The content of today’s meetings must generate enthusiasm before, enlightenment during, and clear retention afterward
As strategic meetings management continues to evolve and expand its influence, the prism through which it is scrutinized becomes more and more complex. In the shadow of high priority concerns such as cost savings or regulatory compliance, one core issue that often gets overlooked is the fundamental importance of meeting content – and how it can be promoted and nurtured before, during and after a meeting or event.
And the context of that consideration stretches far beyond the basic logistical details of a meeting.
“I think the issue really comes down to a company’s business objectives and how you maximize your investment in a meeting or event,” says Christine Erickson, senior director, business development, North America, at CWT Meetings & Events, a specialized division of global travel management company Carlson Wagonlit. “One of the ways you can do that is by expanding the experience beyond the meeting or event itself – before and after. Doing that helps you ensure that you’re driving results that align with your business objectives.”
Erickson also points out that so-called “attendee engagement” has been a buzzword in the meeting industry for years. More and more, she says, the key ingredient in engagement is the relevance and clearly established importance of the meeting’s content and the ability to extend its life cycle before and after a meeting.
Mark McDonald, director of customer relations and events at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., says, “That is a very important topic to us, because we spend good money on meetings and events. To extend the meeting content beyond the three days or five days of the meeting is critically important in terms of getting more out of the money we spend.”
Goodyear hosts about 400 meetings and events a year, according to McDonald, with 20 of them being of major importance. “And it’s for those 20 major meetings that we’re most concerned about extending content both forward and backwards,” he says.
In the pre-SMM past, McDonald notes, companies traditionally “spent a ton of money on the meeting or event, but nothing to extend the impact of the content before or after the meeting.”
In addition, in the case of Goodyear, dealers must pay their own airfare and hotel costs to attend events such as the company’s annual dealer conference. So the appeal and drawing power of the meeting’s content – and awareness of and enthusiasm for it beforehand – is essential to the success of the meeting, says Kathryn Bowling, Goodyear’s account executive at leading global meeting management company and SMM consultant BCD M&I.
“If you look at attendance at their annual conference, it continues to rise,” Bowling says. “That means that the meat of the meeting is considered relevant and important. People want to come because of the content and messaging that will be delivered at the meeting.”
The Goodyear Approach
McDonald and his team use a few basic but proven tactics to maximize the impact of the company’s meeting content.
One is a dedicated website, built within Goodyear’s password protected Intranet so that only authorized users can access it. The site promotes the meeting as soon as it is announced and offers an overview of planned content.
“Among the things on that website might be video of our main speaker and profiles of some of the business seminars we’ll be hosting,” McDonald says. “The idea is to present enough information to have people take the time to go through it to learn about the purpose of the meeting and brief review of what will be discussed. But we don’t go too far in-depth either. It’s more of a ‘tease.’”
After the meeting, McDonald uses the website to preserve all of the information presented at the meeting. “For example,” he says, “we had our major annual dealer conference in January for all of our dealers from the US and Canada. And we actually built a website where all of the materials related to that conference, including all of the speeches and presentations from our executives, were made available for up to six months after the meeting in what we call our ‘Dealer Toolbox.’”
Another way that such an approach extends content, McDonald says, is that attendees at the meeting – or dealers that did not attend, but who access the content afterward – can share it with others if they consider it important, to their business.
The website also features elements such as new product videos or details on new marketing, sales or promotional programs announced at the meeting. Post-event research has clearly demonstrated that the sites are well-utilized, McDonald says. “There’s no doubt that people are going in there and looking at the materials we provide,” he notes.
Adds BCD M&I’s Bowling: “I would also stress the point that use of those websites does not just relate to all of the dealers that actually attend the conference. But the audience also includes an additional pool that did not attend the meeting. So that is another example of a way to extend important content beyond the meeting itself. And those dealers and others who use the website to get the information, even though they were not at the meeting, feel that they are a bigger part of the overall community as a whole.”
There is also a very practical sales benefit, McDonald says. “One of the other things we get from that process is for a person who was at the meeting to go back to their store and say to their buddies on the sales counter, ‘Hey, there’s a really cool new product that you need to see and I can show it to you on the website.’”
Fundamental Objectives
Beyond the mere mechanics of leveraging content before and after a meeting are a trio of vitally important practical goals, McDonald says.
One is sharper focus before the meeting on what it is about and what its business purpose is. The other is better retention of key information after the event. But the even more important consideration for Goodyear is consistency of messaging.
“By using technology,” McDonald says, “we know that our message is being delivered the same way every time. And we spend a lot of time making sure that’s the case and that people are hearing the exact same message before, during and after the meeting.”
Such ability to deliver consistent messaging throughout the extended life cycle of an event also helps reinforce key points and reduces historical challenges with subjectivity, confusion or lack of shared clarity among the meeting audience.
The Growing Role of Mobile
Over the past two years, the ever-increasing list of meeting-related mobile apps has had a profound impact on the ability to leverage and promote content.
“For our January dealer conference, we used a mobile app that is still active and being used two months later,” McDonald says. “It doesn’t have information that is as extensive as what’s on the website, but it does have things like lists of attendees and vendors on the exhibit floor, with links to their websites. It also has links to relevant product information on our website.”
The app was developed and customized with the SnapApp platform offered by industry leader QuickMobile. The easy-to-use, cost-effective platform allows users to create an almost endless array of customized applications that suit their specific needs.
Bowling explains that Goodyear’s increasing use of mobile technology, including mobile extensions of its event-specific websites, allows the company to target the next generation of its dealers, because mobile technology is ubiquitously popular with younger meeting attendees. “And because Goodyear as a company helps support succession planning within their dealer network,” Bowling says, “part of that is about always adapting to changes in the industry – and one of those is technology and the next generation of dealers that will be coming to meetings in the future.”
The Hot Tool – Gamification
A rapidly growing trend today is the use of so-called gamification to steer meeting attendee attention and guide behavior before, during and after a meeting or event.
Gamification essentially means motivating specific behaviors by offering rewards. For example, it is often used to target attendance at what are considered to be the most important individual sessions within the larger meeting agenda.
“The thing companies are looking at now, when it comes to gamification, is how you can design an interactive experience that can drive engagement or trigger a particular kind of activity or engagement in advance of the meeting,” Erickson says, adding that it is now becoming more common as a pre-event tactic intended to steer attention and behavior. “Gamification is here to stay,” she says. “And it’s now a must-have tool prior to a meeting or event.”
Some CWT Meetings & Events clients use it for the entire life cycle of the meeting, while others use it only before or during the event. However, Erickson estimates that half of CWT’s current clients use gamification to drive content and awareness at some stage of an event’s cycle.
Big Picture Thinking
Beyond tactics such as gamification or a meeting-specific web site, there is a larger key consideration, Erickson says. “And that, as it relates to content, is the underlying purpose of the meeting, or the most important business objective,” she says.
In other words, before specific content can be developed and promoted to attendees, its purpose must be clearly understood. “Right now, especially for large meetings, honing in on the purpose of the event is the big question everyone is asking themselves. Because of that, we see clients now taking a lot more time to look at the purpose of the meeting before they start thinking about the development of specific content.”
At the same time, Erickson says, another current critical concern when it comes to assuring that content will have an ongoing impact after the meeting is creating a reason for attendees to continue to engage beyond the closing session.
“There’s always the human factor of, ‘What’s in it for me?’” Erickson says. “And that’s particularly true of the younger generation. So you have to provide an answer to that question, whether that’s an ongoing contest or the use of social networking, for example, to target people within the organization who are the real opinion influencers. Then you leverage them to drive continued interest and engagement. But the real message is that you have to give people a clear reason to stay engaged.”