Remember when it was the height of rudeness to be pecking away on your smart phone while in a meeting session? Well, the days of even intermittent disconnect may be over as mobile technology becomes a social force both inside and outside of the meeting room.
Now, one may even hear an educational session presenter implore attendees to power up rather than power down, in order to tweet info nuggets across the room, to a dedicated conference hashtag or across the world via the Internet. Mobile has gone mainstream in a big way, and it is changing the way we meet.
“We’re in a business where we’re going to respond to stuff as our attendees request it,” says James Spellos, a meetings industry technology educator and president of Meeting U. (www.meeting-u.com). “Our industry and meeting planners are going to keep moving toward that as more of their members and attendees have smart phones.
“There’s a huge amount of value to all of the stakeholders in a conference,” he continues. “We’re definitely going to be there, and not in the distant future be there in a big way, starting from the planning organization to push technology, location-based marketing technology, gathering content about their members and going greener by reducing the paper trail of the meeting.”
Purveyors of Mobile Tech
Of course, where there is a need, businesses will be there to fill in the vacuum.
Two such firms include E-proDirect (http://eprodirect.com), based in Boca Raton, Fla., and meetings industry stalwart PSAV Presentation Services (www.psav.com), which operates in more than 800 locations and until recently has primarily been known as a supplier of high-end audiovisual services.
”You can look at our mobile technology as either helping [meeting planners] with their jobs—apps that are developed for meeting planners—and then there’s also apps for meetings and events,” says Tracy Fairman, CEO of E-proDirect. “We do meetings and events. However, we also do several different apps for either hotels or organizations, whether it’s a CVB or an association or corporation. Our main focus is the individual attendee and having that information available for an individual attendee.”
E-proDirect has four different products, all of which are cross-platform, i.e., they work on Blackberry, iOS (iPhones and iPad), Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, and engage individual meetings from the perspective of the attendee, the sponsor and the meeting planner.
“Our philosophy is we should be available to as many attendees as possible,” she says, emphasizing the advantages of operating on multiple platforms.
Fairman says her products can be tailored to the individual needs of each meeting and destination served.
“It has any information you would find in a directory,” she says, “such as hotel information, what restaurants are in the hotel, et cetera. It gives them alerts such as a meeting room change, which planners can send out, and has a schedule of events along with detailed information about speakers and sessions. It can also include handouts from the speakers and also attach speaker evaluations or surveys for individual sessions. We also have maps, exhibitor floor plans, floor plans of the hotel or convention center, the downtown area and detailed exhibitor information, which can be sold via sponsorships.”
Other features include the now-ubiquitous presence of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with information about local dining, entertainment and ground transportation information.
Fairman says e-Pro Direct frequently works with trade show organizer GES (now known as Global Experience Specialists) and has served clients such as the Produce Marketing Association, HelmsBriscoe, the International Dairy Foods Association, Intel and the National Wood Flooring Association, among other big-ticket convention clients.
No matter whom the client, however, the one thing mobile meetings technology should provide is the ability for a meeting planner to push out information as soon as a meeting’s schedule or other details change.
“One of the things we did is offer a dashboard, so any changes can be done—meeting room changes, et cetera,” she says, “along with API [application program interface] solutions, so the meeting planner can set up the computer system to essentially talk to ours, which is mainly used for schedules, so it automatically feeds into that.”
Fairman says that navigating the dashboard is very user-friendly, as it operates via Excel spreadsheets.
Another aspect of mobile meetings technology that shouldn’t be overlooked, and in fact may be the first item to consider, is revenue-generating features that will help pay for the whole thing, and possibly turn a profit.
“The majority of our associations and even our corporation clients look at this as a revenue-generating item,” Fairman says. “And that’s also a way meeting planners can sell it to their boards. They definitely receive money from it rather than just breaking even if they go that route.”
If a meeting planner does decide to venture down the meetings app path, Fairman suggests allowing a fair amount of time in order to make a wise decision.
“Don’t wait until the last minute,” she says. “They should definitely go out to look for a developer as soon as possible, and there are certain questions they should be asking. They really need to work with a partner that is really familiar with meetings and events, and especially the meeting planner side of things.”
The PSAV Presence
Besides e-Pro Direct, one company that fits the bill mentioned above is PSAV Presentation Services, a longtime fixture on the meetings and conventions audiovisual scene, and which operates in more than 800 locations throughout North America and Europe.
PSAV has branched out from its traditional business model of offering high-end conference and convention AV in a big way, with a suite of apps that maximize the attendee experience via social media and revenue-generating possibilities. The firm provides apps that serve facilities and meeting planners.
“Our amenities apps are about the hotel whereas the mobile event apps are about the specific event,” says Steve Short, PSAV’s vice president of interactive services, adding that the company has partnered with software developer QuickMobile to develop high-end mobile meetings apps. “We are in the process off deploying what we’re calling our Mobile Event Express Edition app, which is a streamlined, optimized app that is designed in a short development window, and at a pretty aggressive and low price point. We can turn around a single-device native app, specifically for iPhone, for instance, in six weeks and have it posted on the (Apple) App Store for under $4,000.”
Short says that a multiplatform device serving four operating systems would cost approximately $10,000.
One game-changer developed by PSAV operates on iPads, and really provides a soup-to-nuts mobile meeting solution that is focused on the rapid flow of information and attendee networking.
“The iPad [app] is a premium event app,” he says. “The connectivity is one of the driving forces behind why mobile apps are so relevant and interesting to meeting planners right now, and there’s the whole green aspect—no printers or binders—and it can be updated on the fly. Closely on the heels of that and probably as important is the connectivity—attendee-to-attendee and host-to-attendee.”
Indeed, using PSAV’s iPad app, attendees can instantly network with their peers in a social-media-like format, along with receiving information such as conference room changes, local attractions and transportation, content download and other items.
“For well over a couple years people have been looking for a way to introduce social media into an event—it is a very integrated and natural mobile app,” Short says. “Mobile apps really need to incorporate social media, which is relative to everyone but is really relative to Generation Y. In a certain way, it’s something they demand.”
Short says planners need to realize that offering an event app can greatly expand the horizons of a meeting, and that PSAV has done many events where the apps are preloaded into iPads or iPods and then distributed to attendees.
“We’ve done it for 3,000 attendees and configured the iPod in advance, so all they have to do is turn it on,” Short says.
In the end, PSAV’s product expansion from providing whiz-bang AV at conferences and conventions is more of a product extension in that it facilitates the communication of ideas from meeting organizers to attendees.
“Every meeting is a show, so we’re all about delivering the message,” Short says.
The Mobile Difference
Corbin Ball, one of the most respected experts on mobile technology within the entire meetings industry, stressed some of the key differences mobile provides at the recent HSMAI MEET National.
During his presentation, ‘Mobile Applications for Meetings: How Smart Phones and Tablets are Transforming Events,’ Ball described mobile as ‘the 7th Mass Media Channel’ and stated some of the crucial advantages to mobile tech:
· Mobile is personal;
· It is always on;
· Mobile is carried (so always with you);
· Mobile includes a built-in ‘payment channel’;
· It allows input whenever there’s a creative impulse; and
· Mobile is the only channel that integrates all of the others!
The Need to Know
Spellos says meeting planners should take a few things into consideration before diving into the mobile meetings app deep end.
“I think it’s the usual due diligence,” he advises. “Talk to their peers, look at the resources—Meetingsapps.com is one of our industry’s best meetings apps portals. They also need to be aware of the pitfalls, such as building for a single platform rather than multiple—re iPhone vs. Android.”
Spellos also says that planners should weigh whether to go with a native app or a Web-based app.
“Even though we can state that connectivity in facilities should be seamless, it isn’t,” he says. “What you lose on the connectivity with the native app is the update ability, but what you lose with the Web-based app is everything [if the Internet connectivity is lost].”
More information about weighing the two options is available here: http://mobithinking.com/native-or-web-app.
Spellos points to MPI as being one of the industry associations that has been on the forefront of offering mobile apps, and that another good peer resource can be had by contacting meeting planner colleagues that work in the tech industry, which are always the first adopters of new technology such as mobile meeting apps.
Regardless of what supplier, platform or platforms meeting planners need to choose between, Spellos urges planners to jump in the pool and start swimming, realizing they may make some mistakes along the way.
“I think that everyone in our industry, regardless of what niche they work in, is struggling to keep up with the rate of change in all of this,” he says. “You’re always playing catch-up, but I do think you need to worry about being too far behind. Do you need to be first? There’s always going to be a lot of bugs in the first version of everything, but if you’re too late, how many customers do you lose and how reactive do you need to be to catch up?
“Follow the very simple ‘ready-fire-aim’ approach,” Spellos continues. “Don’t hesitate to jump in, and just because you make a few mistakes the first time, it shouldn’t prevent you from following up the second time. In fact, those few mistakes will help you create a better experience for your attendees the next time.”