The explosion of technology continues to be the single most dramatic factor in the meeting industry. Like it or not, new technologies that appear with the regularity of tides are transforming meetings for both planners and attendees.

“On the planning side, technology has just made the process more efficient,” says Alex Schutte, corporate marketing manager at technology developer Qvidian in Cincinnati, Ohio. “For example, we do everything in Google Drive, or what used to be called Google Docs. That makes it easy to collaborate on things like our budgets, session descriptions and communication plans. The event manager will usually take the lead in creating that document, but then the whole team will collaborate on refining and finalizing that document. The important thing is that it’s a real time form of collaboration, so it eliminates a lot of the back and forth that usually makes the process inefficient.”

Until now, most meeting planners have tended to view technology more as a matter of convenience than one of transformation. One reason: Many planners, especially older ones, are admittedly intimidated by technology.

Such fear and trepidation are common, says meeting industry technology expert Corbin Ball, CMP, who regularly tracks more than 1,700 technology products in more than 60 categories. “I think most people, in general, feel that way,” he says. “It’s not just meeting planners. We’re living in a time of unprecedented change. But when it comes to meeting planners, putting together a meeting today is like putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. And if you forget or ignore a piece, you don’t have an entire picture. So technology certainly represents a few pieces of that puzzle. But there also are many, many more things out there that planners have to understand and put into that jigsaw puzzle. And all of that adds up to a blizzard of change in the way planners do events. That’s really what planners have to cope with now.”

“We do everything in Google Drive, or what used to be called Google Docs. That makes it easy to collaborate on things like our budgets, session descriptions and communication plans.” — Alex Schutte

Meanwhile, Ball says, the pace of technological change is accelerating every year.

“When it comes to meeting technology, we are living in really interesting times right now,” says Ball, who is a frequent speaker at major meeting industry events. “Things are changing pretty dramatically. And the real drivers are mobile technology, combined with social media. Those two things are working together to cause big change.”

A recent survey by Meeting Profes­sionals International (MPI) found that 85 percent of planners either use or plan to soon use mobile apps for their events. “Three years ago, the number was seven percent,” Ball says. “So that tells you that the adoption rate of mobile has been phenomenal.”

A critical factor in the technology equation is that virtually every meeting planner and attendee now owns a smartphone. “That means they have cutting-edge technology in their pockets,” Ball says. “And that is the real game-changer, because the smartphone has become a Swiss army knife of capabilities and apps that are changing all of the old rules for meetings and events. Mobile technology has now become a totally disruptive technology in the meeting industry.”

Cate Banfield, senior manager, event services at Santa Ana, California-based B2B technology provider Ingram Micro, agrees that mobile is the current 800-pound gorilla of the meeting industry. “Mobile is huge now,” she says. “We don’t do many of our major meetings and events anymore without having a mobile app for it. And for our major events, a mobile app is now our first go-to tool in terms of enhancing the attendee experience. But we also use it to help us as planners and marketers get our message out about the meeting.”

Laura Baumgardner, senior product marketer at CRM and business management service provider Thomson Reuters Elite in New York, is another enthusiastic user of mobile apps. But her deployment of the technology is still relatively simple.

“For us, having a mobile app is important because things like our program guide or agenda are always changing for our conferences,” Baumgardner says. “And with mobile technology, we are able to manage those changes better than before when everything was on paper. It’s easy to update things like the agenda.”

However, she says, mobile technology also facilitates easier communication with attendees, especially onsite. “And it also allows us to make sure they know about things like a special event we want them to get to,” she says. “And those are capabilities that we never really had before.”

She also views the growing use of mobile technology by Thomson Reuters as an attendee engagement strategy. “We do things now like monitor the tweets that are coming from attendees during the conference and then displaying those as a way of engaging people,” she says. “And we did not have that capability in the past either.”

The Next Big Thing — Analytics

Until fairly recently, meeting planners had almost no clue what was actually happening at their meetings, Ball notes. And by the time they found out in a post-event survey, it was too late to do anything that might have caused concern or frustration during the meeting.

“Planners were flying blind during the meeting,” Ball says. “Now you can have access to the kinds of analytical details that can tell you exactly what people are doing and thinking during the event. You can know what they like, what they dislike and how things can be improved — right this minute. That is a gold mine of information that never existed before in real time.”

However, Ball says, only a relatively small percentage of planners realize the availability or recognize the potential of such granular data, nor have industry organizations called much attention to it yet. “For example, in a recent MPI survey, analytics is not even on the list of reasons planners are using mobile apps,” Ball says. “When people talk about mobile technology, most of them still talk about things like replacing paper products like programs or exhibition guides or surveys. In other words, they’re looking at what mobile is replacing, not what the potential is.”

In the near future, Ball predicts, so-called “big data” — the technique of mining vast amounts of information for important insights — which was the secret weapon that against all odds got Barack Obama re-elected president of the United States in 2012 — will become a key component of event design and marketing.

“The question of big data really has two parts,” Ball says. “First there is the question of tracking consumer trends such as Web searches that allow you tap into very large databases of information. Until now, that capability has been expensive. But now it’s available as a service. So meeting planners can use it now to do a better job of creating their events. But another thing that is starting to become a trend is the ability to combine multiple data sources around an event. And attendees create all sorts of interesting data points, from registration to their actions onsite to what they say they like and their social media activity. So to be able to use technology to aggregate and interpret those kinds of things will also start to give planners and meeting hosts a better picture of what is happening as a result of the meeting.”

At Ingram Micro, Banfield and her colleagues have only recently started looking at fast-evolving analytical capabilities. “Certainly, the data side of things is very important,” she says. “And the first time we tried, we were able to accumulate, through our partnership with SpotMe, a level of data that we had never gotten before. We were able to tell, in real time, who was in breakout sessions and send them surveys. And then the data from those surveys also gave us another level of analytical data that we could use to assess and measure the success of various sessions. Now, we want to really work with SpotMe even further to be able to build on that. And the way we look at it, in the long run, doing that will allow us to become more proactive than reactive.”

At Thomson Reuters, Baumgardner has only recently recognized the trend and begun to think about ways to exploit the capability.

“People come to our conferences for different reasons,” she says. “But one of the obvious ones is the transfer of knowledge that comes from our content. So we want to make those sessions as effective as we can, because people pay a lot of money to come to our conferences. So we want to make sure that not only are we providing them with information that will help them do their jobs better, but also that they agree we are doing that. So one of the things we do is ask a lot of survey questions.”

The Gamification Revolution

Baumgardner works with industry-leading mobile technology provider QuickMobile and has increasingly incorporated its innovative gamification capabilities into her tool kit.

Gamification prompts attendees to participate in games and earn points that can be redeemed for various kinds of prizes and other rewards. The underlying purpose of gamification is to motivate particular kinds of behavior, such as attendance at key sessions or activities such as onsite tweeting of comments about meeting content.

“We have attendees play a game so we can get the information we want,” Baumgardner says.

“And we have gotten tremendous feedback from the way we do that. For one thing, it’s easy to use the app. People don’t have to complete a paper survey like they did in the past and turn it in. So the process is quick and easy.”

The company also can ask open-ended questions that give them even more detailed feedback. “And we use that now to find out what people don’t like about the conference so we can improve that for next year,” Baumgardner says.

Thomson Reuters first used gamification for one of its major annual conferences in 2013. “We got a ton of information from doing it,” says Baumgardner, adding that the company got an astonishing 86 percent adoption rate from attendees.

Banfield and her team have worked with SpotMe to develop innovative ways to use gamification as an attendee engagement strategy. “It starts just by having people download the app,” she says. “But from there, we ask you to do all kinds of things, from sending tweets to attending a session to participating in a business card exchange, and you get points for doing those things. Then it grows from there to engaging with certain vendors or customers.”

Ingram Micro created an onsite retail store that awarded prizes from event technology sponsors such as Cisco, IBM, Dell, Lenovo and Samsung.

Schutte has incorporated gamification into Qvidian’s customer loyalty and advocacy program, known as “Club Q,” an invitation-only customer appreciation and engagement program.

“Those customers get a log-in to a third-party portal and within that there are different challenges they can complete and get points from,” Schutte says. “Then they can redeem those points for rewards.”

Baumgardner, Banfield and Schutte agree wholeheartedly that gamification is probably the single most important technological innovation in the meeting industry over the last 12-18 months.

But, Ball says, many more important innovations are still to come. C&IT