Technologies Impacting Business Visual, Tiny, and Powerful. Several mega-trends are making an impact on business today, and the ramifications for the meetings industry are nothing short of profound. Here are a few that I see in several countries I've visited around the world:

• Video In the past, only the big-budget television and Hollywood producers could generate content. Today it is economical, and the quality of the tools has increased to the point where the average person can capture life as it happens.
• Bandwidth-powered Internet This is not your father's Internet! It is a community-driven, video-enriched medium that connects the planet as never before. The speed of the Net will only increase.
• Miniaturization. Cell phones are becoming more powerful and smaller. PDAs are a must-have as people get rid of watches and embrace technology. All of this has profound impact for business and the meetings industry. We can't offer programs as before and expect members to keep coming back. Welcome to the revolution!
  Terry Brock President & CEO, Achievement Systems Inc.,
  speaks regularly about marketing and technology.
  (www.TerryBrock.com)

Omni-directional Communication

The "democratization" of content has emerged as an essential piece of entertainment, advertising, marketing communication, and business communication. The listed order is not capricious - trends migrate from more experimental, entertainment-based technologies and concepts into the world of advertising and marketing before being institutionalized in the broader business world.

The year 2007 may be benchmarked as the year that presidential debates were democratized, eclipsing staged "town halls" by offering the opportunity for those with access to YouTube to create video questions for the candidates. From network television to global corporate communication, to services accessible to businesses of every size and configuration, is a very small step.

Technology linked to the Internet has made possible open communication of individual tastes, ideas, and aspirations. The ease and importance of that one-to-one communication will continue to shape business thinking and practice going forward. Business communication is no longer uni- or even bi-directional. It is omni-directional, and that changes everything.
Martha Rogers, Ph.D.
Founding Partner, Peppers& Rogers Group, a division of Carlson Marketing Worldwide, and Co-author, Return on Customer (www.1to1.com)

A Host of Boundaries Smashed

Technology smashes boundaries. Globalization may be the most visible clue, but the boundaries smashed are not just geographic. They are the boundaries between industries, between employees, and between customers. Technology allows customers to share their experiences electronically with the world. Violate a customer's trust today and risk being outed in front of millions. So be careful, because you can't un-Google yourself.

Technology changes the rate of change, as the pace of innovation accelerates. Which means no matter how great your product or service is today, tomorrow it will still be just another commodity, and tomorrow comes faster than it used to.

Technology has flattened organizational charts, enabling the lowliest employee to leap tall hierarchies in a single click, so corporate culture is now the most important management tool a business has. What kind of culture can earn the trust of customers and the enthusiasm of employees, as well as facilitate a climate of innovation?

Don Peppers
Founding Partner, Peppers& Rogers Group, and
1to1 Media, Co-author, Rules to Break & Laws
to Follow, Return on Customer, Managing Customer
Relationships, and the 1to1 business book series (www.1to1.com)

Changing Behavior - Permanently

Technology permanently changes behavior. Today, rapid advances in three areas - processing power, bandwidth, and storage - are coming together to create amazing new products and services over the next several years: cell phones with high-definition TV, voice-enabled applications, and mobile commerce, just to name a few. These coming changes will impact business just as the cell phone and iPod have changed behaviors. And when your members, exhibitors, and customers change their behavior, you'd better be paying attention.

However, in today's high-tech world with video conferencing and Web meetings, there's nothing more powerful than being face-to-face and building relationships, and that takes place at physical meetings. That need will always be there. The key is to blend the relationship-building aspects of our physical meetings with the pizzazz that new technologies are bringing to make sure all of our meetings are delivering even higher levels of learning, sharing, and commerce.
Daniel Burrus
A leading technology forecaster and business
strategist and the author of six books, including
Technotrends (www.Burrus.com)

Social Engagement Marketing

The Internet is greatly impacting social interaction, fueled by a dramatic surge in the popularity of social networks, as exemplified by the outstanding success of MySpace, which now numbers more than 196 million member accounts - a figure that surpasses the population of Brazil, the world's fifth largest country.

While consumers are busier than ever, they seem to enjoy carving out a significant part of their day to devote to social networking. Their changing consumption patterns are already reverberating through the media landscape, where media use per person has dropped for the first time in a decade, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

Not surprisingly, companies are clamoring to be part of this new social landscape. But while marketers want to go where the eyeballs are, they're wrestling with a host of issues specific to the new models of user-generated-content media and word-of-mouth marketing.

These converging trends point to a future where both consumers and marketers will be able to avail themselves of better social engagement tools that provide consumers a superior real-time view of their social interactions, and brands a more engaging way of reaching those difficult-to-please consumers. Michael Tchong
A trend analyst, transformational speaker,
and serial entrepreneur on the potential of
new technologies (www.Ubercool.com)

Technologies for Meeting Planning

Watch for New On-site Services

Web 2.0 technologies (including blogs, RSS newsfeeds, Wikis, social networking software) will impact how association meeting planners plan and market meetings and how members and meeting attendees interact with their association.

Also, we're seeing the convergence of three technology trends:
1) The migration of software to the Web as the delivery mechanism (application service providers).
2) The ubiquity of broadband wireless Internet access (via phone, Wi-Fi, Wimax, and others).
3) The development of more capable smart phones with rich Web-browsing capabilities (such as the iPhone), mapping/GPS capabilities, and micropayment technologies such as Near Field Communications (NFC).

These three converging trends will open the door in the next two to three years for a wide range of on-site services including: Web-based ad hoc on-site audience polling; rich lead retrieval for everyone using NFC; GPS-based services to help people find their way at events; phone-based events registration and ticketing; on-site surveys; YouTube-like events marketing, and several events-based networking applications.
Corbin Ball, CSP, CMP, Corbin Ball Associates
(www.corbinball.com)

Convergence and Collaboration

As the technologies that affect our industry (and all industries) continue to mature, association meeting professionals will focus on two threads - convergence and collaboration.

Convergence will allow planners to use technologies for multiple purposes on site. Imagine an attendee's mobile device as meeting program, name badge, and hotel room key. The planner will be able to send program information, session handouts, conference daily newspapers, and much more directly to the devices. Hotels will also be involved, as conference attendees will be using their mobile device as their hotel room key, using RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies.

Collaboration will affect these devices (as they will certainly be able to communicate with each other), and have an enormous impact on how Web-based tools are created and used. If you haven't started blogging to members or conference attendees or uploading podcasts of keynote speakers (for sales or marketing purposes), you're not taking advantage of the new communication tools. Perhaps most importantly, by establishing community wikis (Web sites to which everyone can collectively add content), you encourage members to redefine available content and hopefully re-establish the organization as their industry's thought leader.
James Spellos
CMP, President, Meeting U.
(www.meeting-u.com)

Multi-point Events

More than 40 years ago, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore correctly predicted that computer processing power would double every 18 months or so while prices would stay constant. Moore's Law, as it came to be known, basically says that technology gets twice as good for the same price every year-and-a-half.

Seems like technology leapfrogs itself every 18 days, not months! We love new gadgets and software that let us all do cool new things, but sometimes it gets overwhelming. As we find novel ways to meet and communicate - text and instant messaging, Web conferences, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, and the list continues to expand - I worry that the human side of getting together in a physical setting could be lost.

Meeting professionals must adopt the new technologies and learn to apply them appropriately.

Future meetings will be a blend of the physical and virtual, offering multiple opportunities to "meet," and transforming traditional events into multi-point happenings available globally throughout the year. Jeffrey Rasco
CMP, President, Attendee Management Inc., which provides online registration and other
interactive solutions for housing, travel,
and e-marketing, as well as content management
(www.attendeenet.com)

Content Delivery

Digital Services
If the content delivered at your meeting is the most important part of your meeting, then making sure that content is available to everyone should be equally important. Attendees should not have to pick and choose which sessions to attend because of overlapping schedules or limited space; they should be able to see everything.

Today's digital technology can completely change your meetings. At the meeting, you can digitally expand your meeting room space in a variety of ways, either instantly or for future playback. Presentations, audio and video, can be available immediately for those who could not attend a session. After the meeting you can deliver all your content in many ways, such as streaming media and podcasts, to accommodate all of your members. And you can integrate testing for continuing education purposes.

If your meeting delivers the most content, it will attract the most attendees.
Brent Rogers
National Director of Digital Services, AVW-TELAV
(www.avwtelav.com)

Greater Visual Impact
Providing visual impact to keep attendees focused on meeting content is increasingly important. Studies show that 93 percent of communication comes from how a presentation looks and feels, not from the words themselves - it's all about audio and visual clues. Meeting attendees accustomed to high-definition television and flat-panel displays are increasingly sophisticated in their expectations and require richer media than PowerPoint slides.

Planners also are looking for "greener technologies." For example, an LED stealth screen serves the multiple purposes of speaker support, background imagery and scenic applications, all using less power than traditional lighting.

As the MySpace and YouTube generation emerges as meeting participants, so will mobilization and personalization. In moving beyond the actual meeting space, technology allows attendees to view the meeting live in the comfort of their guest room, or view missed sessions.
Digby Davies
President and CEO, PSAV Presentation Services
(www.psav.com)

What the Next Generation Thinks

Virtual Can Be Practical
Although face-to-face communication is ideal, it is not always practical or available. With much skepticism, I attended my first virtual meeting, and to my surprise I found it quite enjoyable. I simply logged onto my computer and dialed a telephone number from the comfort of my office. The virtual platform permitted the meeting's host to poll participants, who could take control of the computer screen to comment, instant-message each other, or pose a question anonymously.

At a meeting/convention, I would find it convenient and efficient to receive both text and e-mail messages announcing room/speaker changes. Also, presentations should be available online prior to the meeting, so participants can make notes on PDAs or laptops rather than frantically scribbling down every word presenters say. The more participants are engaged in the meeting, the more meaningful it tends to be, so audience response systems will become more prevalent.

I do not believe technology will change the mission of associations and their meetings - to provide a platform for education, networking, and research. Technology will simply facilitate new ways of accomplishing their objectives.
Matthew Ardakanian
Senior at the University of Delaware;
Two-time PCMA/Roy B. Evans Scholarship Winner

Relate to Changing Lifestyles
Because the generations entering the workforce have been so tapped into technologies and applications such as blogging, wikis, and RSS feeds, and social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, the more that associations can utilize those tools, the more they will be able to relate their organizations to the lifestyles of the younger generations. It won't necessarily change the fundamental mission of associations, but it may cause them to restructure.

These technologies, when used with purpose, have the ability to enhance face-to-face meetings. We meet many people in life and online due to serendipity or link-to-link Web browsing. At conferences, people can strategically connect with others who are interested in the same topics or have skill sets or experiences to learn about or emulate. If you've connected with someone online, you can make an appointment to meet at a conference to continue the online conversation and connect with others by way of personal introductions. Industry blogs and wikis, like traditional news sources, also make for good conversational segues.

Helen Davisson
President, GW Tourism for Tomorrow, student in Master of Tourism Administration Program,
The George Washington University,
and PCMA/Roy B. Evans Scholarship Winner