By John Buchanan
After a decade of flirting with the promise of revolutionary change, technology is on the verge of transforming the entire process of meeting planning. Not too long ago, that meant converting labor-intensive tasks such as attendee registration into jobs that can be managed more quickly and efficiently. Today, however, the role of technology is much more evolutionary, with new capabilities not even imagined a few years ago, such as the ability for attendees to communicate and interact with one another before, during and after a meeting or convention, or for planners to know what attendees are thinking at any step along the way. As a result, more and more planners are being captivated by technology.
Jonathan Gray is outreach manager at Tallahassee, FL-based Florida Telecommunications Relay, which supplies specialized products to the hard-of-hearing. Meeting planning is among his long list of responsibilities. “From what I see, technology is a growing area of meeting planning and it’s huge,” he said. “There are still so many people out there using the traditional methods of doing everything manually, but I think everyone is leaning toward technology because it’s making things faster and easier. Once planners figure it out and see the benefits of it, they’re not hesitating to use it. Technology is where the future is. Because of what we do and who we are as a company, we’re very excited about technology. In our business, technology is everything, so anything that can help us provide better information or training, we’re probably going to try it.”
Madeleine Brust, director of event strategy at Islandia, NY-based information technology management company CA Inc., noted a more practical and pressing reason why she and other planners are embracing new capabilities. “Over the years, the meeting planning position has become busier and busier,” said Brust, 
who planned 10 meetings and conferences last year, ranging from 20 to 6,000 attendees. Her major event is CA World, a user conference produced every 18 months.
“Meeting planners are now asked to cover a lot more than they used to. Years ago, planners were just taking orders. We listened to what people wanted, then acted on it and made sure it ran beautifully. Today, planners are asked to get involved much more strategically. And technologies can only help us do that. They free up time and give us the opportunity to have answers for upper management, and they’re able to report back on how the meeting is going and what the return on investment is.”
Web 2.0 Changes Everything
Greg Meinert, commercial market manager at Norcross, GA-based Siemens Energy & Automation, which sells factory automation products, is one of the many planners just now learning the power of new technologies. He, too, is interested in systems that allow planners and meeting sponsors to know what’s going on with their attendees in real time. “You try to get instant feedback,” said Meinert, who planned 300 meetings and events last year. “You do exit surveys, but you never really know how well you’ve hit the mark.” Now, however, Meinert has recently learned, providers such as iDNA Information Systems, Turning Technologies, Option Technologies Interactive and TouchPoll, among others, offer the ability to know what attendees are thinking as they’re thinking it, a breakthrough capability that allows for a much more sophisticated analysis of the effectiveness of meeting content and delivery.
Corbin Ball, CMP, is one of the most respected meetings-technology experts in the United States. Based in Bellingham, WA, Ball recently served as the leader of the panel of judges for the WorldWide Technology Watch competition sponsored by EIBTM. He explained that fast-growing interest in audience response technologies points to a broader example of the tidal wave of change that is flooding the meeting world with new ideas. “In the corporate arena, the hottest technologies are Web 2.0 and the interactive media,” Ball said. “The current convergence is between user generated content and mobile technologies.” Web 2.0 is an increasingly broad term that simply means participatory use of the Web. It includes RSS news feeds, blogs, podcasts, rich Internet applications and user-generated content, such as wikis. As a result, meeting attendees can now have direct impact before, during and after an event. The latest manifestation is an attendee-to-attendee model, not just planner-to-attendee.
Social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace are playing an emerging role in meetings today — both officially and unofficially — and breakthrough technologies such as SpotMe and nTAG are applying the principles of social networking directly to the meeting environment. More new concepts make their way to the drawing board every day.
“Web 2.0 represents a transformation of the Web, from where you went on to a Web site to read the material, to now, where you go on to a Web site and participate in real time,” Ball said, noting that the next generation of evolution will be migration to wireless mobile technologies, from PDAs to phones. The iPhone, he pointed out, is the perfect example of where technology will ultimately lead. “It’s the best mobile Web browser ever made, and it’s an indication of where all of this is going,” he said. “That opens up a whole range of things. Now you will be able to bring technology with you onsite in a real easy format. That is going to be a huge trend that will really change things. Surveys, audience polling, networking — all of those things will now be transformed by mobile technology.”
Three Areas Of Impact
For now, however, said Paul Paone, the New York-based executive director of Meetings Technology Expo, which will stage four events across the country this year, the impact of technology can be measured by three critical metrics. “The first is the efficiency element,” Paone said. “The second is to enhance the meeting experience, and the third is that it either saves you money or earns you money. Those are the three main issues to look at when you’re assessing these new technologies.”
Paone stressed that the most important general application of technology today is under the banner of the strategic meetings management initiatives that are sweeping the industry as the disciplines of meeting planning and travel procurement are merged into a single, more cost-effective exercise. “In large organizations, corporate travel managers dictate travel compliance to meeting planners, so planners need 
to be the point of convergence between travel management and the individual meetings divisions,” Paone said. “That’s the big issue. Corporate travel managers and meeting planners need to get on the same page, and that’s what this strategic meetings management initiative is all about.”
When it comes to strategic meetings management, the major innovator has been StarCite, the world’s leading provider of on-demand meetings management technology. Last fall, StarCite raised the bar again when it joined forces with American Express Global Commercial Card to offer a new technology solution that combines sourcing and planning with payment and reconciliation. The partnership merges AMEX’s expertise in paying for and analyzing meeting spend with StarCite’s e-sourcing and planning tools in an innovative Web-based solution. It creates a true one-stop-shop for controlling and analyzing meeting expenditures.
StarCite will also debut another important innovation this spring, as a result of an alliance with Orbitz Worldwide Corporate Travel Solutions Group, that will allow attendees to book travel on Orbitz for Business and Travelport for Business directly from the StarCite attendee management application.
“StarCite is the clear leader in sourcing,” Ball said. “But there are other players.” He and others cited GetThere.com, Concur, Cliqbook, Lenos Software and Arcaneo as innovative providers who offer viable alternatives to the StarCite model. “And there will continue to be more companies,” Ball said, “because sourcing is such an important part of the automated meeting planning process.”
In November, Concur announced One Touch Business Travel, the next generation of its Concur Travel & Expense service. Powered by SmartExpense, the new Concur capability combines travel expenses, payment and analytics into one easy to use application that can be personalized for individual clients.
Converting Planners
Meinert is one meeting planner who learned first-hand for the first time last year what new technologies can do. He used the CineMeetings & Events service of National CineMedia to replace hotel meeting rooms with movie theaters in 45 locations across the country for a safety training seminar for Siemens customers. Averaging 50 to 200 attendees per location, Meinert achieved an attendance rate much higher than Siemens had anticipated, based on prior events. “We had a much higher turnout, per location, than we had ever had in the past — roughly double,” he said. “And then, our very aggressive goal was to have half of attendees be new customers — and we actually exceeded that as well.”
The new solution also offered important logistical benefits. “I didn’t have to worry about going out and finding 45 hotels, or catering, and we also saved money on a cost-per-person basis,” Meinert said.
As part of the service, National CineMedia produced a 90-minute film that boasted a panel of experts Meinert would never have been able to assemble in one place at one time. The A-list cast of presenters, in turn, served as a key catalyst for record-breaking attendance. Even better, Meinert said, the visual drama and physical comfort of movie theaters made the presentation of important content much more palatable, while the all-star panel enhanced the company’s market image.
For Gray, a need to get feedback from major trade shows prompted the use of TouchPoll, one of the leading audience response and research capabilities currently on the market. Gray discovered it two years ago at a trade show he attended. “We realized, hey this is a pretty neat thing and maybe we can use it to our advantage,” he said.
Last year, Florida Telecommunications Relay deployed TouchPoll for the first time at an outreach conference where it wanted to learn more about awareness levels among the hard-of-hearing population in Florida. Company leaders say its benefits were obvious from the start. “When people came to our booth, we 
got them to take a poll,” Gray said. “The great thing about TouchPoll is that it’s totally customizable, so we customize the surveys of the groups we’re trying to reach. We always try to capture general information, such as name awareness. Then we get into more specific information from that specific group. For example, do they know there is specialized equipment available from us for the hard-of-hearing? Did you know there is a distribution facility in your area?”
The new technology has had significant impact on their business. “TouchPoll crunches the data for us, and we get back a very detailed report of what happened at that particular event,” Gray said. “For example, we might find at a particular event that there are a lot of hard-of-hearing people in the Miami area who had no idea that we have a distribution facility in the area. That, in turn, tells us that we need to do a media blitz to people ages 60–75 in the Miami area that promotes the fact that they can go to a specific location and get served. So it helps us focus our outreach advertising.”
In addition, Gray said, TouchPoll saves him a lot of money over the cost of traditional marketing research — and also solves a unique problem. Hard-of-hearing people often don’t answer their telephones, making them difficult to reach in standard telephone surveys.
As a result of his success with one new technology at trade shows he attends, Gray is now open to applying new technologies to his own meetings. Because he is currently more interested in feedback than anything else, his next decision will be on an audience response provider to service the company’s offsite meetings. He says based on what he has heard so far, he likes what iDNA Information Systems is delivering. He also has an interest in webcasting as a new way of delivering training content to contractors across Florida. He plans to outsource that service once he has decided on a provider.
An Early Adopter
Brust, meanwhile, has been a dedicated user for the past seven years of Passkey, an online reservation and room inventory management system that was among the pioneers of modern meetings technology. She uses it for CA World, which draws 6,000 attendees to four major hotels in Las Vegas.
“We use it to manage all of our housing, for customers and for staff,” Brust said. “And we have about 2,000 staff members who attend this conference, in addition to the 6,000 attendees. From the customer perspective, we set up a Web site with a link from our conference Web site so they can register and then move on to housing,” she explained. “They go into the system, and there is a seamless transfer over to the Passkey application. They can put their dates in and they are given a choice of hotels, based on availability. So they select their hotel and input their credit card and they are given a confirmation number. The information is stored within the Passkey database until we’re ready to send it over to the hotels.”
Brust uses Passkey in conjunction with an online registration system from Jack Morton. The registration application rolls over to Passkey for actual reservations and room inventory management.
Like other planners, Brust has reaped a big reward from her use of technology.
“By far, the most important benefit to me, as a planner, is the fact that we’re able to control the room inventory and manage it,” she said. “Previously, using old systems, it was very manual. We would rely on hotels sending us spreadsheets so that we would know what we had picked up on a nightly basis. This way, we have an instant snapshot, and we can go into Passkey and know exactly where we are, on a nightly basis, for each property. We can also look at it by room type and by room block,” she said.
“So, we’re also able to manage the inventory by moving it around from one block to another. That way, we ensure an even flow across the board to maximize the number of rooms that we use, and therefore reduce the amount of attrition we would have to pay for at the end of the conference,” Brust said.
“We were paying attrition costs in most of our hotels the old way. Now, we have it down to little or no attrition. It is also a benefit to the hotels, which can go into Passkey and see where the pickup is,” Brust explained. “We move inventory around from one night to another. We’ll say to a hotel, ‘If you take 50 rooms from Wednesday and give us an additional 50 rooms on Tuesday, it evens out the flow and we’re more likely to fill the rooms.’ The hotels would much rather have bodies in the rooms than collect attrition.”
CA Inc., a leading provider of information technology management services, has also developed an internal IT capability that manages all of the sessions at Brust’s meetings. Now, she is looking at social networking tools as another way of bringing her events to the cutting edge.
One Comprehensive Tool
Looking to the future, Paone explained where technology must lead in order to be universally adapted. “When you’re looking at the overall picture of what’s at the core of everyone’s meeting program, I think it’s a matter of managing all of the technologies and putting them together into one comprehensive tool that has interrelated workings, from a group of interrelated technologies,” he said. The key, Paone said, will be a coordinated application of customized technologies to a broad spectrum of strategic meetings management initiatives tailored to the goals of individual enterprises. “It has to come from management, from the top down,” he said.
“The biggest issue in meeting planning today is that you have a very fragmented process, you have a lot of players. So the problem is to unravel their technology programs to build them back into something that is compliant across the spectrum — and look at it as a single, seamless process.” Only a few companies have met that standard so far, he said. Instead, most companies and a clear majority of meeting planners still use just individual capabilities, such as a sourcing and booking tool or attendee registration software, rather than a truly integrated platform. However, he insisted, such a seamless, long-term plan will be the wave of the future.
Ultimately, in response to the demands of strategic meetings management directives and the increasing influence of travel procurement managers, planners will be able to capture all of the data required to quantify and analyze every penny spent on meetings. But, Paone acknowledged, only a handful of the most progressive companies, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, can do that now.
Ball noted the other challenge that planners who are looking at technology face today. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution,” he said, adding that it is no longer possible or practical to reduce burgeoning categories of meetings technology down to a top-three shopping list based on an easy, industry-wide assessment of what’s out there. “There are 190 online registration products out there, or more, so you can’t really talk about top-three any more,” Ball said. “A specific type of capability that is important to one planner is not going to be important to another planner.”
Both Ball and Paone also pointed out that another hurdle that technology must clear before it can reach universal application is an accepted system of standards of the type that have evolved in virtually all other tech sectors. That simply means that various systems must be able to communicate with one another compatibly before they can be integrated into the type of comprehensive platform that Paone and others see as the future. “Standards will have a major impact,” Ball said. “When you can truly standardize, that opens up a whole range of ways in which these applications can get much better. Providers just have to agree on how they can communicate with each other. That’s the key stumbling block right now.”
However, Ball cautioned, technology is here to stay — and its transformation of the meetings industry will accelerate rapidly now. His advice to planners who so far have resisted it is to get on board — or pay a potentially high price. “The message is that digital Darwinism is alive and well,” Ball said. “If you’re not using these tools, you won’t be as competitive as those planners who are. Planners who are using these technologies correctly and effectively will be more efficient and will survive in the long run.” C&IT