Recession coming? Perhaps the best way to keep briefed on your profession is to attend the annual conference of your peers. Yet wouldn’t you enjoy the event more if you had a greater voice in the meeting design and formats, topics and speakers, participation and networking opportunities and ways you could meet online before and stay connected afterwards?

In this podcast hear about trends and fresh ideas for meetings from respected pros who cover all kinds of meetings for MeetingsNet. Meet The Meetings Group Editorial Director, Betsy Bair and Face2Face blogger and Association Meetings Editor Sue Pelletier. They’d just returned from PCMA’s big conference in Seattle, with fresh ideas on how to “Collaborate, Communicate, Innovate.

Betsy enjoyed a Pecha Kucha session.

“Did you go there on vacation?” “I rode on that bike ride for breast cancer too.” “Oh, you went to that meeting too?” Walking around the conference halls, with your favorite tote bag over your shoulder is like carrying a mini-billboard about some special part of your life. Such questions are easy conversation starters. It’s about increased approachability amongst strangers. As when walking your dog, you’re more likely to talk with others walking theirs. One thing leads to another, as you walk into the next session together.

This clever way to reduce the waste generated at meetings also helps attendees get to know each other. MeetingsNet blogger, Sue Pelletier got the tip from Nancy J. Wilson’s blog, Pretentious Musings of a Green Meeting Planner.

Per Wilson, “One of the newest green meeting practices is asking participants to bring their own conference bag instead of a sponsor supplying one. It makes sense, we all have so many. Before you say your participants would find this ‘tacky’ or ‘cheap’, hear me out.

Because, what is actually happening is participants are showing up with bags:

• From an earlier conference.
• From organizations they belong to in their personal lives.
• Imprinted with personal messages such as “Ask me about…”
• Bags From their favorite vacation spot.”

Just as Richard Florida asks, Who’s Your City?, meeting attendees who bring their own bag, can ask each other, “Who’s your bag?” to get to know each other. Next? Name tags. (Reuse them.)
Conference participants: here’s another way to recycle – and do good.

About nine years ago I started bringing home from the conferences where I spoke the inevitable mugs, tee shirts, pens and, of course, conference tote bags. I collect them from six other nearby speakers and take them up to a well-run non-profit here in Marin County.

Once I saw one of “my” tee shirts on a young, pregnant Vietnamese woman (2005 in Orlando ~ American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons) and another time I glimpsed a man carrying two shovels, with a very full tote bag over his shoulder (Intel inside, We Meet Our Goals, 2004). I told a friend, with a quicker mind than mine, about these two sightings and he responded, “Too bad we couldn’t switch the shirt and the bag.”

As well, consider bringing home those extra hotel soaps and shampoos (oh, you do, eh?) and donating them to your favorite non-profit. Maybe to help the homeless, or for a womens’ shelter.

Traditionally, conference attendees fill out conference evaluations after a session or conference is over, but the SXSW conference for tech and entertainment folks is anything but traditional. Some attendees heckled in real time at the  “pandering” and/or “self-promoting” style of Business Week’s “Valley Girl” columnist Sarah Lacey during her interview of Facebook CEO, Mark Zukerberg.A “trainwreck.”(Advice: know your audience.) A surge of audience members started criticizing her via their blogs and twittering micro-blogging. It got vicious.The opposite could also happen, of course, if an audience raved in real time about an interview, speaker or panel. Then the conference organizer could extend the session. The era of the passive attendee is fast-passing. Live blogging just started recently, mainly at tech-centered conferences or unconferences. Audience twittering just started within the past 14 months or so. Yet the trend will spread quickly to more kinds of meetings. Parents are learning text messaging to keep in touch with their children. Young meeting attendees expect to make their views heard, in the moment. As more meeting attendees adopt these social media tools, they’ll use them the conferences they attend. Thus more and more attendees won’t wait to vote on the questions the speaker or panel wants to ask. They’ll be commenting, asking the questions and trading opinions as the program unfolds. They’ll take photos from their seat, then try streaming video.That means that savvy meeting planners will eventually “have” to find a way to track the unfolding comment stream of the audience and choose a way to respond to them, either during or right after the session. Speakers, panelists, meeting planners and sponsors face a whole new attendee-centered meeting future, just as companies are experimenting with how to operate in a customer-centered world. Now that’s a fast-unfolding future full of ugly and uplifting mob scenarios.

Then provide companies more value. In one of those “Why didn’t I think of this earlier?” moments the leaders at Professional Convention Management Association adopted a simple and very successful change.

They invited would-be sponsors to underwrite events and other programs throughout the year, not just at the annual conference or other one-time opportunity. The basic offer to major companies: Pay more for a multi-year time period and gain considerably more “touch points” with members. Result? PCMA tripled its revenue in just three years. Now that’s a great example of SmartPartnering. Done wrong, sponsorships annoy or even anger those one seeks to serve.

For more ideas on doing it right read this interview with sponsorship expert, Emily Rogers. Any size or kind of group could adapt this model to reduce costs and to offer more value to attendees.

PCMA is even co-hosting a conference on the topic (with sponsors of course). And the current issue of their magazine, Convene, features a cover story on how cities are partnering to offer meeting planners a package: rotate your annual conference between our cities and, together, we will offer you extra value. SmartPartnering can be efficient, profitable and contagious.

Want still more ideas on how to attract sponsorship money while making your meetings more interesting – and less expensive to attend?

Is your expo + conference a “must attend” event for more people very year? How clear and well-known is the biggest reason to go?

Attendance has grown a whopping 40% every year since George Jage launched his World Tea Expo in 2003. And he had a handicap. Jage had never worked in the industry he sought to serve. Yet he wanted to eventually host the largest educational gathering for people anywhere in the world involved in any part of the tea business. Yes, the formerly quaint and now “hot” beverage – tea.

As the first non-tea industry keynoter at this expo I stayed all day to observe and participate. After speaking at over 300 conference/expos I was impressed to see how this “outsider” managed to involve so many groups and attendees in ways to learn, network more efficiently, cross-consult, co-create, co-teach, bundle packages, cross-sell and other Me2We approaches to collaboration and community-building.

Whether you are an exhibitor, board member, staffer or attendee at an annual conference and/or expo, you can discover fresh ways for all parties to make your meeting more valuable and convivial from this interview with Jage.

For starters, here’s some popular features of the World Tea Expo’s Me2We approach to conference + expo design:

• Promise and prove a clear and visible reason to attend. The World Tea Expo provides “the largest educational program on tea” anywhere in the world and the largest tea event in North America.

• Guarantee that most sessions will be led by people who have a proven track record in the topic they’re teaching. This also happens at CaterSource yet is surprisingly rare at expos. Pay your presenters and require them to avoid sales pitches. The tips they offer, in the face time with attendees will attract clients.

• Make many sessions team-led so they are more relevant, idea-packed and fun.

• Keep classes small and intensive (many are three hours) to enhance chances for:

- Hands-on practice with the actual activities of the attendees’ work.
- Attendees to ask questions, and turn other participants into colleagues.
- Instructors to attract clients or customers and find partners to co-create differentiating value.

• Include a new business bootcamp that shows new attendees:

- The best ways to start, not just any business but a tea business.
– Product tasting and marketing and operational ideas to jump to the cutting edge of their industry.
- They are welcome into the community of attendees who will help them grow.

• Invite leaders of associations at the edge of your work to participate and otherwise partner – to offer more value for all attendees and/or members. For example the director of the United National Products Association and the founder of the American Botanical Society will be presenting and attending this June in Las Vegas. He’s also forged partnerships with those hosting conferences serving those in the coffee and spa businesses. Kim Jage says the lively expo attracts people as diverse as a new tea room owner and a Fortune 500 company research scientist.

Here’s some tips for exhibitors and for meeting planners. Get still more fresh ideas on how to grow your own conference + expo from others who’ve already done it at Society of Independent Show Organizers. For more ideas see The Professional Convention Management Association, MeetingsTV, Trade Show Exhibitor’s Association, Major American Trade Show Organizers, International Association for Exposition Management, MeetingsNet, IAAM, Meeting Planners International’s blogs and wiki and ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership. Perhaps you’ll want to host an social network to deepen your attendees loyalty, collaboration and learning so they feel closer at next year’s conference .

Pecha Kucha. This “equal time” meeting format is wildly popular because everyone gets a chance to share and compare in a quick and lively way. That’s why it spread around the world so quickly in the past few years. Attendees loved it yesterday when Joan Eisenstodt demonstrated the approach at PCMA’s prestigious conference of meeting professionals. “I am now a big fan” wrote MeetingsNet blogger Sue Pelletier who covered the session.

Pecha Kucha Night was originally conceived as a way for young architects and designers in Tokyo to gather and “show-and-tell” their work, leaving enough time to compare notes afterwards. Here’s how it works.

Each person who wants to talk about her or his work presents a slide show (a PowerPoint presentation). They are limited to 20 images, each slide showing for no more than 20 seconds.

Thus each presenter get six minutes and 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter pops up to present a pithy message.

Think of it as speed dating for meetings where the goal is to quickly learn a great insight from each other. This format has spread throughout the world, from Amsterdam to here in San Francisco. By the way, Pecha Kucha is Japanese for chit chat. Brevity is growing popular.

Besides using Garr Reynolds’ fabulous new book, hosting your own Pecha Kucha gathering – and avoid death by PowerPoint.

… so they’ll want to come back next year. How many conferences have you attended where you felt talked “at” by a series of speakers up on stage? Then you rushed between sessions to meet new people and catch up with friends in the hallways. Wouldn’t it be great to have a meeting designed to support you in exchanging ideas with the colleagues most helpful for you? Well, next February many professional meeting planners will be attending a conference that’s designed to in a “Me2We” way – where attendees turn from passive to active participants – interacting more frequently and productively. Then they can celebrate together and to learn from each other. (Not a new idea – just one that is spread too slowly for some, including me.) Some in the food industry have jumped in to help peers.

Want your next conference to be more meaningful and memorable? Via Jim Louis, one of the adept moderators of a closely-knit online group to which I belong called MeetingsCommunity (MeCo), I discovered MeetingsNet’s coverage of the innovative formats for the conference, “MPI Meeting Differently”:

“To improve the trade show experience, MPI is changing the layout of the exhibit hall. One innovation is something MPI calls “conversation spots,” freestanding circular plexiglass towers that are divided into quadrants and placed in high-profile spots around the exhibit hall. The idea is to provide a more intimate meeting area for exhibitors and attendees than they normally find on the trade show floor.

Organizers tinkered with more than just the trade show format. New concepts include:

a. The “Conversation Café”-a learning environment based on a coffee shop.

b. “Book clubs” – discussions led by book authors and subject matter authorities.

c. Wikis – each educational session will have its own wiki pages to encourage pre- and post-session communication and collaboration.

d. Educational sessions in “soft seating” or lounge-style meeting environments. Most of the 80 educational sessions will eschew a traditional classroom setting. Instead they will be held in the round to facilitate interactive learning and discussion.”

My hope is that this is the tipping point to make meetings even more interactive so attendees find in each other fresh ways to be mutually-supportive. Even as a “professional” (aka paid) speaker I’d welcome more short (20 – 30 minute) “meet the expert” sessions around 8-12 person tables, with a bell ringing so you could move through three sessions in a block. Then the mix and mingle times are more fun and valuable. That’s because you’ve probably discovered some people who share your interests and gotten a sense of whom you might like and respect enough to talk further. Use CrowdVine or other services to set up a social network – just for the conference.

For an invitation-only gathering, have inclusive, action-inducing rituals like the TED conference or Rennaisance Weekend.

Plus why not let attendees vote on the topics, speakers and session formats they most want?

And why not ask all invited speakers to 1) submit in advance, three of the tips they will present, then 2) receive an email of all speakers’ tips and be required to 3) refer to at least two other speaker’s tips as they complement the speaker’s message. Thus the conference would have more continuing threads of themes.

Also why not have lively panels of inside and outside experts (1. journalists or columnists, 2. researchers at investment banks, and 3. veteran, respected exhibitors) who see, from a different perspective, the sector represented in the conference. Give each panelist just seven minutes to offer their best two pieces of advice for attendees. Encourage attendees to submit written questions as they listen. Volunteers could gather the questions, sort for best mix for the strong and well-liked MC to present to the panelists to answer. As attendees leave the meeting room, they are given the handout with the written version of panelists’ tips and their bios. Thus attendees see more candor and pertinent content – in a contagiously active way. Who knows? That may lead to more unconferences. And, perhaps more associations and other member-based groups will start their own social network to keep people involved, meeting and collaborating all year long.

Speaking of partipatory, hear holiday cheer that’s guaranteed to make you laugh with joy. My way of wishing you a (Me2We) holiday you savor – with others .