SMMP Technology
Online SMMP meetings technology handles meeting registration, marketing and promotion; provides attendee networking and feedback; and manages RFPs for hotels and meeting venues. Meeting planners are starting to combine SMMP technology with social networking Web sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as blogs to market meetings and promote attendee networking before, during and after events.
Corbin Ball, CMP, a leading independent technology consultant, noted, “With companies keeping a closer eye on procurements, the use of SMMP technology will become more significant. Before, it was just StarCite. Now you have other providers coming with similar capabilities. Another trend to watch is the sites offering reviews on how meeting planners like different properties to help other planners make purchasing decisions.” Ball, president of Bellingham, WA-based Corbin Ball Associates, offers meeting planners a wealth of information about meetings technology and social media at corbinball.com.
Web sites offering hotel and venue rankings and reviews by meeting planners include meetinguniverse.com and meetingscollaborative.com. Other online SMMP, RFP and meeting technology 
providers include meetingintelligence.com, elitemeetings.com, cvent.com and certain.com.
The increased efforts by corporations and meeting planners to control costs will help drive the use of SMMP technology. Traditionally, many companies have not tracked the aggregate costs of meetings conducted by various divisions and departments nationwide and worldwide, said Kevin Iwamoto, vice president of enterprise strategy for StarCite.
“Meetings are the last bastion of cost savings and consolidated management for corporations because it has always been so decentralized and not a priority. Now that companies have placed huge cost-saving targets on purchasing and procurement, they are starting to create processes and policies for monitoring it company-wide, including meetings,” explained Iwamoto.
He added that federal laws and regulations are spurring some industries to use technology to help track meeting planning costs. For example, financial companies are following guidelines issued by the U.S. Treasury Department for recipients of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. Also, in recent years, an increasing number of federal and state laws and guidelines require pharmaceutical firms to track spending on gifts and entertainment for doctors, much of which takes place at meetings and events.
Online SMMP providers work closely with companies to ensure that the Web-based services provide data that can help track meeting costs.
For example, StarCite has a 12-person corporate advisory board that meets once or twice a year to offer feedback about proposed StarCite services and proposed enhancements. “It’s important to spend a lot of time talking to our corporate customers, who include 450 of the Fortune 1000, about what they want,” said Iwamoto.
Taylor, who plans meetings for several companies that use various SMMP online systems for dozens to hundreds of meetings per year, cited one big advantage of the systems: After attendees register for the first time using an SMMP system, it stores the information, which makes it easier for people to register for additional meetings because there is a centralized record of all attendees.
She recently contracted with Cvent to provide SMMP services for a security services company’s sales and training meeting that attracted about 1,400 attendees. The online company provided a registration Web page linked to the company’s Web site, and handled hotel RFPs, name tags and distribution of program information and hotel packets.
Independent Proprietary Tools
Companies such as Cvent and StarCite aren’t the only sources of online SMMP technology. It is increasingly available from third-party meeting planners who use their own proprietary meeting planning technology for their corporate clients.
A6 Consultants, a Tucson, AZ-based meeting and event planning firm that specializes in corporate meetings, developed its own online meeting planning tool — eventinterface.com, which manages event registrations, hotel reservations, speaker management, event marketing, attendee networking and sponsorship sales.
Meeting planners at A6 use eventinterface.com with a variety of corporate clients. For example, a large U.S.-based financial corporation uses the service to manage registration and nominations for a series of nationwide small business awards banquets, and a game manufacturer uses the technology to register attendees for its annual gaming conference and show.
The company recently negotiated a deal to allow an international hotel chain to use the service for its own meetings and offer it to meeting planners who book events at its properties. Similar deals may be possible in the future, said Al Wynant, managing partner of A6 Consultants.
A6 combines eventinterface.com with social networking Web sites. “When we set up a registration Web site, we set up a link to Twitter, Facebook or a blog. We heavily use that to promote meetings, for networking pre- and post-meeting, and to answer questions from attendees,” said Wynant.
Blending Approaches
During the recent economic downturn, many companies were forced to consider alternatives to in-person meetings. Thus, the popularity of blending face-to-face meetings with audio and visual communications systems such as teleconferencing, telepresence (an immersive, life-size video conferencing technology) and online video conferencing, soared in the last several months.
Companies will certainly continue to depend on face-to-face meetings to build business relationships. However, combining visual communications systems with face-to-face meetings can make them more focused and productive and cut costs as well.
“Recent studies have indicated the power of business travel and face-to-face meetings because of the return on investment. But telepresence does have a place. It’s an alternative mechanism to make meetings 
more effective,” confirmed Ball.
The face-to-face and technology mix can also increase attendee participation rates and reduce travel budgets. Companies will continue to combine the two meeting styles as visual meeting technology becomes less expensive and easier to use, Ball added.
Marriott International believes that telepresence technology will eventually catch on in a big way. In January 2009, the hotel chain began offering the technology in its hotels worldwide to “enable Marriott to offer customers the widest array of meeting options, whether in-person, virtual or both,” the company stated.
Marriott is offering telepresence service to groups of fewer than 20 people in various locations who want to connect through teleconferencing. “We believe telepresence will create more business meetings because people can travel shorter distances and easily connect with colleagues and clients around the world,” Arne Sorenson, Marriott president and COO, said in a recent statement.
As more companies blend traditional and virtual meetings, consulting services are popping up to advise meeting planners how to combine the various approaches.
For example, Guided Insights specializes in planning and facilitating virtual, teleconferencing and face-to-face meetings for corporations that want to blend the two approaches for meetings, training sessions and other events.
Nancy Settle-Murphy, the president of the Boxborough, MA-based meeting planning company said, “Companies are asking how to combine face-to-face with virtual and under what circumstances to save costs and make face time more effective. They are saying, ‘Let’s not use face time to make presentations to each other because we can read PowerPoints before the meeting, but to have vital exchanges where we need to look at each other to build relationships and trust.’?”
Settle-Murphy recently combined face-to-face and online conference meetings for 20 executives and managers of the operations group of a major medical supply company. The goal of the meeting was to come up with ideas to reduce costs.
“I suggested that, before they meet in person, that they meet in a virtual conference room. That way, the face-to-face meeting could be shorter and more focused. They brainstormed their cost reduction ideas in advance. When they met for a day, they had more than 100 ideas. They broke into smaller groups and came up with a short list within four hours,” said Settle-Murphy.
Enhancing Face-To-Face
Teleconferencing is also playing a role in enhancing face-to-face meetings. “There can be a nice combination. You can have a bunch of folks in one location and connect to another location or to people working out of their homes,” said Jill Burgum, director of global events for Tandberg, a provider of teleconferencing equipment and services.
Burgum uses Tandberg’s own teleconferencing systems to help plan some of the 25 meetings a year for the 1,500-employee company.
In November, Tandberg held a meeting for about 100 participants who gathered at the company’s facilities in New York, Boston, Dallas and Reston, VA. Through videoconferencing, participants listened to speakers in Reston and participated in Q&A sessions. After the teleconference meeting, sales people and executives in each of the four locations met face-to-face.
Burgum tracks the benefits of combining teleconferencing with face-to-face meetings involving employees, customers and potential customers.
“We do about 75,000 video calls each month worldwide. In a year, we save about 21,000 metric tons of carbon emissions, and about 38,250 employee productivity hours and millions of dollars in travel costs,” said Burgum.
Virtual and teleconferencing technologies are also combined with face-to-face training meetings.
“Many companies want blended learning where they meet in groups as well as some distance learning via technology. But many companies and their meeting planners are still trying to figure out the right combination of the two meeting styles to make it most effective. That’s a large part of what I do,” said Settle-Murphy.
She cited several questions that meeting planners should ask when considering whether it is cost-effective to combine face-to-face meetings with teleconferencing and virtual technology:
What’s the purpose of the meeting? How many people need to attend? What is the average rate of pay for the meeting participants? What are the total meeting expenses, including the costs of registration, hotel and meeting rooms? How much time will the attendees spend traveling? Is there a need for support and administration staff? Will the purpose of the meeting be met?
Final Thoughts
Despite the benefits of meeting technologies, many corporations have been slow to adopt the systems. Some large companies that have meeting planners worldwide and hold hundreds of meetings could cut costs by using meeting technologies but they don’t.
“The big reason is budget. The cost is sometimes difficult to defend in corporations that are budget conscious. And meeting managers have so many things going on that they don’t have the time to learn about and implement new technologies,” said Iwamoto.
Many meeting planners still operate using Excel spreadsheets, phone and faxes.
“When you multiply the number of planners in a large corporation who handle hundreds of meetings a year that way, it’s easy to see the large amount of inefficiency there,” said Iwamoto. He added that, in large corporations, sometimes some meeting planners use meetings technology and others don’t, and they don’t share their best practices, adding to unnecessary cost and inefficiency.
Ball urges all meeting planners to take the time to educate themselves about meetings technology because it will inevitably dominate the industry. “Everything will be different five years from now in terms of how meetings are marketed, managed and run, and what people expect at meetings, especially as these tools become more common and powerful and cheaper,” said Ball. C&IT