During the 2013 Cisco Live conference, the social media monitoring team was able to instantly respond to attendee questions, as well as deliver real-time attendee feedback to the company’s executives so that changes to meeting content could be made on the fly. Credit: Cisco
Over the last year, the progressive use of mobile technology and social media to enhance the quality of meetings has become a cutting-edge best practice. For many companies and their meeting planners, however, the ever-expanding range of new options and often dauntingly complex decision-making process has become as much of a hindrance as it has a potential innovation.
To provide practical examples of the effective use of such capabilities, Corporate & Incentive Travel talked with three practitioners who are setting the standard for attendee engagement and feedback.
CISCO
Leading the Way
Cisco, based in San Jose, CA, is a global technology leader whose meeting-related innovations, such as Telepresence HD videoconferencing, have had a profound impact on the evolution of the industry in recent years. It’s no surprise, then, that Cisco is also a highly innovative creator of mobile technology and social media.
The company has a clear objective in mind when it comes to the increasingly complex deployment of technology, says Kathleen Mudge, who oversees the use of mobile technology and social media to support the company’s major events, such as its annual Cisco Live user conference, which draws 20,000 in-person attendees and generates 135,000 qualified page views of meeting content online.
“You have to make it very easy and simple for people to get quick answers to whatever questions they have about the event, or to communicate messages out to them.”
— Kathleen Mudge, Mobile Technology and Social Media, Manager, Cisco, San Jose, CA
“Everything is based on the event’s goal, on what we’re trying to accomplish with the meeting or event,” Mudge says. “And for us, that is to connect the Cisco brand with our attendees. We have found there is no better way than social media and mobile apps to do that. And that’s largely because people have smartphones with them now at all times, everywhere they go. And that means that what they use to find information is their fingers — from wherever they are, including at a meeting. So we want to make sure we use that knowledge to make the event as enjoyable and productive as we can for our attendees. The way we do that is with mobile apps and social media.”
For Cisco, the key is attention to personal connectivity. For example, some attendees use Facebook as their go-to social media tool, Mudge says. Others use Twitter. Still others use LinkedIn. “So today, you have to make sure you are connected to all of those people by being integrated into the social media tool they prefer to use,” she says. “The basic reality is you have to make it very easy and simple for people to get quick answers to whatever questions they have about the event, or to communicate messages out to them.”
Cisco uses mobile apps and social media to get out all information about its major meeting. However, it also uses such technologies in more sophisticated ways than most other companies.
For example, during Cisco Live, the meeting technology team reports up to executive management the attendee feedback they are getting, such as the hottest sessions or the most common questions or comments about the company. “And if management asks ‘What are people saying about this or that?’ I am able to quickly collect that data and tell them,” Mudge says. “That means that management can get the information it needs to make quick adjustments to the meeting, even if that means changing something for the very next day, such as the content of the CEO’s keynote speech or a breakout session.”
To do all of the things Cisco wants done, Mudge oversees a state-of-the-art technology platform that is grounded in its Active Networks/StarCite meeting management system.
Key additional components include Salesforce.com’s Radian 6 and Cisco’s own SocialMiner to gather information and generate feedback. Of particular significance is the fact that Radian 6 and SocialMiner allow them to set precise parameters of what data they wanted filtered into their overall information stream.
“There is a ton of information out there now around any event, so you have to control what it is you want and what you want to do with it,” Mudge says. “For example, you can call out individual words or phrases that you’re most interested in as a way of monitoring what is going on in conversations. You just have to distill everything down to learn exactly what you want to know.”
Social media also plays a key role in the overall effort. For Cisco Live, the company creates a dedicated Facebook page, and Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
And last year, the company upped the ante when it comes to social media. “Before, we were just listening to the conversations taking place around the meeting and responding and connecting with attendees,” Mudge says. “But last year, we made a really big change. The social media staff that supports the meeting was increased from three or four people in prior years to 12 people at peak times. And what that enabled us to do was actually create content we could send out during the meeting, as well as monitor and respond to attendee comments and questions even more quickly.”
Given the fact that ongoing communication with and feedback from attendees is among the company’s core goals, the efforts have been a spectacular success, Mudge says. For example, thousands of attendees send out tweets that are often re-tweeted. “In effect, they go viral within the company and that really helps us foster communication around the Cisco Live event,” she says.
Because their technology activity is so comprehensive, Cisco deploys a formal command center at Cisco Live.
And, Mudge says, she does not know of another company, in any industry, that has taken things to the level Cisco has.
“We like to think of ourselves as the gold standard,” she says. “That’s a very big part of the Cisco brand.”
MATTRESS FIRM
Teachable Moments
Mattress Firm, based in Houston, TX, is the world’s largest bedding retailer, with about 1,200 stores in the U.S. The company hosts more than 100 meetings each year, many of them training sessions.
For the last 18 months, Cory Ludens, vice president of learning and development, and his dedicated internal technology team, have been looking at and developing social media and mobile technology tools to support their meetings. “We have a relatively young work force,” Ludens says. “And that means they are pretty tech-savvy and friendly. So we began to realize more and more that a way to reach that audience was to utilize some of the tools they were already used to using.”
“Everybody wants to use technology now. And it’s really changing the way business is conducted and meetings are held. And that’s especially true of large events, such as our annual sales conference.”
— Corey Ludens, V.P. Learning and Development, Mattress Firm, Houston, TX
However, he says, he quickly learned that it’s not just millennials who have become enthusiastic adopters of the latest technology. “Everybody has, really — even baby boomers,” Ludens says. “Everybody wants to use technology now. And it’s really changing the way business is conducted and meetings are held. And that’s especially true of large events, such as our annual sales conference.”
After extensive research and investigation, Mattress Firm teamed with San Francisco-based technology provider Taptera to create a customized version of its mobile meeting support platform. They introduced it at this year’s BEDTalks annual sales and leadership conference.
“We utilized the app as a communication vehicle before, during and after the meeting,” Ludens says. “So whereas before, if we had been sending things via email or uploading stuff to a website, whether it’s learning material or one of the talks being given at the conference, or some kind of new procedure we’re putting into place at the event, in the past much of that would just have been distributed via email.”
The Taptera app has also reduced old-school meeting-related costs such as printing. “We have our annual leadership conference coming up in early 2014,” Ludens says. “Based on our experience with the app at this year’s meeting (2013), we made the strategic decision to not print attendee workbooks any more. In fact, we’re not printing anything anymore for attendees to use onsite at our event. Everything is now being done within the app.”
That will save more than $20,000 at the 2014 conference, money that will be reinvested into things that make the meeting better, without increasing its total budget.
Ludens also integrated an innovative social media platform called Chatter, from Salesforce.com, into the Taptera app. “Out of the box, the app did not have an integration with Chatter, so we made the business case for doing that,” Ludens says. “And then we worked with Taptera to have them build in connectivity with Chatter. And then one thing we saw right away was attendees using Chatter, within the Taptera app, to take notes during the meeting.”
The app also allows attendees to directly link their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to connect with each other. “And that’s one of the things from my perspective, as the planner of a growing event, that is most important,” Ludens says. “We had fewer than 200 attendees at our annual conference three years ago. But our company is growing very, very rapidly. That meant that this year we had more than 650 attendees. So there are a lot of people now coming to this meeting who are new to the company, and they don’t know a lot of our other people from around the country. The tool helps us get people to know each other and connect.”
Ludens and his team have further improved their app by integrating with the information aggregation and distribution platform pioneered by Box.com. “We wanted to start using Box as a distribution point for content, background materials and so on,” Ludens says. “So we also used the Taptera app to introduce Box to the rest of the company.”
That capability also helps support the event down the road. As a matter of course, for some time Mattress Firm has repackaged and distributed all of the basic content and support materials from their conference after the event and distributed it to attendees as a way of reinforcing the educational aspect of the meeting. That includes PowerPoint presentations and videos.
“The challenge to doing that, in the past, was that it took us a few weeks to get all of that stuff together and distributed,” Ludens says. “And that meant people would start to say, ‘Well the meeting was four weeks ago and I still don’t have the stuff from the meeting. I want it now.’ So this year, we loaded everything on to Box.com and then used the Taptera app to drive attendees to Box to get it. And that meant they had it immediately.”
And in turn, Ludens says, that broader, more sophisticated, capability helps its 350 field leaders do a better job of training throughout the year.
SONIC DRIVE-IN
Smartphone as Meeting Hub
Sonic Drive-In, headquartered in Oklahoma City, has 3,500 franchisee-owned fast food restaurants in 44 states. Its annual sales conference, held each September to kick off the company’s new fiscal year, draws 2,500 owner-operator attendees.
By attending meetings hosted by other organizations, Christi Woodworth, veteran meeting planner turned director of digital communication and social media, learned that the capability existed to post an entire meeting agenda, and all related communication and attendee feedback to a smartphone. “We wanted to bring that capability to our own meeting, because we typically have three or four concurrent breakout sessions going on at any given time,” Woodworth says. “So we wanted to better understand, on the front end, before attendees even arrived for the meeting, what sessions they found most interesting and which ones they intended to attend.”
“We wanted to better understand, on the front end, before attendees even arrived for the meeting, what sessions they found most interesting and which ones they intended to attend.”
— Christi Woodworth, Director, Digital Communications and Social Media, Sonic Drive-In, Oklahoma City, OK
The capability also has helped the meeting planning team do a better job of creating sessions and content that is perceived as being worthwhile. In the past, meeting planners and hosts essentially imposed on attendees whatever they believed to be most important, Woodworth notes. Today, the process is increasingly being democratized by interactivity and feedback — a trend that translates into more successful meetings and an enhanced planning process.
To help develop the capabilities the company wanted, Sonic Drive-In relied on BCD M&I, which has been their meeting management company for the past 11 years, to advise them on mobile technology options. For their 2011 and 2012 annual franchisee conventions, the company used the Zerista mobile platform. This year, they switched to QuickMobile, which bills itself as “the complete, paperless event guide.”
“Zerista was a good introduction for us into mobile apps for the first couple of years,” Woodworth says. “But for this year, and going forward, we used QuickMobile because of its additional capabilities, such as so-called ‘gamification.’ ” That means the ability to integrate with tools such as FourSquare or even Facebook by engaging attendees in game-related content that will ultimately offer them the chance to win rewards. “We give away prizes on the last day of the meeting,” Woodworth explains. “And one of the ways to become eligible for the grand prize is to play one of our games. For example, we’ve taken things like scavenger hunts and turned them into virtual games through the mobile app. And in turn, that has helped us do things like track traffic to specific vendor booths or how many came into a general session.”
Attendee engagement via QuickMobile and its gamification capabilities has meant that Sonic Drive-In can promote certain sessions they deem most important by giving them more weight in the gaming process. “We give people incentives via the games to motivate them to do what we’re most interested in having them do, such as attend a particular session,” Woodworth says.
She predicts that such gamification of corporate meetings will increase. “People already use their smartphones to play games all the time,” she says. “So why not add a level of game playing to a meeting or event that is supposed to be fun for attendees anyway? That just adds another element of fun to the event.”
Even more important than gamification, however, is the app’s ability to deliver a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute meeting agenda on a smartphone.
“Our franchisees love the fact they can just look at their smartphone and know where the next session is they want to attend,” Woodworth says. “They don’t have to look around for some printed agenda or booklet. And we don’t have to spend the money anymore to print those things.”
Another key benefit of the QuickMobile platform: It has allowed for better attendee-exhibitor engagement. “It makes it easier for attendees to find exhibitors and to set up appointments,” Woodworth says. “So since we do a trade show as part of our event, that was very popular with both exhibitors and attendees. It also allowed us to create more sponsorship opportunities.”
In the future, Woodworth thinks mobile technology will have more and more impact on the planning of meetings and the attendee experience. “Right now, I’d say the technology is still in its infancy,” she says. “I don’t think many people would say it’s mature. So that just means it’s going to get better and better going forward, because planners will be able to do more and more things that have a positive impact on the outcome of the meeting.” C&IT
Terry Matthews-Lombardo, CMP, is a case study in industry longevity, having held jobs on both the supplier and planner sides since graduating “a very long time ago” with a degree in hotel management. Terry has learned a lot during a lifetime of planning meetings and events in more than 40 countries around the globe, and says that contrary to popular opinion you mostly really do sweat the small stuff in this industry. Working out of Orlando, FL, as an independent trip director, meeting manager and freelance industry writer, she continues to attempt to solve world problems (or at least industry challenges) from one hotel lobby bar to the next. She can be reached at TML Services at 
Mary MacGregor joined 
Chuck Jones is the Chief Marketing Officer for Omnience, an Atlanta, GA-based company specializing in technology for maximizing the ROI of marketing events. 
For the first time in five years , professional meeting planners are generally optimistic that the industry is once again healthy , and that although it might never return to the free-spending days before the recession, the dark clouds that once loomed over it are gone. But just as the overall 2014 meetings industry outlook is positive, there are serious concerns, too, most of them related to rising costs that must be reconciled against budgets that are not growing.