From Sue:
Content makes top of planners' list
Forget rates, accessibility, staff, and F&B costs--according to this survey by YPB&R, both corporate and association planners said the thing about which they are most concerned is “making the agenda relevant.”
This is great news. Sue makes the point that the survey results could be interepreted to imply that planners are finally looking at their meetings strategically instead of tactically. And she's likely right on that account.
To me, this is more proof that the big tech conferences - where "content was king" - aren't really dead. Their spirit lives on.
Another example: There was a post on MIMlist today referring to an article in Meeting Focus about informal networks. The author suggests this is a trend that planners need to incorporate in their meetings.
Anyone who's done tech conferences (and more recently marketing, business, legal and insurance among other subjects) has been managing informal networks for quite some time. We called them 'SIGs', among other things.
The SIG meetings we used to run in conjunction with our tech conferences were roughly equivalent to a blogger meetup of today. Some opinion leaders with name value were brought into lead discussions that attracted many of their followers, who in turn invited others, resulting in some tremendously boisterous and compelling conversations.
In other words, you could say that the "innovations" we're seeing in the meetings press today were all done by the Internet World in 1998.
It was good to be the king.
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