It’s been five years since Meeting Professionals International (MPI), the world’s largest association for those in the meeting and event industry, acquired the Plan Your Meetings (PYM) brand. In that time, we grew the free education and networking PYM live events—even taking them into the digital sphere this year, complete with avatars!—and transformed the magazine into a dedicated guide for professional development resources in order to serve the needs of non-titled planners seeking growth.
The impact of this change will ideally be minimal for PYM planners. For instance, over time, the most popular PYM blog posts will migrate to the MPI blog, where they’ll remain freely accessible (along with a bunch of other content), and the resources presented in this Professional Development Guide will, in 2021, be updated and published as a supplement to MPI’s The Meeting Professional magazine (also available online at no cost).
Unprecedented and incredibly difficult. That’s the 2020 in which we find ourselves. While the coronavirus pandemic has decimated the live, face-to-face meeting and event landscape, there’s some reason to be hopeful. The meeting industry thrives due to the creative innovation of its community.
Many assistants and non-titled planners have had to learn and embrace videoconferencing on a regular basis; many others have been furloughed or find themselves out of a job. However, for most of these situations, the best way to move forward is through education, professional development and acquiring/honing necessary future-proof skills.
Resources in this edition of the Professional Development Guide include an updated list of scholarship opportunities and free (or low-cost) online education. You’ll also find an introduction to the new avatar-rich Plan Your Meetings live digital events (free to planners), dive into the racial inequity in the industry and more.
To help combat the widespread in-person-event disruptor—the coronavirus—the Plan Your Meetings live event team is leveraging another disruptor by holding events in a virtual world.
Don’t be confused, these are not videoconference calls; these events take place in an online virtual world. No one will be able to see the real you—there’s no camera involved—they’ll only see your avatar. Confused? Watch this video for a basic overview:
Doing a test run with some other Meeting Professionals International and Plan Your Meetings staff, I was reminded—only in the most basic sense—of the first online virtual world I experienced back in 1998 (Active Worlds). That, of course, was on a dialup internet connection with jumpy-blocky graphics that took time to actually render on the screen—it was slow and the audio wasn’t very good as few people had quality microphones, but it still dazzled users as the most visually stunning virtual world yet available.
In the intervening decades, many more people have experienced and become comfortable traversing virtual worlds such as Second Life. The VirBELA Open Campus platform in which Plan Your Meetings live events will take place, however, is a huge step forward for holding interactive events in virtual worlds.
What you’ll experience “in-world”: education and one-on-one networking, as you’d encounter at any previous, in-person Plan Your Meetings live event. You walk around the various rooms and locations (with your avatar), talk with industry peers and, of course, use emotes (ways to communicate with your avatars movement, such as clapping or dancing). Perhaps the most interesting emote in this context is that of shaking hands with other avatars—when was the last time you shook someone’s hand without subsequently applying sanitizer gel? As with any hosted buyer-type program, attendance at Plan Your Meetings live virtual events are free for planners—you just need to register.
Once you register to attend a free Plan Your Meetings live virtual event, you’ll be sent all of the information needed to get started, such as instructions on downloading and installing VirBELA as well as tips to help you make the most of the experience. I recommend exploring the virtual world prior to the scheduled event so you can get accustomed to the most basic controls and options—you’ll need to build your avatar, anyhow, so after creating the look for the virtual you, just poke around. (If you don’t have time in advance to do anything beyond designing your avatar, that’s fine as you’ll get a quick tutorial at the start of the event. But if you’re totally new to virtual worlds, I strongly encourage spending a few minutes exploring in advance.)
Plan Your Meetings Digital Events are open to both planners and suppliers. For complete details and to register for any of these free virtual experiences, visit the Plan Your Meetings live events page.
To help educate professionals during this unprecedented crisis and to help prepare them for the inevitable recovery, many industry groups are amping up their online offerings and making them freely available, as the MPI Academy has done for much of its content.
Following are some excellent, live online programs throughout May 2020. If you miss the original live broadcast, still click through as you’ll likely be able to view the recording. These are free but require registration.
U.S. Travel launched a new weekly webinar series that looks toward the recovery of our industry and the broader economy, focusing on the guidance, data and traveler sentiment necessary to safely restoring travel and tourism in the U.S.
All of these live webinars take place 12-1 p.m. EST on the dates listed
“Social media is not going away. It is a business tool, it can be an incredible place to find strength but it can be dark. I am organizing a conference on how to handle social media as a positive platform. I can’t wait to share it with you soon.”
That quickly deleted Instagram post by stylist Jessica Mulroney drummed up a flurry of intrigue with online royal watchers in January, theorizing that the note’s removal indicates a surprise appearance by Duchess Meghan Markle. Whether or not the Suits actress signs on to the event as a speaker doesn’t much matter for our purposes, but the overall tale highlights the oftentimes toxic landscape of social media as well as its importance as a business tool.
And now that so many meeting professionals find themselves at home, exercising extreme social distancing, many without active events on which to work, some no longer employed, perhaps obsessively searching for and scanning coronavirus news on Twitter, it’s prime time to focus on your professional education—you can only watch so many hours (or days) of Netflix before that leisure activity becomes a chore.
So here we go again. Decades into social media’s communication takeover, many meeting professionals still need to learn the proper uses of the various social media platforms and hone skills in what author, futurist and artist Howard Rheingold terms “crap detection.”
Even though social media is fluid with new rules, mores, opportunities and threats swirling around seemingly every day, one trend I’ve seen over the past decade is that the best published guidance for effective social media use has remained evergreen. More specifically, the most basic social media communications concepts are just as valid and important to learn now as they were 10 years ago. Sadly, many users continue to dive into social media—and claim fluency in that domain—while ignorant to these essential lessons.
Here are four important elements of social media in which all professionals should be fluent—with links for those seeking a refresher.
Get your facts straight
Fake news—both well-meaning yet erroneous and propagandic in nature—is enjoying a golden age thanks to the easy-to-share nature of social media. Sadly, the art of fact-checking is not receiving the same love. Not only must event professionals be able to communicate with stakeholders clearly and correctly via social media, they must also know how to deal with disinformation online. In Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold shares sage wisdom to help readers develop authentic digital literacy and critical thinking skills (“crap detection”), with the hopeful goal/promise similar to that of any good meeting or event: to produce a more thoughtful society. (Those really wanting to get into the weeds of digital communication theory should explore the materials for Rheingold’s past courses at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.)
Some of the disinformation encountered online comes from these jerks of chaos. In short, the goal of a troll is to disrupt, distract and cause grief. How you respond/react to trolls can affect the tone and quality of your event. Consider this hypothetical: Your keynote speaker engaged your community via Twitter in advance of your event, seeking to identify their most under-served pain points. A couple of valid responses are posted, then a random user chimes in to denigrate the physical appearance of the speaker…then moves on to abuse the other respondents. The valuable pre-event back-and-forth has been hijacked. Suddenly, there’s a negative taste tied to your event and the quality of community feedback disintegrates, all thanks to an anonymous digital heckler. In general, the best approach to a troll is to block/report the account and do not engage—ignore the petulant child. Hootsuite offers some excellent additional insight on how to deal with trolls.
You develop strategies for every aspect of your meeting/event, so why don’t you have a social media strategy? This begins with deciding upon a social media policy—guidance (sometimes simple recommendations, sometimes enforceable with penalties) for staff, partners and/or attendees to ensure communication is respectful and on-brand. In “Open Door Policy,” I explored the reasons for and against having a robust social media policy. Although published 10 years ago, the lessons shared in that article are just as important and overlooked by meeting professionals today. (Go here to read an updated version that also provides 0.25 hours of continuing education credits.) Once you’re past the policy question, move on to the nitty gritty of your social media strategy—Hootsuite has a PowerPoint template for that.
Early discussions about the ROI of social media were a bit ephemeral in nature. How can you quantify the value of your activities on the various platforms? The ah-ha moment for me came with the understanding that you define how to gauge the success of your own social media actions—there’s no singular metric that applies to every organization or event. A valid entry point to this topic is “Untangling the Value of Social Media,” my own initial foray into the social media ROI discussion.
“Social media is not going away. It is a business tool, it can be an incredible place to find strength but it can be dark. I am organizing a conference on how to handle social media as a positive platform. I can’t wait to share it with you soon.”
That quickly deleted Instagram post by stylist Jessica Mulroney drummed up a flurry of intrigue with online royal watchers in January, theorizing that the note’s removal indicates a surprise appearance by Duchess Meghan Markle. Whether or not the Suits actress signs on to the event as a speaker doesn’t much matter for our purposes, but the overall tale highlights the oftentimes toxic landscape of social media as well as its importance as a business tool.
And now that so many meeting professionals find themselves at home, exercising extreme social distancing, many without active events on which to work, some no longer employed, perhaps obsessively searching for and scanning coronavirus news on Twitter, it’s prime time to focus on your professional education—you can only watch so many hours (or days) of Netflix before that leisure activity becomes a chore.
So here we go again. Decades into social media’s communication takeover, many meeting professionals still need to learn the proper uses of the various social media platforms and hone skills in what author, futurist and artist Howard Rheingold terms “crap detection.”
Even though social media is fluid with new rules, mores, opportunities and threats swirling around seemingly every day, one trend I’ve seen over the past decade is that the best published guidance for effective social media use has remained evergreen. More specifically, the most basic social media communications concepts are just as valid and important to learn now as they were 10 years ago. Sadly, many users continue to dive into social media—and claim fluency in that domain—while ignorant to these essential lessons.
Here are four important elements of social media in which all professionals should be fluent—with links for those seeking a refresher.
Get your facts straight
Fake news—both well-meaning yet erroneous and propagandic in nature—is enjoying a golden age thanks to the easy-to-share nature of social media. Sadly, the art of fact-checking is not receiving the same love. Not only must event professionals be able to communicate with stakeholders clearly and correctly via social media, they must also know how to deal with disinformation online. In Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold shares sage wisdom to help readers develop authentic digital literacy and critical thinking skills (“crap detection”), with the hopeful goal/promise similar to that of any good meeting or event: to produce a more thoughtful society. (Those really wanting to get into the weeds of digital communication theory should explore the materials for Rheingold’s past courses at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.)
Some of the disinformation encountered online comes from these jerks of chaos. In short, the goal of a troll is to disrupt, distract and cause grief. How you respond/react to trolls can affect the tone and quality of your event. Consider this hypothetical: Your keynote speaker engaged your community via Twitter in advance of your event, seeking to identify their most under-served pain points. A couple of valid responses are posted, then a random user chimes in to denigrate the physical appearance of the speaker…then moves on to abuse the other respondents. The valuable pre-event back-and-forth has been hijacked. Suddenly, there’s a negative taste tied to your event and the quality of community feedback disintegrates, all thanks to an anonymous digital heckler. In general, the best approach to a troll is to block/report the account and do not engage—ignore the petulant child. Hootsuite offers some excellent additional insight on how to deal with trolls.
You develop strategies for every aspect of your meeting/event, so why don’t you have a social media strategy? This begins with deciding upon a social media policy—guidance (sometimes simple recommendations, sometimes enforceable with penalties) for staff, partners and/or attendees to ensure communication is respectful and on-brand. In “Open Door Policy,” I explored the reasons for and against having a robust social media policy. Although published 10 years ago, the lessons shared in that article are just as important and overlooked by meeting professionals today. (Go here to read an updated version that also provides 0.25 hours of continuing education credits.) Once you’re past the policy question, move on to the nitty gritty of your social media strategy—Hootsuite has a PowerPoint template for that.
Early discussions about the ROI of social media were a bit ephemeral in nature. How can you quantify the value of your activities on the various platforms? The ah-ha moment for me came with the understanding that you define how to gauge the success of your own social media actions—there’s no singular metric that applies to every organization or event. A valid entry point to this topic is “Untangling the Value of Social Media,” my own initial foray into the social media ROI discussion.
Last month, I deployed a survey for MPI of meeting professionals (planners and suppliers) to gauge the concern related to the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its impact on the meeting and event industry. (You can see those complete results here.)
Most recently, we wrapped a subsequent survey specific to the experiences and opinions of industry suppliers re: the impact of this virus. In the field between March 3-5, the survey had 217 respondents. Here’s what we found.
Cancellations
Notably, in mid-February, 80% of respondents said their meetings/events had not been affected by the virus. This time around, we specifically asked about cancellations (a big step up from simply “affected”) and 73% of suppliers said they have encountered these as a result of the virus.
Business impact
Here, we see that 65% of suppliers expect less business in 2020 thanks to the novel coronavirus; 26% believe they’ll have more business as a result.
Concern
A total 95% of suppliers are concerned about the business impact of the novel coronavirus. Last month, 90% of meeting professionals were concerned.
Duration of impact
Understanding that most industry suppliers aren’t virology futurists, we still sought to hear opinions on the anticipated duration of the virus’ impact on meetings and events.
Most notably, 70% of respondents believe our industry will be affected for 1-6 months; 3% think it’ll be wrapped up in April; 15% believe its impact will stick around at least through the end of 2020.
Sales strategies
Yes, 49% of suppliers indicate their sales strategies have not changed as a result of the novel coronavirus. However, that means more than half of all respondents are changing their sales strategies. How?
14% – Limiting international travel
9% – Offering greater discounts or complimentary amenities/services
8% – Shifting to remote calls with clients rather than in-person meetings
8% – Limiting involvement at trade shows and professional events
More surveys on this evolving topic are likely in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned to Plan Your Meetings as well as MPI’s dedicated novel coronavirus page.
Get up to speed on some outstanding reports you may have missed during your busy 2019, by exploring this year’s most-read stories from the Plan Your Meetings blog.
How often do you work with a convention and visitors bureau (CVB) for assistance organizing your meetings and events? If you answered “never” or “what’s a CVB?” then the newest edition of the Plan Your Meetings Professional Development Guide may very well open up a whole new world of possibilities in your work!
In “CVBs: A Planner’s Best Kept Secret?”, we explain what this type of destination management organization is, how it operates and, most importantly, how it can best be leveraged to help with your event planning efforts—at no cost. Along with those various elements, you’ll also find additional online resources and educational opportunities to help grow your skills relevant to planning and working with CVBs.
For this edition’s columns, we once again tapped résumé and career expert Dawn Rasmussen, CMP, to share successful job-seeker advice (“The Dangers of ‘Up-Titling’”). This is an especially notable problem as the current business landscape is filled with a confusing blend of old-school and creative titles—the title “associate cat herder” certainly requires an explanation. And digital strategist Andrea Williams pops up to emphasize the importance of truly knowing your potential clients (“Why You Need Detailed Customer Profiles”).
Of course, you’ll also find the usual resources we update and collect here to aid your professional growth, such as planner scholarships, complimentary industry magazines and no/low-cost online education and live events.
Updated twice per year, the Professional Development Guide is created as an interactive resource for you—loaded with active links, a complimentary MPI Academy webinar (“Digital Storytelling: Create New Revenue Streams Through Digital”) and more. With that in mind, please reach out and let us know what essential resources you’re struggling to find so we can try to collect those in a future edition.
Don’t miss free education opportunities at Plan Your Meetings live events throughout North America—see future dates and register.
The amount of stress that you experience everyday might well be increasing. Instead of letting everything you come into contact with master you, seek to master your environment, only allowing those things you choose to come into your consciousness. Attempting to do too many things at once only leads to stress. Taking a strategic pause every now and then can lessen the time pressure you feel, help you to be more productive for the brunt of your career and probably help you to live longer.
Years ago, a Time magazine editorial lauded one of their senior writers who died of a massive heart attack at age 44. They described him as a “vivid personality, first-class intellect, bracing professionalism.” The editorial/obituary said that this fellow did an extraordinary number of things extraordinarily well. He vigorously filled his post, and also wrote extensively about politics, social issues, the media and books.
In addition to those things, he frequently appeared on TV panels, ready to express provocative, but well-thought-out opinions. This gentleman lectured, wrote books and freelanced for other publications. Amazingly, they say that he had a wide, varied circle of friends—people at every level.
I was aghast when the editorial/obituary said that this fellow rarely did fewer than two things at once and lauded him for doing so. He “opened his mail while discoursing on story ideas. When he went to lunch with a co-worker, he often took a book.” Apparently, he never turned down an assignment and he attacked the most mundane task as if a Pulitzer Prize “depended on it.” The piece concluded by observing that this gentleman had a forthcoming book wherein he decried that “it was a simple fact that ‘some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.’”
Don’t the good people at Time magazine understand that cramming everything into your life at hyper speed can contribute to early death? I wrote to the magazine following this commentary, although I didn’t expect them to answer. I asked, “Where was the reflection in his life? When did he pause? When did he ever reset his body clock? I understood that he was a notable individual, but to praise him publicly for doing two things at once, and in the same breath recount that he died of a massive heart attack at 44 is dripping with irony.”
This person was the antithesis of someone who masters his personal environment. Rather, he let all assignments, all intellectual queries, all interests, anything, apparently, that appeared on his personal radar screen, to master him.
In your life, what are some techniques that you could use daily to pause, collect your thoughts, reduce your level of stress and move on with relative grace and ease?
1) Close your eyes for as little as 60 seconds and visualize a pleasurable scene. It could be a waterfall, a favorite hiking trail, a mountain top view, the shoreline, a campfire or simply the image of a loved one. Any time that you can visualize a pleasurable scene, it is like resetting your internal clock. You get an immediate “time out.” Think of it as a vacation of the mind. When you return to where you are, invariably, you will be in at least a slightly better frame of mind.
2) As a variation on this theme, with your eyes closed, listen to music with your headphones. When you are concentrating solely on music that you like, giving it the undivided attention of one of your senses, the time begins to expand. A three- or four-minute-long song goes by, perceptually, in ten minutes.
3) Allow one of your senses—smell, taste or touch—to dominate. For the next several minutes, close your eyes and simply explore your immediate environment by touch only. Yes, I know that you already know how many of these things will feel when you touch them. Make a game out of it. Pretend that your sense of touch was the only vehicle that you had for understanding your environment. When you open your eyes again, the world will look a little different, and things will be a little less intense.
Do the same with your sense of smell. If you are in an office environment and think that you don’t have options, look around you. Perhaps there is a non-toxic smelling magic marker nearby. How about a flower or lead pencil or a cup of coffee? When have you stopped and actually smelled the coffee?
4) Play with Rover. Interacting with pets enables you to reset your internal clock. A growing body of evidence shows that pets have a calming, tranquil effect on people.
5) Notice your breath. Breath is the key to life. If you can’t breathe, you can’t live. In a particularly stressful environment, you might be engaging in shallow breathing. If you can draw three deep breaths, you will find that you can more easily feel in control.
It’s been five years since Meeting Professionals International (MPI), the world’s largest association for those in the meeting and event industry, acquired the Plan Your Meetings (PYM) brand. In that time, we grew the free education and networking PYM live events—even taking them into the digital sphere this year, complete with avatars!—and transformed the magazine into a dedicated guide for professional development resources in order to serve the needs of non-titled planners seeking growth.
