Simon on: Online registration questions

Online registration has become so easy that it’s now available as a DIY service. That’s obviously a great advantage but it carries potential pitfalls. 

The most obvious is that it’s tempting to go on adding questions until the form is so long that registrants lose the will to live.

Yet how much of the information collected is of any real use? For example, how many meeting planners really need a postal address for registrants if nothing is being sent by post? Maybe the marketing department wants to know where the registrants come from but a town or even a postcode will be enough for that. 

The difficulty is that, the longer the form, the less accurate the answers. Some questions seem almost designed to give misleading information. The most obvious is ‘How did you hear about this event?’, especially when somebody who clicks ‘Magazine’ is then faced with a list of titles. The chance of getting an accurate response is marginally above zero because, as with all forms asking too many questions, registrants will probably click the first box they see.

So what is needed? First and last name and email, definitely. Organisation name, probably. Beyond that, a question should only to be on the form if the answer is useful.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: No change for conferences

The most vocal critics of traditional conferences claim that formats must change because the world has changed since conferences became an established communications tool. 

This is like saying that the structure of the novel must change because today’s world is totally different to that of Charles Dickens’ day.

That is clearly a nonsensical argument: the structure of a story is still the same and, in the right hands, is still compelling. It may be delivered on an e-reader, but the process of telling the story has been unchanged since Chaucer’s time.

Obviously authors have tried to come up with variations to the linear story just as planners have tried to come up with new styles of conference. 

Some authors also experiment with the format by omitting punctuation or chapter breaks but their stories still use age-old techniques. As a result the traditional novel still holds sway.

It’s the same with conferences: there are many technologies being promoted as the latest game-changer but what the promoters overlook is that they’re just tools. 

At the heart of any conference has to be a clearly defined purpose. Only when that has been established should anybody begin to think about what technology (if any) is going to be used.

Originally published in Conference News

Why do some cars still have rev-counters?

Late in 2012 Land Rover launched the latest incarnation of the Range Rover. Interestingly, while the body and lots of the technology is superior to the last the outgoing Range Rover, the interior isn’t vastly different. Some of that is because Land Rover had been upgrading the interior of the last model Range Rover with elements that would be in the new car. This is a clever idea because it means they can test and prove the latest technology without having to launch it on a brand new car which would obviously present more opportunity for problems. By rolling out different elements over a 2 year period they will minimize issues that customers will have with the new vehicle when it’s launched.

As part of this programme, the 2010 Range Rover lost its traditional instrument cluster (where the speedo and rev counter are) and the physical gauges were replaced with a 12 inch LCD panel which displays virtual instruments – very clever and I think it’s something that Mercedes did earlier than 2010. It actually works quite well and the dials look quite realistic.

My problem with this is that Land Rover seem to have missed a big opportunity. 

To illustrate what I mean we need to cover some basics first. Land Rover hasn’t offered a manual version of the Range Rover since the 3rd generation car was launched in 2002. That makes me ask what the point of the rev counter is? The car will change gears when it needs and won’t let you override it if you would break the gearbox so knowing how many revs you are doing is fairly redundant. 

That said, there was the petrol version with the sportier engine and I can see that people would like to know the revs on that engine. Also, cars have traditionally had a rev counter so no sense rocking the boat too much given the traditional nature of the product. 

At that point the car had a conventional dashboard with physical gauges so building different versions would be impractical and anyway – what else would you put there?

Now however, the sat-nav/phone/radio/CD/iPod control/etc/etc are all controlled through the computer in the centre console and the computers are considerably more powerful than they were in 2002. The centre console computer is also a more integral part of the car than it has been before. 

The problem for me is that I can have sat-nav on screen but then if I want to change radio channel, I have to change to the radio screen. Similarly, if I want to ring someone I have to change to the phone screen of the system.

So why can’t I lose the rev counter and replace it with the map or arrow view from the sat nav? Or pull up a list of recently dialled numbers or radio stations? It seems that the car has a virtual rev counter just “because that’s what cars have” and nobody has cared to rethink what’s possible.

I think large companies that design products need to have a team or department specifically tasked with figuring out what could be possible and how that could benefit the customers. Honda have the tagline of “The power of dreams” which is fine but to me dreams are huge projects and that is basically looking in the wrong direction. 

For me, the term that best covers what needs to happen is “imagineering” where imagination meets engineering. On the other hand, perhaps these companies just need a Chief Ideas Officer!

Simon on: Using email effectively

The constant advice to meeting planners is to ‘engage’ their attendees ahead of the event. This usually means ‘You need social media’.

Why doesn’t anybody say ‘Don’t waste time on that, learn to use email effectively’?

After all, there’s plenty of room for improvement: most conference emails are clumsy hype. The nearest they come to personalisation is to include the recipient’s name.

It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of useful guidance: Drayton Bird’s book on writing sales letters that sell has been a winner for years because it’s practical. And his advice on writing applies to emails.

After all, a relevant email with an effective subject line is more likely to be read than the stuff that usually goes out.

Unfortunately, marketing people have been persuaded that social media is the thing to have. Never mind that there’s rarely anything of value in the Twitter feed or the Facebook page for a conference.

Equally, when it comes to email marketing, they seem unable to think from the recipient’s point of view. The result is time spent sending out useless stuff that nobody reads.

But current thinking seems to be that, so long as they can tell people ‘We’ve got a social media strategy’, it’s okay.

Originally published in Conference News

Stop! You're doing it all wrong

When I was a kid I was sometimes allowed to wash the car. This normally consisted of a bucket of water with washing up liquid for bubbles and a sponge. I would wash the car with the sponge and then when I thought I was done, I would throw the contents of the bucket over the car to help rinse off the suds. Sometimes, I would use a hose to rinse the car off and that was that.

As I grew up and had my own cars to wash, I progressed a bit. Eventually I discovered that washing up liquid contains a lot of salt so I started using proper car wash shampoo and I moved on to using a shammy leather to dry the car after washing it. 

Recently however, I've started to get seriously into car cleaning and polishing and I discovered that I'd been cleaning my cars all wrong and that really surprised me. Once you understand the logic behind it all then it does make sense. 

I need to explain the correct way to wash a car so I can explain what I was doing wrong but first I need to show what the problem was with washing the car badly in the first place. With any modern car, the paint is very durable but not invulnerable. Washing and polishing the car badly will cause major paint damage over a period of time and this damage can only be repaired a certain number of times.

This photo (which I've borrowed from CleanYourCar.co.uk with their kind permission) shows the sorts of scratches that often exist on the car’s paint. The rear of the panel in the photo has already been polished which is why it looks new compared to the front part of the panel.

You can read the full article about how that car was cleaned and the paint issues corrected here. Even if you're not into polishing cars like I am, you can scroll through the photos as they tell most of the story.

So, if you really don't care about how to wash a car and just want to get to the point of the article then please skip to Is there a point to this article?.

Cleaning a car properly.

I must preface this by saying that this is not intended to be an exhaustive article – it's just some basic steps that illustrate my point.

The first thing you need to do is either hose or preferably jet-wash the car down. This removes any surface grit and loose dirt which will improve the quality of the wash later. I certainly did this in more recent years.

Once the loose dirt is washed off, the proper washing starts. At this point, you need to use 2 buckets of water – one for clean water and one for dirty – more on that shortly. Also, you should never use a sponge as a sponge will collect all of the surface dirt that was on the car and will hold it on the surface of the sponge. Rinsing will get rid of some of that dirt but a surprising amount stays on the surface of the sponge. This means that during the course of washing the car, the sponge effectively becomes a brillo pad!

Instead of a "normal" sponge, you should use a microfibre "noodle" sponge or wash mitt (something like this). This type of wash mitt has tentacles that effectively give you a much larger surface area and the dirt has a lot less chance of scratching the car.

Now, in terms of the two buckets, you need one bucket with clean water in it (this will be the "dirty" bucket) and one with clean water and the car shampoo. A lot of "proper" car shampoo is ph neutral and specially formulated to not remove any existing wax from the car. If you clean and wax your car properly then the finish should last months with only rinsing and drying needed in between.

The thing to do is to wash the car by dipping the wash mitt into the top couple of inches of the dirty bucket to wash off any debris – going too deep into the bucket risks collecting dirt that hasn't sunk properly yet. It's best not to stir the dirty bucket either for the same reason.

Once you've rinsed the wash mitt with the dirty bucket, then dip it into the clean bucket and wash the the car. If you do this correctly, you will be amazed at how different the water in the clean and dirty buckets is at the end of the wash!

In terms of actually washing the car – again, it's just common sense but you should start at the top of the vehicle and go around it in bands. I tend to do the whole roof first, then the windows and any roof pillars, then the bonnet and top of wings and to the same height down the side of the car. I normally leave the back of the car until last in this bit because that is normally more dirty than other parts of the car at the same height. I’ll then go around in another 2 bands washing the progressively more dirty parts of the car as I get lower down rinsing the wash mitt frequently as I go.

The benefit of this pattern is that it means I'm going from the cleanest part of the car to the dirtiest. Again, the goal is to minimize the dirt that gets onto the wash mitt or other parts of the car.

Once I'm done with the washing then I'll rinse the soap off the car with a hose or jet wash and then finally dry the car but I now use a microfibre drying cloth rather than a shammy leather for the same reasons that I don't use a sponge.

After that point, there are literally dozens of products and techniques that can be used to polish and shine the car but they're beyond the scope of this article. If you know me then you will know I’ll happily bore you to death about this stuff in person!
 
Is there a point to this article?

Well, I'm glad you asked – of course there is!

The point is that if I (and thousands of other people) are washing cars wrong then how many other things are we doing wrong? Once you understand the logic to washing a car, it makes a lot of sense but too often we don't stop to think about the best way to doing things – we just do them that way because we always have.

If I'd wanted to wash my car better, I could have just looked at what I was doing and added a better shampoo or something else but that wouldn't have solved the problems. I needed to forget what I thought I knew and start from the beginning.

As I've mentioned before, forgetting what you think you know and working out the best way to do something is not the approach that's taken most of the time which is a shame because it's often the better way to get results.

When did volume get a number?

Recently I sat in the newly launched Range Rover in a showroom and had a play with the in-car entertainment system. These days there are lots and lots of cars out there that have large screen displays in the console to control all manner of in-car systems from radio and CD to navigation, iPod connectivity/etc.

One thing about the Range Rover system puzzled me and I thought it was bad User Interface (UI) design. As is normal, the volume control is a separate rotary control that you turn anti-clockwise to lower the volume and clockwise to increase the volume. When I changed the volume, a large box appeared over everything else on the touch screen with a number to represent the volume. The problem was that this box stayed on the screen for what felt like 3-4 seconds during which time I couldn't do anything else on the screen which I found annoying. It’s probably less of an issue in real use (i.e. when you’re driving and not sitting still playing with the new system) but it did get me thinking.

I tried to think about when volume got a number attached to it and I've got an idea of how it happened. Once upon a time, turning the volume up or down on something (like a radio) resulted in the sound getting louder or quieter and that was all you needed to judge the level of volume.

Then someone invented the TV remote control. These were originally very primitive devices that often only had 4 buttons - channel up and down and volume up and down. The problem that this presented was that people needed a way to see that the buttons they were pressing were having the desired effect. This was easy with channels because the picture would change but with volume, that might be a little more subtle and so the on-screen numbers to indicate the level of volume was born.

That seems to have persevered ever since and there are lots of things that now have a number to indicate the level of volume but is that always sensible or necessary? I currently have a BMW which doesn't give me any indication that the volume has changed. Instead it relies on my trusting the fact that I twisted a control or pressed a button and it adjusts the volume accordingly and honestly, I've never had any problem with it at all - I've never even given it a second thought until I wrote this article.

The fact that the new Range Rover’s in-car systems put the volume in my way enough to make me think about it proves that it’s bad UI design. There were a lot of places on the screen where a discreet volume level indicator would fit perfectly (even if it was a number) but because I’m actually touching the control to make the adjustment - is an indicator really necessary?

When designing UI elements it is vital to question everything and make sure whatever you are adding provides real value. As a poster my wife bought me for Christmas says “just because we've always done it that way doesn't mean it’s not incredibly stupid” and in a similar way, even if it’s “new and impressive” - if there’s no justification for it then it’s still stupid!

Simon on: Wasting time

It’s odd that, in an era when we are more time-poor than ever, we are using technology to come up with ever more sophisticated ways to waste time. Take social media as an example. I’m not a great Twitter user and only follow 12 other users, mostly trade magazines. Even so, my Twitter feed of yesterday included 172 tweets with fewer than 9% of any interest.

What of Facebook? Again, I’m not a heavy user but there were 73 threads on my Facebook page of which 23% were of interest. I opened only 40% of my emails: the rest, including those in the Junk folder, were deleted unread. Of those I opened, 10% were from LinkedIn but I probably only clicked on three or four stories of which, possibly two were of real interest. I still feel compelled to go through all the headings just in case.

It seems the price of all the benefits of instantaneous communication is time spent shovelling all the dross out of our computer systems. Maybe one day somebody will come up with a program that can monitor everything that comes through and be taught to filter out the useless stuff from every source.

Whoever comes up with that will make a fortune.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Misinformation

Perhaps I shouldn’t let it get to me but I get really irritated by the amount of misinformation that’s bandied around the meeting industry these days. 

What do I mean? I recently received an email from somebody suggesting that ‘big data’ would be a good topic for a seminar for the meetings industry. 

The reality is that few meeting planners will have a database with more than a few thousand records in it. That’s not big data. 

Big data involves millions, possibly billions of records. But the person who suggested it wasn’t the first I’ve seen suggesting that meeting planners need to understand big data.

Then there’s the whole free Wi-Fi thing. If you’ve got an event with a few hundred attendees, free Wi-Fi might be feasible. If you’ve got more than 1,000 attendees, forget it. 

If you want a Wi-Fi system that’s reliable and will enable all your attendees to make use of it, you are going to have to pay. It’s just too complicated to expect anything else.

Unfortunately some meeting planners believe this and other nonsense. Maybe I need to start asking university tutors how they teach students to evaluate technology and its suitability for their events.

Originally published in Conference News

Death and Taxes

A lot has been written in the media lately about various corporations and how much tax they pay and it’s been winding me up like you wouldn’t believe!

Benjamin Franklin said “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” and that still seems to be entirely true today. Even more true is that we all want to avoid both of those as much as possible!

Let’s examine the situation. Amazon and Google (to name two of the most high profile corporate cases) have been accused of not paying enough tax by the British Government. Apple in the US has had similar accusations levelled at it.

This has gone on so much that the UK Government have summoned a number of these companies to testify before a Commons select committee about the situation.

As far as I can see – the truth is painfully simple. The companies haven’t done anything wrong at all. They have used the fair and legal measures available to them to minimise the amount of tax they pay and every company should do the same. If companies didn’t try to avoid taxes then the accountants inside those companies wouldn’t be doing their jobs correctly. On top of which, the companies have a responsibility to the shareholders to maximise the amount of profit which means minimising tax.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt said that he was “perplexed” by the situation (rightly so in my view). He said "What we are doing is legal. I'm rather perplexed by this debate, which has been going in the UK for some time, because I view taxes as not optional. I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required. It's not a debate. You pay the taxes. If the British system changes the tax laws, then we will comply. If the taxes go up, we will pay more, if they go down, we will pay less. That is a political decision for the democracy that is the United Kingdom."

And that sums it up for me. They are paying all of the taxes that they are legally required to pay and they are using the perfectly legal measures to avoid paying more tax than they have to. Should taxes be based on how moral you feel? I don’t think so. They should be based on what the law says and if the Government think that companies aren’t paying enough tax then change the law.

My company does everything it can to minimise the tax we pay and I have no shame in saying that. The thing that the media seem to have forgotten is that these businesses pay a huge amount of other taxes. From VAT on sales, rates for business premises, PAYE and Employers NI on salaries of the thousands of people they give jobs to – the list goes on and on.

Legally avoiding a bit of corporation tax – not a crime – nothing to see – move along!

Simon on: Facebook

The people who tell us that the only meeting planners not using social media are either stupid or incompetent are fond of quoting Facebook statistics. 

You know the sort of thing. If Facebook was a country it would be the third biggest on the planet and so on.

It has always struck me that these figures are irrelevant if you’re organising a medical congress in Birmingham but that doesn’t stop them appearing.

But I wonder how they are reacting to some recent statistics from Pew Research Center in the USA?

The figures confirm that the Facebook population is massive but the really interesting figures come further down the paper. 

Only 12 per cent of Facebook users say that it has become more important to them over the past year while 28 per cent say it is less important. The bulk of them say there is no change.

And in the category that has always been regarded as the backbone of Facebook users – those aged between 18 to 29 years, more than a third now spend less time on Facebook than they did a year ago.

Could this mean that users are tiring of Facebook? 

Originally published in Conference News

It’s not what you’re selling – it’s how you sell it!

I had to go to the tip (which I guess is a colloquial term for the local council's waste disposal site or municipal dump) recently – nothing particularly exciting about that but what I found when I got there interested me a lot.

I've been to the tip plenty of times before. We used to live near a tip that which I never really liked going to as it felt disorganised and messy although there was nothing wrong with it from a functional point of view. 

It’s a small site with a load of skips around. Because the site is small, there’s often people queuing out onto the road waiting to get into the site. The skips are large industrial skips with large metal steps at the side of them so you can get high enough to throw your stuff in. There is a “General Waste” skip and a couple of others for garden waste or wood but that’s about it.

Whenever I went to this site I always felt concerned about getting a puncture there because the floor seems to be have debris on it. Generally, it wasn't a great waste site and as such I tried to avoid going there as much as possible. Unfortunately for my long suffering wife this meant that she would wait until she was bored of waiting for stuff to be taken to the tip and do it herself!

Then we moved house and there was a different tip that was much nearer to us so we started using that. The two facilities perform exactly the same function but its amazing how different they are. 

The new tip is a really modern site with about 16 skips plus a couple of other areas. The site has a huge concrete ramp that goes up and around in an oval with one side of the oval being at road level and the other side being at the level of the top of the skips. This makes it amazingly simple to dump stuff into them. 

Added to that, the large number of skips are all labelled for different types of waste and the one where you put anything that doesn't fit into another skip is labelled “Waste for Land Fill”. 

This one simple fact – that it was going to land fill – really made me think about what I was throwing away and it made me spend much more time separating the stuff I was taking to the tip into different categories so as much as possible could be recycled. 

On the way out of the tip there is a large sign telling you how much of the waste that was taken to the tip each month was recycled. Normally it seems to be about 75% which is amazing. I would imagine the amount of recycling at the older tip was more like 10%. 

Given that both facilities are performing exactly the same function, it’s amazing what a difference presentation makes. How many other areas of daily life could be transformed with a bit of thought?