on the badges themselves, making them more legible. “Currently we’re still doing more signage and printed materials than I would like, but I hope that in the future (the app) will be so second nature to all attendees that we’ll be out of the business of printing conference support materials.”

Fort Collins, Colorado-based Schnei­der Electric, a client of QuickMobile, has “basically eliminated all of our printed materials and pushed everything into the mobile experience, from speaker bios to agendas to build-your-own-schedules, tying into the Schneider focus on sustainability,” notes Todd Moran, director of social enterprise. Granted, printed materials also can to some extent be avoided by loading content onto an event website. But there are definite advantages to going mobile instead. First, attendees will have access to the content where it is most convenient for them. “I don’t have to browse on my device to a separate website. I have the app up 24/7, and so I’m a lot more likely to use it,” Moran explains. Moreover, the content on an app is “truly tailored to be either tablet- or handheld-friendly and displays the information in a much cleaner way, optimized for the small screen,” King adds.

Enhancing Engagement

Another big reason why meeting hosts and planners are behind the use of mobile meeting apps is its capacity to support engagement with the event. That takes several forms, including networking with other attendees, participating in presentations via audience response, answering poll questions and posting comments about the event, and even playing event-related games through the app (gamification). The first kind of engagement is not just a priority at trade shows and large association meetings; corporate meetings also can benefit from app-based networking.

At a sales meeting, for example, companies often are looking for the sales team “to connect with each other beforehand, start conversations about the industry, ask questions and share knowledge,” Schwartz says. But the virtual conversations should mainly be limited to pre and post event, he maintains. “During the event the app isn’t necessarily the means of communication but rather the tool for encouraging face-to-face communication,” for example, by allowing attendees to quickly search for and review one another’s profiles. “If you have people at the event who are trying to network through the app itself, I think that’s crazy and counterproductive to networking,” Schwartz adds. The app is “a networking and planning tool before the event, a reference tool during, and a (virtual) community tool after.” He observes that the latter is a function that attendees are less accustomed to, compared to agenda and map features. But companies are increasingly interested in integrating apps with online communities to effectively extend the lifecycle of the event.

“The app isn’t necessarily the means of communication but rather the tool for encouraging face-to-face communication.” — Jordan Schwartz

Attendees also become more engaged when they can provide ongoing feedback on the event and its content. Schneider Electric found QuickMobile’s Q&A feature “pretty intriguing,” Moran says. “We used that to capture some real time, not survey specific, unstructured feedback throughout the user conference, and some of that actually ended up feeding the closing session.” At that point, Schneider representatives addressed comments and questions gathered through the app over the last three days. “It was a little scary for some of the execs who had to stand on-stage and (field the questions), but I think it was very powerful in terms of the attendee experience,” Moran says.

The experience also becomes more fun with app-enabled gamification. Through QuickMobile, each attendee is given a QR code, and the codes are exchanged through the app when they make a connection; that data is tied-in to a leaderboard based on the number of connections they made at the event. “We also awarded 40 points for every check-in attendees did in the marketplace (using their QR code), which encouraged them to go look at the demo stations and immerse themselves in the technology,” Moran explains. Certain behavior at the event is both encouraged and tracked in these ways, which can lead to onsite adjustments by the organizers. “Based on check-in activity we saw on Day One for the learning lounge we ended up doubling up on staffing for the second day,” he notes. “That is something we would have typically done for the following year, had it not been for real-time feedback based on QR code check-in.”

Tracking and Analytics

Along with saving print costs and attendee engagement, the third advantage of mobile is the ability to gather analytics of the sort Moran describes. It’s certainly a key feature: The IMEX Group/QuickMo­bile study identified “usage analytics” as the second most important “event app must-have,” behind “a user friendly way for me to manage app content.” Event hosts and planners can track numerous behaviors quantitatively, including the downloading of materials, viewing of specific content, connections made with others, participation in polls and so forth. “So all of a sudden where there used to be a black hole with no data,” says Brennan, “now we can start to measure the behaviors at these meetings and events and continue to improve on it.”

Brennan sees at least two major frontiers for mobile meeting apps that will render them as an even better tool for event planners. One is the integration of the apps with other enterprise systems, such as those in the areas of sales and marketing, customer service and learning management. “The more you can contextualize the attendee, and the more that you can capture data about the attendee and what’s happening at that meeting, it creates more value for the enterprise and for the attendees themselves,” he says. A second frontier is security. “Today’s event planner definitely has to be aware of IT security on mobility units. All of our tier-one clients require a high degree of security, and it’s a critical component of our platform,” he stresses.

Indeed, event planners must be aware of the numerous features that mobile companies are touting on the market today in order to make an informed purchasing choice. Pairing apps with events is becoming part of the skillset of the modern meeting planner, although it wasn’t 10 years ago when King received her CMP. “There used to be loads of information (in the curriculum) about printing meeting materials when I got the designation,” she observes. Times have changed. C&IT