Simon on: Apps vs. Web

New research suggests that a third of young professionals dislike event apps. Given the way apps have been promoted to organisers, this may come as a surprise.

But should it? In most cases it’s quicker to use a mobile device to go to the event website and find information than to download and install an app. And if users don’t get round to removing apps for past events, their devices are going to get cluttered up with apps they no longer need.

It’s also clear that the design of some apps works against them because they’re so muddled it’s difficult to find relevant information.

All of this means that organisers must not neglect their websites in favour of their apps.

They need to take a close look at their websites and ask whether they provide the information users want and whether it’s easy to find. For example, are the dates, location and opening times shown at the top of the home page? How many clicks does it take to find the seminar programme? These days it's very easy to deliver different content to mobile devices and desktop browsers.

Get all of this right and it might even be possible to save money on app development.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: ITCM - Virtual meetings

Virtual meetings are nothing new - in fact they've been around for several years under the technological guise known as teleconferencing.

Although in that form the concept of virtual meetings never quite took off, today the idea is much more accessible - yes there are still limitations but it does have its uses.

Recent developments have certainly made these kinds of meetings a much more serious possibility and we can now meet with anyone, anywhere.

But there is a downside - to find out what that is, read the whole article featured on ITCM, by clicking here.

Change doesn't happen all of a sudden

As I prepare to travel to Las Vegas to work on IMEX America 2014 I can't help thinking back to when we started working on the systems for the show in 2001.

This chain of thought started when I was in Germany for IMEX Frankfurt this year. I was staying in a hotel and eating in restaurants that didn't exist when we did the first show in 2003.

In May 2014 we had the 12th show in Frankfurt and this will be the 4th show in America and I think it's fair to say that there have been some dramatic changes in the world since it all started.

We've had the first black President of America, a number of countries that were dictatorships now aren't, fully electric cars are on general sale and BlackBerry has gone from world leader to struggling also-ran.

In that same time, the events industry has moved forwards, but I don't believe we've seen any dramatic shifts in the events world. Of course, if you compared the first IMEX Frankfurt 2003 to an IMEX 2014 show then you would definitely see some significant differences but these haven't been "big bang" changes – they have occurred much more gradually over time and will continue to do so.

Back in 2003, the iPhone was just a glint in Steve Jobs' eye and when it was released in 2007 it was definitely a defining moment that ultimately transformed the world we live in. That said, the iPhone was the culmination of years of work and gradual improvements in technology (battery life, touch screens, processors, memory) and while the world did sit up and take notice, proper penetration of smartphones into the general business world took a fair while longer. So much so that it has only been in the past 4 years or so that event apps have really started to become much more commonplace.

The iPad was released in 2011 and we soon saw those appearing on show floors as a useful alternative to laptops. This was partly because of their portability and partly due to the fact that most people only want to browse the web, compose emails and write documents on their devices.

Equally, in 2003 I doubt if free public Wi-Fi existed in most places but these days it's fairly normal for a café, bar, hotel or restaurant to have it and it transforms the experience of being in a foreign country. Now I can sit in a rooftop bar on a beautiful sunny day with a nice cold beer while keeping up to date with my email rather than having to be in the office!

There was no social media of any note back in 2003 – Facebook and Twitter were founded in 2004 and 2006 respectively but took a good while to reach any kind of market penetration and while people were talking about "web 2.0" we didn't really see any discernable effects of it in the events world until much later.

I think it's fair to say that the changes we have seen have mainly come in the form of technology in one way or another and whilst there has been some incredibly significant changes in the world, they don't happen overnight and don't effect the events industry quickly.

So the next time someone asks me "how is this going to change the events industry" I think the most appropriate response is "gradually".

Simon on: ITCM - Time to consider our own data security

With recent stories of celebrities' iCloud accounts being hacked, it's time that data security became a serious issue for everyone.

We wouldn't leave our doors unlocked so why do we leave our personal information up for grabs? 

With nearly a third of us choosing '123456' as our password of choice, the question is: are you doing enough to protect your data? 

Read the whole article featured on ITCM, by clicking here.

Some companies clearly don't "get" the web

Recently I found a document from ages ago where I'd made a note that my daughter would love a 1kg bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk. I thought that it would make a good Christmas present so I decided to try and find one.

A quick Google later told me that although this product has existed in the past, it's rare if not impossible to find at the moment. Perhaps it's a seasonal thing but one website did turn up a result – a website called DebenhamsWeddings.com and not only that, they show that the price has fallen from £10 to only £3 – result!

The problem is that the only action that's available on the page is "Add to gift list" which I didn't want to do – I wanted to buy it so I rang the customer services number which is where it started to get a bit weird.

I explained my problem to the lady who answered the phone and she said "yes, sometimes Google show pages for products that are no longer available". She took the product number from me and looked it up and sure enough – this product was no longer available.

I said "why wouldn't your web team update the page to say that this product isn't available" and she completely failed to see that it is totally Debenhams fault and said "no, it's Google linking to the page that's the problem. You shouldn't use Google to search for products on our website" – erm HELLO...what sort of moronic response is that?

Honest to god – if Debenhams leave a live page on the internet that shows a product as available then it's not Google's fault because nobody (including Google) can tell that this product isn't available any more. The fact that she gave me a response without any hesitation shows that this obviously happens reasonably frequently.

It just goes to show how dumb some company's attitudes to the web are which is quite scary. Thankfully, it does make it far easier for retailers who have a clue about what they're doing to take business away from idiots that haven't a clue.

Simon on: Suitcasing

There seems to be an increase of interest in ‘suitcasing’ - the process of taking advantage of networking opportunities at conferences without paying the registration fee. Even the New York Times has written about it.

It’s easy to see why it annoys organisers: people are gaining benefits from the event without contributing anything. One organiser quoted in the NYT article claims that between 1 and 3 percent of attendees are ‘suitcasing’. If you have 500 delegates at a conference each paying €1,000.00 registration, you could be losing up to €15,000.00.

There are proven technologies and techniques that can be used to combat the problem but this issue also raises a question: why are people doing this? It’s because they want the networking benefits of being at the conference.

That’s something that you don’t get with virtual or hybrid events. The promoters of these technologies will disagree but recent experience suggests that trying to be a virtual visitor can be a frustrating business. The technology works but people at events don’t want to stand around talking to a tablet on a stick.

People want to talk to people. The best way to do that is face to face. That’s why people are ‘suitcasing’.

Originally published in Conference News 

Good UX is harder to find but it does exist

Sometimes I get fed up with the amount of bad UX that's out there. It's much easier to find than good UX and therefore I find myself writing about it more often than good stuff. There are plenty of good lessons to be learned from bad UX but it is nice when you come across something genuinely good and that's what happened to me recently so I thought I should share it.

It's not unusual for me to order things from the internet - in fact I do more shopping there than anywhere else these days. Delivery companies are hit and miss to say the least but for a while DPD have stood out for me as a good example of user experience in the delivery sector.

The main reason for this is that some time ago they started sending me a text saying when my delivery would happen down to the hour. For example - "Your order will be delivered today between 14:22-15:22 by DPD driver Keith". They also give me the option to reply to the text and have the package delivered to a neighbour or reschedule for another day.

This is really nice for package recipients because the last thing they want when they're having a package delivered is to have to stay in all day hoping the package will arrive. More recently, I've had emails from DPD too with a link to a website that provides even better information. When I click on the link in the email I see this.

For me this is a brilliant linking of various technologies to improve the UX. The vans are all satellite tracked now and linking that data with the data from the handheld computers you have to sign to acknowledge delivery means DPD can tell me which delivery the driver is currently on and how long it will be before my delivery. This also means I can keep an eye out for the driver if I live in a place that's harder to find. That should ultimately cut down on the number of failed deliveries that they then have to put extra effort into - a win for the company.

As I said at the beginning of this article - it is really nice to find something that makes me go "wow, that's a great idea". I just wish it happened more often!

Simon on: ITCM - UX stretches beyond websites

User experience is something that most people believe only applies to websites, and while the UX of a site is important, when it comes to the events industry, it is something that should apply to the whole event.

Despite UX being very easy to get wrong, I think event planners need to look at their event through the eyes of an attendee to have optimum user experience and with it, a successful event.

Agree with me? Read the whole article featured on ITCM, by clicking here.

Pathetic unsubscribe mechanisms drive me crazy!

I suspect most of us are inundated with spam email these days. Some of it comes from unknown sources - that's true spam in my book but plenty of other email messages come from a retailer or mailing list I signed up to once upon a time.

Over time, I find that either they send me far too many emails or I just get bored of the content. If I notice that I'm not reading the content of emails from a particular retailer or mailing list for a while then I tend to unsubscribe to cut down on the volume of stuff in my inbox.

Doesn't sound too complicated so far does it? Well, the problem is that I have a number of email addresses that all go into my inbox. The problem then comes when I click on an "unsubscribe" link in an email and I'm presented with a stupid form that asks me to enter my email address.

"Stupid form" is quite a general description so let me explain further. If this was a "smart form" then it would know who I was. The retailer has sent me an email that generally is personalised to me (it normally has at least my name in it) and so they should easily be able to track which email address they sent the email to. Instead they make me play a guessing game where I have to try various email addresses until I find the one that they sent the email to.

That's bad enough but in fact, some unsubscribe mechanisms are much, much dumber than that. Let's take Aldi as a prime example. I subscribed to their newsletter a while ago but I then got multiple emails a week advertising baby food and all sorts of other "special offers" that had no relevance to me. So, I decided to unsubscribe and that's where the pain started...

Now in Aldi's defence, they did tell me the email address that the email had been sent to at the bottom of the page. That said, I could easily tell that their unsubscribe link is personalised but their form still doesn't know which email address I want to unsubscribe from.

Clicking the link takes me to a ridiculously slow loading web page (it took 25 seconds when I tested on a nice fast connection) and then I see the "Subscribe to our newsletter" page that looks like this

My screen is fairly large but I still can't see anything on the screen that talks about unsubscribing until I scroll down the page at which point I see this form

ok - at last I'm getting somewhere - so I filled in the only mandatory field on the form and clicked "Newsletter unsubscribe". Sadly, there are no bounds to the Aldi web team's stupidity - I got put back at the top of the form where I was unable to see the error message that is being presented for me. That requires me to scroll down again at which point I see this

Oh great - so a field that isn't marked at mandatory is actually mandatory even though there's only one option and I'm unsubscribing so it should be fairly obvious what I want to unsubscribe from. Still, I'm nearly there so I tick the box and hopefully leave the mailing list forever.

Unfortunately for me - the first time I tried this I went through the whole process on my mobile only to reach the end of the process and be told it wasn't possible to unsubscribe. 

Wow - how stupid is this process! If they have a dedicated page to say that I couldn't unsubscribe then why the hell can't they record my email address and say that they'll fix it for me later?

Sometimes - even processes that should be incredibly simple and pain free for the end user end up being complicated beyond belief by bad development. I'm sure there were undoubtedly some "geniuses" in corporate meetings who thought it was all excellent - they should get at least some of the blame too. I also realise that there is a possibility that the developer(s) protested at how crap this all was and was shouted down by their managers but there are also lots of bad developers out there!

The UX of any interaction between your clients and your website is vitally important and even big companies sometimes show just how badly it is possible to do it. When designing a system you should always try and experience the system from the customer's perspective - make sure you know how painful it is to use the system so you can make it better!

Simon on: Compelling content

A recent conference session included information from research carried out for MPI a couple of years ago. When asked to identify the most effective elements of a hybrid meeting, planners chose online chats, rebroadcast recorded sessions, online Q&A with speakers and virtual breakout rooms.

Attendees, on the other hand, put compelling content as easily the most important factor.

In itself this difference of opinion may not matter were it not for the fact that, if the MPI figures are right, content was put in a clear first place by attendees while planners reckoned it a poor seventh.

Why was this? Do planners want to boast about having the latest gizmos at their events or have suppliers’ sales people convinced them they can’t survive without this or that technology?

Whatever the reason, planners need to understand that the answer to the question, ‘how do you engage the attendees?’ isn’t ‘use the latest tech’ it’s ‘get the content right’.

Because if the content isn’t right, the sexiest technology in the world isn’t going to save the conference. The attendees will all be sitting with their heads bent over their mobile devices and they won’t be sending tweets about what a great conference they’re at.

Originally published in Conference News

Why does it seem so difficult to get the basics right?

This post was triggered by a recent stay in a London hotel and those of you who know me are fully aware that staying in hotels isn't a particularly unusual thing for me but in this case, finding a hotel which addressed my basic needs so well is definitely unusual.

You might be asking yourself why my basic needs are so unrealistic as to be rare to find in a hotel so let's look at that.

In my case one of the most important elements for a hotel room is temperature. Personally I like my hotel rooms on the cold side - if it's too warm in the room then I will have a terrible night's sleep which is no fun but far too often what the hotel terms as "air-conditioning" and what I understand by that are totally different. This hotel's air-con was excellent - so much so that I had to turn it up from the coldest setting which is unheard of for me!

Next on my list is a comfy bed but again, what I consider "comfy" and what someone else does could be quite different things. This bed was very comfy with a nice duvet and lovely feather pillows - I was a happy boy.

Finally on my list of basic requirements is peace and quiet. I am quite a light sleeper and a room too near a lift or a noisy area will disturb my sleep badly.

Given that my list of basic needs turns out to be three items (cool enough, comfy bed and quiet enough) I find it a bit shocking that it's so rare that I find a hotel that adequately meets these needs.

That leads me on to ask - how many other businesses are getting the basics wrong? It's very easy these days to be distracted by the latest technology or focussing on winning new business or any number of other things. I think it's worth remembering that regardless of what you business you are in, you should try and get right back to basics sometimes and making sure you're doing those things as well as you can.

Bad usability: Halfords website search

I needed some oil and decided to go to Halfords website and see how much it cost. I typed "10W30" into the search facility and the website searched for "power". As you can see from the image below, this search returned 197 results - not one of which had any relevance to what I was looking for. 

Ironically the oil I wanted does exist on their website but you can’t search for it unless you know to add the word "oil" into the search term. Even then, their website search results seem to prioritise any number of other oils which aren't 10W30 over the one product that is. 

Simon on: Wearable technology

So wearable technology in the form of Google Glass or smartwatches is supposed to be the latest game-changer for the meetings industry. This looks very much like another example of the latest shiny thing being hailed as a breakthrough.

In spite of the hype surrounding the likes of the Galaxy Gear, the watches are little more than repeater stations for smartphones and they need charging every couple of days.

Then there’s Google Glass which appears to provide a connection to email, the Web and other functions by showing, in effect, a heads-up display in the top right corner of the wearer’s field of vision. 

Various voices are already being raised in alarm at the privacy issues the gadget raises by providing users with the ability to record video and take photos using Glass without anybody else knowing.

But the point about all of this is that none of the technology provides a real benefit to the meetings industry. It’s a distraction. It’s probably going to have as much impact as 3D television had on the nation’s viewing habits. 

The good news for meeting planners is that, for now, all those blogs promoting wearable tech can be safely ignored.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Free Wi-Fi at events

People are still demanding free Wi-Fi at conferences because hotels and coffee shops do it so why not conference venues? Sadly, it’s not as simple as that.

Over recent years the number of Wi-Fi devices being carried by conference attendees has increased significantly. Many now have at least one smartphone plus a tablet computer and probably other kit as well.

The problem is exacerbated by the increasing number of people carrying myfi devices which, as Apple found out years ago, can create havoc on a Wi-Fi network.

The increasing number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices means that, while an organiser of a conference for just a few hundred has a fighting chance of providing reliable free Wi-Fi, those running bigger events have a choice: bring in a specialist or deal with a stream of complaints about poor connectivity.

The problem is that Wi-Fi is not an inexhaustible resource: there are only a few channels available and they can become clogged quickly, meaning that range and capacity of the Wi-Fi access points falls to the level where the service is virtually unusable.

So if you have  more than a few hundred attendees and you want stable, reliable Wi-Fi at your conference, you have to accept reality: you have to pay to provide the service. Don’t assume you can get it free.

Originally published in Conference News

How to choose a good password

As many of you will know, online security is a subject I'm fairly passionate about. So much so that I've been writing a fair bit and also speaking at some events about it all lately.

After looking back through my blog posts I realised that I've not written anything about how to choose a good password and that is the most crucial element in the fight to keep your online accounts safe. So now seems like the perfect time to remedy that and explain the current best practice for passwords.

I specifically say "current" best practice because like most things - the advice can change from time to time and actually has changed over recent years.

The old advice for creating a secure password was to have a random string of upper and lower case letters interspersed with numbers and symbols. Something that didn't look anything like a word you would find in a dictionary and that was at least 12 characters long (and preferably more like 16 characters). Something like this :-

UY8&beY!6alPQ:3s

Although that is a 16 character password, there are a couple of problems it - the biggest of which is that it's incredibly horrible to remember and most people couldn't.

At this point I need to explain that there are ways to measure how good a password is and the best way is something called "entropy" which is basically a measure of the randomness of the characters in a password. You really don't need to understand how that works but we can use that as a comparison for how strong some example passwords are. The 16 character password above has an entropy of 77.7 bits.

Being able to remember a password is obviously a major requirement of passwords - otherwise people will write them down and that means someone else could find out what they are easily.

So instead of the older password advice, there is now some much better password advice which is to select 4 completely random words that are not related to each other and string them together. So for example :-

correcthorsebatterystaple

I've highlighted the individual words so that you can better distinguish them. I don't think anyone would dispute that this password is much easier to remember than the previous example and it is actually more secure as it has 93.6 bits of entropy.

Even so, that's not the best we can do with this password and a couple of very simple tweaks will make it much better. Those tweaks would simply be to capitalise the first letter of each word and to include a bit of punctuation like this :-

Correct!Horse&BatteryStaple?

This password is now still fairly simple to remember but has 140.2 bits of entropy which is approaching twice as secure as the first password I showed.

So, now you know how to create a really secure password and keep your online accounts and data safe but we're not quite finished. The final things we need to consider is that passwords do get lost and not just by you - as the recent eBay hack has proved, even the biggest players on the internet have security problems from time to time and there have been many of these attacks which have revealed passwords.

For that reason, it's REALLY important that you have a different password for each account on the internet. I know that's much easier said than done but there are tools like 1Password.com or LastPass.com which will help deal with that.

The MOST important piece of advice I can give though is no matter what else you do - make sure you have a completely different and secure password for your email account because most websites will allow a password to be reset with an email so if someone can login to your email they can probably login to most of your accounts.

Simon on: App security

Ask any organiser whether they would mind a competitor getting hold of a full list of their registrants in order to promote a competing event and most would probably object. 

Yet, according to recent reports, that’s what’s happening at some events. In some cases, the organiser has apparently been told that it’s possible and has ignored the warning.

The situation has arisen because some conference apps (not all by any means) allow any user to download a full list of registrants, in some cases, along with all their personal information.

A competitor doesn’t even need to attend the event. All they do is download the app to get free access to the registrant database.

The fact that some organisers have been told that this is possible with their event app and have done nothing to prevent it suggests that they don’t care about the security of their data. 

Unfortunately this seems to be a common attitude these days. A recent conference session on Internet security attracted only a handful of delegates while another promoting the wonders of social media was a sell-out.

Perhaps it’s time for organisers to learn how to safeguard their assets before being swept up by the latest bandwagon.

Originally published in Conference News

Data security is a deadly serious issue

My recent blog post said that programmers who stored passwords in plain text should be beaten to death with a house brick. That caused someone to email me saying that they thought it was a bit extreme and that perhaps I should consider changing it.

So the first thing I'd like to say is that my comment was not meant to be taken literally but I seriously believe that was obvious. I did have a think about it and I believe the sentiment was justified as a way to highlight the seriousness of the situation and I'd like to explain why starting with some examples.

The first example is the British Pregnancy Advice Service. They have a website which amongst other functions, allows people wanting advice on pregnancy, abortion and contraception to request contact from the charity.

Unfortunately, the charity didn't manage their website development well and didn't know that their website was storing highly sensitive personal information about people who contacted them. Their website was also vulnerable to hacking and someone broke into the site and stole a lot of sensitive personal information.

The charity was fined £200,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK – something that will certainly hurt badly for them but it was less than the maximum possible fine of £500,000. The charity said they were "horrified at the scale of the fine" but the ICO's Deputy Commissioner said "ignorance is no excuse".

At this point I need to say that I have no idea whether there were unprotected passwords in the BPAS website but at the same time, most attacks by hacking exploit lazy or bad programming that doesn’t adequately protect the data in question.

Then there's the case of Cupid Media who operate a variety of dating sites. In 2013 they were hacked and 42 million user account details were stolen from their server. Sadly these details did include plain text passwords and unfortunately, many people regularly use the same password for every website meaning lots of other sites that they are registered with could also be hacked.

Rather disturbingly I also saw a website recently which had almost no security – the admin elements of the site could be reached if you knew the right URL with no login at all and this website stored both passwords AND credit card details in plain text. Honestly, this is probably the most scary example of bad programming I have EVER seen in my life.

Even the general standard of programming was truly shockingly bad. Unfortunately, the person who wrote that website allegedly does this stuff for a living but honestly shouldn’t.

My point is that if a programmer doesn't understand that storing passwords in plain text is one of the worst possible things they can do then there is realistically no chance that they will understand all of the other security threats or how to keep your data safe.

As the UK Government "Cyber Essentials" scheme puts it "Compromise of information assets
can damage companies" and I completely agree.

So when I said you should "beat them to death with a house brick" I was doing so purely for effect. Don’t do that – just fire them and get someone else!

How should passwords be stored on the internet

As I posted yesterday, eBay has been hacked and has lost a lot of data containing usernames and passwords and that got me thinking about how they're storing the passwords. 

In their post about what had happened they said "Because your password is encrypted (even we don't know what it is) we believe your eBay account is secure" and that puzzled me because encryption is a two way thing - if something is encrypted it can be decrypted (providing the relevant encryption keys and/or passphrase is available).

Now what they might have meant is "Because your password is salted and hashed" and that would explain why they don't know what it is but as a description to the general public - it probably means nothing.

So I thought it would be a good idea to explain what that means as it would help anyone who has a website that stores passwords understand what they should be doing.

Let's deal with hashing first. A hash is a "one way function" which means we can put a word through the hash and it will turn into something else but there is no way to reverse the hash and get the word back. Equally, a hash function will always output a fixed length string so it wouldn't matter how long your password is.

There are a few common hash functions by far the most common is MD5 so taking the dictionary word "password" and running it through an MD5 function will return 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 but changing the letter "p" to a capital so that we use "Password" gives us a totally different hash of dc647eb65e6711e155375218212b3964.

The problem here is that if I Google for either of those hashes I will immediately find a website that has a list of millions of MD5 hashes and they know which words caused that hash to be generated so as a security mechanism that's no good as a way to protect passwords.

This is where salts come in. A cryptographic salt is where we add some random data to the password we want to hash. Each password should have a different salt and that means that the resulting hash will be different. So, if we added the users first name to the password it might be that we then have "Simonpassword" and "Clarepassword" which would result in completely different hashes even if the two users had the same password.

By combining these two simple techniques it is possible to make passwords a lot safer even in the event that the database is compromised. I'd like to say at this point that we don't use the user's first name as a salt and we go quite a lot further in terms of protecting the passwords but this is the minimum that anyone should be doing.

So if you're talking to a web developer about your website that stores passwords you should ask them if it uses salted and hashed passwords. If they say "no, it stores the passwords in plain text" you should beat them to death with a house brick!

Simon on: M&IT - iBeacons

With so many gizmos and gadgets continuously hailed as the latest game-changer, it's hard to know what is useful and what is useless.

The most recent piece of tech to be crowned the golden egg of the meetings industry is iBeacons - but what's the truth? And more importantly, what are the benefits?

Find out by reading the whole article featured on M&IT, by clicking here.

eBay's hack highlights a short sighted password policy

For me, yesterday's big news was that yet another big website has fallen victim to hackers. This time it's eBay and so I dutifully logged in to change my password only to be confronted with a pathetic situation.

However I discovered that eBay's passwords can only be between 6 and 20 characters long. They don't tell you the upper limit any more but it's still there! 

This really annoys me massively because from a technical perspective, there's no reason they can't allow you to have any length password you want. The best current password advice is to use 4 unrelated words together as a password, allowing much longer passwords is dramatically safer and my passwords are routinely over 20 characters long.

eBay's page about the security breach says "We take security on eBay very seriously" and "our team is committed to making eBay as safe and secure as possible" - I'm thinking longer passwords would increase the security.

Simon on: Complaints on social media

A few people have argued against spending time on promoting conferences through social media because there is no evidence that it works. The difficulty lies in the claim that social media can be used to attract more delegates to attend a meeting.

It’s true that hobby events can generate huge activity. It’s also true that, in spite of determined efforts by some, this isn’t the case for professional conferences.

Look at the feeds for most conferences and they’ll be mainly made up of promotional posts from the organiser, notes from the organiser’s friends saying they’re excited to be going and posts from commercial organisations trying to get attendees to go to see them.

But one feature of social media is starting to play a role: it is increasingly becoming the first stop for anybody who wants to complain. 

And this is where a meeting planner can use it to advantage. If somebody is monitoring the feeds, these complaints can be spotted, acted upon and, most important, a response posted before the complaint gets out of hand.

The difficulty then becomes one of resisting the temptation to post a message reading ‘Did you bother to read the joining instructions?’. But that’s a different issue.

Originally published in Conference News

Be careful how you scale your business model

Over the past year or two I’ve been getting more into coffee. This was partly triggered by my visiting the IMEX offices in Hove regularly and loving the fact that they had a proper coffee machine in the kitchen. A “proper” coffee when I went down there was a real treat and that prompted me to buy a second hand single group coffee machine for our office which has proved to be very popular.

As part of my coffee education I’ve been trying different coffees and learning more about how to steam milk properly as well as lots of other aspects of the art of coffee making.

I do also like visiting a good coffee shop and while there are some fantastic independent shops around, I do also like Costa in particular and I’ll explain why.

Some while ago I read “Pour your heart into it” which is the excellent book by Howard Shultz about how Starbucks came to be. In it they talk a lot about the whole experience of Starbucks being vital to them and Starbucks being the “third place” which isn’t work or home but is somewhere else – an escape if you like.

As far as I’m aware, Starbucks were the company that really changed the face of coffee retailing. At their peak, they were opening new wholly-owned stores at the staggering rate of up to one per day. I’ve long admired them as a company for how they treat staff and how they built a huge company by doing the right thing, being nice and providing a luxury experience that made people pay more for it than they were used to paying for a cup of coffee.

Since then in the UK at least there’s been increasing competition from other companies like Costa and Café Nero and certainly outside of London, Costa seems more prevalent than Starbucks meaning I go there more often.

Recently I was in my local Costa and got chatting to the barista about it all and she was really knowledgeable and helpful and gave me some really useful tips about what I could do to improve my skills. She also showed me how to do “latte art” – a skill I fear I won’t master anytime soon!

To contrast that I went into Starbucks today and bought a coffee and keen to learn more I started chatting to the barista there. Sadly I got the feeling that they’re not really baristas in Starbucks any more – they’re just servers who have a machine that they operate with no real knowledge of the underlying skills and techniques because they literally pressed a button on the machine and coffee came out.

She did steam the milk partly by hand because they started the first part of the steaming with the nozzle just under the milk but then they just sat the jug of milk down on the machine and left it until the machine decided it was done. I personally didn’t feel like she really understood the process of steaming the milk properly and that was reinforced when she tipped the top part of the milk down the drain before filling my cup. I do really feel that it’s a shame that Starbucks seem to have replaced the properly skilled barista with a glorified vending machine.

It may be that Starbucks have consciously taken the decision to do this because it makes it far easier to recruit and train staff at a lower cost. It also would mean that the vending machine operators (I don’t feel I can use the term barista now) are less likely to go off to the competition because they don’t have the skills but to me it feels as though they’ve compromised on their core values for convenience. If they’ve taken that decision deliberately then fair enough but I for one will be getting my luxury (and let’s face it – expensive) coffees at Costa from now on because I prefer the experience and I value the investment they have made in their baristas.

I guess the lesson here is – compromise your core values at your peril. It might be that the vast majority of the people buying coffee don’t really know or care whether the barista is properly skilled as long as the end result is “acceptable”. You can also probably roll things out more cheaply and easily to a wider audience but I can’t help wondering what else is going to be sacrificed once you start on that particular slippery slope.

I've been a bad blogger!

Yes, yes, I know - I've been a naughty blogger and I should have written more than this by now but I'm now planning on publishing more stuff and lots of shorter things that either amuse me or that I find interesting as well as attempting to write longer articles - we'll see!!

Simon on: Big Data

The annoying aspect of so much of the nonsense spouted about technology is that it diverts attention from what planners should be doing. 

Take Big Data for example. Meeting planners don’t need to bother about it because they’re unlikely ever to have to deal with it.

Big Data describes huge, unstructured databases that need to be analysed using sophisticated systems and specialised data analysts. Both are very expensive. Even the biggest conferences aren’t going to produce a database on which Big Data techniques will be relevant.

Yet we have people using the examples of major consumer brands, which may have Big Data, to claim that meeting planners need to get to grips with the subject. Needless to say, these people usually have a product or service to flog that answers the supposed need they have highlighted.

The reality is that instead of worrying about something that will never affect them, planners should be concentrating the data they collect now and figuring out whether they really need it.

In most cases, the answer is no because most of the data is never used. This means registrants wade through pages of questions to no purpose.

So forget Big Data. Concentrate on Necessary Data.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Social media

One of the technologies that should be making a difference is social media, particularly LinkedIn. It includes industry-specific forums that offer the chance to seek advice and discuss issues of common interest.

Unfortunately, it isn’t working within the meetings and events industries.

There are many forums on LinkedIn serving meetings and events. The difficulty appears to be that forum owners have a choice: open the system to everybody with no checks and annoy users with blatant sales pitches or devote time to moderating contributions.

Some of the leading industry associations have gone down the second route but then seem to have difficulty devoting the necessary time to reviewing comments. The result is annoyance for genuine contributors who feel that they are not trusted and that their comments are being censored.

As a result, useful contributors will be driven off in frustration with consequent damage to the relevant association’s image.

But this points to one of the long-term difficulties of social media: it was originally promoted as a no-cost medium. That was always misleading because, although there’s no direct cost, as there is with advertising, there’s a hidden cost because any organisation wanting to use it has to devote time to managing it.

If they don’t there’s a danger the whole thing will backfire.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: Crowd sourcing at its worst

I have received a Facebook invitation to register for a conference. So far so good but there is no programme as yet, just a request to tell the organiser what subjects would be of interest.

This is crowd sourcing at its worst.

I don’t know whether there will be any content that will make it worth giving up a weekend for. It may turn out to be just a couple of days of social chat because the organiser seems to have no ideas and no understanding of the interests of potential attendees.

Yet crowd sourcing is supposed to be a big thing. In reality, it has been around for a while but it used to be called research. An organiser would commission a research team to contact potential attendees and talk to them in order to define the hot topics. The results were used to draw up the programme.

That approach works. Throwing the whole thing open to the world through a website won’t, because the vast majority of potential attendees probably won’t bother to reply leaving the organiser short of ideas.

Consulting the potential attendees is very important but just asking ‘what do you want?’ through a Facebook page doesn’t count as consulting.

Originally published in Conference News