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