maarten.vanneste@meetingsupport.org's blog

In the US, Suggestion is made to offer Socially Responsible (CSR) projects as incentives to sales teams instead of Incentive trips to exotic places, because these kind of incentive trips are putting the whole meetings industry under pressure. Serious Legal restrictions are imposed on Bail-out money receiving companies and some other organisations impose similar restrictions voluntary, for perception’s sake. When a 55.000 participant conference in Las Vegas is cancelled, it really badly hurts our industry and the local economy. And we currently talk about hundreds or thousands of meetings and conferences being cancelled in the US ...

An alternative incentive is a good idea, but so are “alternative” meetings, with a new paradigm. Meetings with more learning and networking elements like we are dissecting and testing today at Meet Different.

We say networking or networking events when we talk about putting people in a room with drinks and music. Yet what happens at such occasions is that most people will find their fiends and enjoy the evening together.  People have the totally acceptable and natural tendency to stay on well-known/safe territory and the amount of networking can be expected to be low.

"Networking is far too important to leave it to receptions and lunches." says Ib Ravn.

And right he is!

Networking is Important. It may even be the final buoy, saving meetings from going under all together, especially in an already challenging economy,

Learning (watching presentations) you can do on-line, but meeting new people, works really only face to face. The power of random; encounters is really unique to meetings: innovations are the sparks that sometimes fly around when one bumps into a stranger at a meeting.

The opening show contained some real loud audience reactions, clapping and screaming: The threats to this industry in the US are real as 55.000 participant conferences are canceled and large companies say “we know this is about perception, we do realize that meetings are business critical, but we cancel all 150 meetings anyway!” After the opening session, several people approached me and said; “Meeting Architecture!” “Strategically ‘anchoring’ meetings to corporation’s strategy is the way to stop these kinds of crisis scenarios for the future and Meeting Architecture will make that happen.”

A few great dinners and meetings took place and more people joined.

We started off with a MA2020 meeting on Sunday morning.

Since 2003 I’m campaigning for freedom of trade and fair competition in our industry.
Some magazines have published editorials, articles and even dedicated covers to the practice that is threatening our industry: the tying of exclusive suppliers by venues. In other words: You want to have your conference here? You will work with who we say!

Let’s not be naïve: the practice is still amongst us. It is barely discussed in the meetings industry: is it taboo?

Long Term Meeting Teams: Saving time and money in the long run.

Procurement, love’m  or hate’m, they are here to stay: one suggestion we should all think about is the creation of Long term Meeting teams.

But we have to admit, some times it is close to Kafka:  Every year again, the sales meeting is started from scratch, with a new pitch sent out to 3, 5, 10 or even more suppliers.