Google Wave, We Hardly Knew Ye

Friends, Americans, meeting planners, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Google Wave, not to praise it.

So it goes. Perhaps many of you out there in TV Land were not even aware of Google Wave's existence; and, if you were, you still may not have had any idea about what it was or what it did — and I'll wager it was an even smaller minority that had a clue how to use the thing. I sure didn't.

But it seemed promising, at first. And now it's departed. Earlier this week — which is how I learned of its untimely demise — Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote a good post-mortem of this "real-time communication and collaboration" website that Google unveiled last year.

Snapping Out of It

We could use a little more white space in our lives.

So says Juliet Funt, owner of Talking With Purpose Inc., although space was a bit of an issue at her presentation at the 2010 ASAE Annual Meeting and Expo in Los Angeles this week. When all the chairs in the session filled up, attendees lined up in the back, sat on the floor, and stood in the doorway and hall in order to hear Funt speak.

What was the big draw? First of all, Funt has a terrific presence. She's funny and down-to-earth, and tells great stories. And her topic, managing overwork and chronic stress, was one that everyone in the room seemed to relate to. If you sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel trying to fit it all in, you are not alone.

Funt, the daughter of "Candid Camera" creator Allen Funt, also gave the audience practical tips for reclaiming their lives -- and their meetings -- from overload: Answer e-mail five times a day, not around the clock. Resist the impulse to grab your phone when you get a spare moment, and actually look at people around you. Put your cellphone in the glove box when you drive. Draw some boundaries by countering requests with your own request to take a day to think it over.

And she suggested ways that meeting planners could give attendees a little more space, too.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's Extra, Extra!, where we give air time to all the news that wasn't fit to print in PCMA's weekly ThisWeek newsletter.

According to this story in the New York Times, written by a former meetings-industry journalist, the tide of eco-friendly hotels may have — at least for the time being — crashed upon the rocks of recession. One hotelier, who is also a Green Meeting Industry Council board member, said, "Big-ticket items that have long-term return on investment have definitely been put on the back burner."

Quick: Name the most boring thing ever. If you said, "in-flight magazines," you are correct — but maybe not if you consider the airline magazine of the new Afghani airline Safi Airways. In its pages, you can brush up on "Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites, and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles," writes the Wall Street Journal reporter. Who needs to watch, say, Marley & Me for the 500th time when you've got that to read?

Earlier this summer, Stefanie Syman published a book called The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, which traces the history of, well, yoga in America, from its Transcendentalist origins to widespread acceptance by people from all walks of life — even while on the road, as this story from Hotel Interactive discusses. According to the article, business-traveling yogis should seek out Kimpton hotels in particular, as the company is big on the amenity.

Here's some good news for fans of the Crescent City (aka New Orleans, aka N'walins, aka the Big Easy): The 1,193-room Hyatt Regency New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina struck, broke ground last week on its $275 million reopening project! In addition to getting the Hyatt back up to par for a reopening sometime next year, the renovation will also add 200,000 square feet of meeting space, plus two restaurants, two bars, and a coffee shop.

Last but not least, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (great newspaper name, that) reports that the city's planning commission has approved the design for a new downtown convention center — which, by the way, looks really cool: Click through here for the story — featuring an aerial rendering of the new convention center, which appears as though it will feature lots of light and green space.

Introducing: Booth Crawling at ASAE

When I did a story in the July issue about using Foursquare at meetings industry events, I ended up writing more about the potential for using the application than about exhibitions or meetings that were actually using it. As Kevin Richardson, CRM manager for Freeman, put it, to most people in the meetings industry, "Foursquare still means a game that they played as kids." That could soon change, Richardson added, as exhibitors began to experiment with new ways of connecting with people using the application.

And that's exactly what's happening at ASAE's 2010 Annual Meeting and Expo 2010 in Los Angleles, where nine technology services exhibitors have teamed up to create the "Tradeshow Booth Crawl." Attendees who use Foursquare to check in at all the booths on the exhibition floor at the LA Convention Center become eligible for prizes, including gift cards, a camera, and an iPad.

Business was brisk today, the opening day of the Expo. The game required attendees to ask booth personnel to initial a gameboard, which proved to be a great conversation starter. “Technology is changing the way we build relationships, but people create relationships," said Jim Kelly, COO of Syscom Services, a participating company. "The booth crawl is designed with people in mind. We hope this social experiment will not only increase traffic to our booths and bring attention to our new products and services, but create a platform for engagement among conference attendees. Let’s give them something to talk about!”

Then We Came to the End

This morning my younger daughter went off to preschool camp for the last time; in two weeks, she starts kindergarten. So today was all about endings and beginnings -- two things that school is very good at making you aware of, in a formal, carefully delineated sort of way. For every grade, there's always a first day of school and always a last; and when you've run through all the grades, there's a grand event to mark the occasion, full of pomp and circumstance (as well as "Pomp and Circumstance").

The meetings industry, too, is very good at officious beginnings, what with our welcome receptions and opening-night cocktail parties and gaveled-to-order general sessions. But endings? I'm not so sure. I've been to meetings that have ended with a bang, in the form of a closing-night awards dinner, or a final keynote luncheon, or a closing general session. But I've also attended meetings that haven't ended so much as they've drifted apart -- in a series of half-attended late-afternoon caucuses, or a half-hearted final tour of the exhibit hall, with no centralized mechanism to sum things up and thank everyone for attending.

And maybe that's not a bad thing. And maybe having a formal closing event isn't a good thing. What do you think? Is it important not just to end a meeting, but to let attendees know you're ending it?

A Bright Idea

I'm so impressed.

The Alabama Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau website has an online chat tool on its media relations page. That may sound like a small thing, but not to writers working on deadline. I went onto their website recently to find a the name of a contact who could give me some information. Using the chat, I was able to get an answer from a real live person in about 20 seconds. Without making a phone call or sending an e-mail.

It also kind of blew me away that they thought of adding an online chat feature in the first place. The chat tools are common on consumer websites, but I have never encountered a live chat feature connecting writers and journalists with media relations experts.

It's not going to change the world, but I think its a really good example of innovative customer service -- of finding new applications for existing tools.

And, of course, I hope it catches on.

August 2010 Issue: Live!

The digital and text-only versions of our August issue are now online. This is our annual directory of meetings sites, cities, and services -- highlighting a premier assortment of destinations, venues, and service providers across the country and around the world. And this year, there's something more: the debut of our monthly CMP (Certification Made Possible) Series, which allows readers to earn a CEU hour toward their Certified Meeting Professional credential by reading one or more articles in Convene, then taking a short test online. Kicking off the CMP Series is "'Didn't See That Coming,'" a comprehensive feature on force majeure by Senior Editor Hunter Slaton.

You always suspected that reading Convene made you smarter and more successful. But our CMP Series helps prove it.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Do you ever feel like, as soon as your annual meeting (or any similar annually or multi-annually reoccurring event that you plan) is finished, that its next edition, hydra-like, rears its lovely but still challenging head? That's how we magazine writers (sometimes) feel about the next issue ... there's always another one! At times it can feel like a treadmill. As such, that's why this week's Extra, Extra! will be a bit on the short side, as we Convene editorial staffers are currently in Day Two of closing our September issue, which, among other enticements, has the second story in our new CMP: Certification Made Possible series! So here goes:

USA Today reports that three hotels in Atlanta — the 502-room Marriott Renaissance among them — will be closing this year. Why? Atlanta has, at the moment, a significant hotel room surplus ... not a bad thing when you've got multiple big conventions descending simultaneously on the city, but not ideal when hoteliers are struggling to fill rooms and, as a result, charging less than $100 a night at top-shelf hotels such as the InterContinental, the Grand Hyatt, and W.

The Wall Street Journal has a fun story about something any business traveler worth his or her salt has surely left behind at least once in a hotel room: cell phone chargers. Hotels collect so many of them that a mini-vernacular has even grown up around the oft-ophaned items: Housekeepers for a hotel company with five properties in Sacramento, Calif., call the mound of left-behind chargers "black spaghetti," while each Omni Hotel & Resort in North America has a charger "graveyard," with at least two bins' full at all times.

Can't tear yourself away from Facebook, but need to book that flight? Worry not: Delta Air Lines just launched its new "Delta Ticket Window" on the near-ubiquitous social-networking site. The application allows customers to search, book flights, and share them with one's friends without ever having to leave Facebook! Thank god — we were worried that Facebook wasn't getting enough of our time.

Speaking of Facebook, the Econsultancy blog has a smart story about "why you need a social media strategy, not a Facebook strategy." It begins:

The first venture into social media for many companies, whether a small start up or a big brand, is to create a Facebook page to 'experiment' with social media, which is seen as an add on to other marketing activities.

But just putting a page up onto Facebook, with no coherent social media strategy, is unlikely to do anything for a brand.

And finally, the weirdest story of the week award goes to this one from The Guardian newspaper, about three bored kids (ages 15, 13, and 11) who, unbeknownst to their parental units, pooled their savings of $700 to buy three tickets on Southwest Airlines from Jacksonville, Fla., to Nashville — and they were actually able to board and fly on the plane.

Where were they going, you ask? Get this: Dollywood, the Dolly Parton-themed amusement park. I never knew that Dolly Parton had such cross-generational appeal. I think the kids' effort is at least deserving of a mini-concert by the legendary country singer, don't you?

Failure Is An Option

Shaping Space: The d.school's Environments Collaborative from Stanford d.school on Vimeo.

I was inspired today to do a little digging on innovative spaces by the announcement that Event Camp has chosen the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago for its annual meeting in 2011. The only word to describe the Catalyst Ranch is funky -- it's filled with toys and cushions, and decorated with artifacts from 35 different countries. If you want, you can swing in a hammock. Not a safe choice, but, it seems to me, a fitting one for Event Camp, a grassroots gathering of event professionals, which is making a name for itself as a testbed for meeting design. (Read about it here.) Great example: at Event Camp Twin Cities, scheduled for Sept. 8 and 9, organizers will experiment with trading in rows of chairs for balls. And who knows what Event Camp East Coast, scheduled Nov. 12-13 in Philadelphia, has up its sleeve. (The dates were just announced on the #eventsprofs Twitter group this week, with details to come.)

My search for insight about the role of space in innovation led me to a comment that surprised me, particularly coming from Scott Witthoft, co-director of the Stanford d.school's Environments Collaborative, which designed the d.school space. The new center opened this spring after five years of research and planning.

People ask Witthoft all the time how to make their spaces more innovative, he said. "I think people look to space to solve problems of innovation that are outside of space ... Sometimes you have to suck it up and try something you haven't done before and be willing to fail."

Convene Spins: Joanna Newsom

I'm hijacking Convene Executive Editor Chris Durso's Convene Spins meme this Friday. Why?

Well, this morning, during my daily first-cup-of-coffee web browse, I went to an independent music review and news site that I frequent called Pitchfork, and saw a story about how one of my favorite artists, the harpist and songwriter Joanna Newsom, recently played Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Pitchfork had videos of both songs that Newsom played on the show: "You and Me, Bess" and "'81." The video for "You and Me, Bess" was even in black and white — a fitting style for the somewhat out-of-time Newsom.

So I clicked through and began to watch the first video, which was (like the song) transfixing and beautiful — but I then I was sort of jarred by something I saw in the background of the stage: sponsorship ads for Bud Light — which, in case you aren't familiar with Joanna Newsom, really doesn't fit her target demographic. Maybe if the ads had been for, I dunno, absinthe.

Have you ever had a situation at a meeting or event where the juxtaposition of an education session or speaker with a particular sponsor just doesn't feel right? Or have you ever had to reject a sponsor in order to head off that disconnect at the pass? If so, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section (we might even publish your response in a forthcoming issue of Convene!).

In the meantime, music-lovers (or, I suppose, Bud Light lovers): Please click "play" on the video below to hear an enchanting song, despite the weird sponsorship curveball. (If you like the song so much that you want to hear the other that she played on Kimmel, click here.) Happy Friday!



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