Inspiration Hub

At the annual Exhibition & Convention Executives Forum, Sam Lippman, president of Lippman Connects and producer of the event, has a tradition of starting off the conference with a five-minute summary of the top-level takeaways from the annual ECEF Pulse Survey. This year’s event on May 28 at the JW Marriott Washington, D.C., was no exception, and Lippman’s quick delivery of the survey results—five business trends for convention executives—was a fitting blast-off to the fast-paced educational day.

Just like people, teams have personalities. While the nature of teams has shifted since our tribal hunter-gatherer days, teams are still one of our most crucial social structures. This is true in most organizations, and particularly the case in high-stress event planning groups. How we introduce hopefulness into our teams can be the difference between joyful collaboration and frustrating second-guessing.

It’s entirely normal—and almost expected—to feel lost in the beginning stages of your job. You’re trying not to forget details, dealing with clients, all the while trying to maintain sight of the big picture. And aside from some internet articles, there isn’t a real guidebook. Enter: mentors. Mentors in your field can be underrated. But they hold information and wisdom that will help guide you through your job—and even far into your career. So, how do you find one, and how do you present yourself as the perfect mentee?

Meetings are necessary. We have to have them to move business forward, make decisions, plan projects and communicate with cross-functional teams. They are an intrinsic business component.

But what is not a given is an effective meeting. We all want them, want to be in them and want to host them. But often, we are faced with meetings that are either poorly managed, unnecessary or a huge time suck. How much time do you spend in meetings? I’ll bet it’s more than you think.

Since our work culture is mostly team-based, it’s about time we reflected it in our conference design. Teams that learn together actually implement together! The fact that it’s also a smart attendee acquisition strategy is the cherry on top.

We're all quite familiar with the Q&A portion of a meeting session: The final few minutes where the audience has its chance to drill down a bit with the presenter. But one participant asking a question to a presenter is the smallest form of interaction imaginable. What about all the other participants? They are simply listening. This means that, at best, three to five percent of the audience becomes actively engaged in that session. With a format called conversations & input (C&I), though, event organizers can radically improve audience activation and interaction, and deepen learning by orders of magnitude.

Digital images displayed on digital displays open up a new world of changeable and moving images. When it comes to selecting digital displays, exhibitors are faced with a staggering choice of options – from small tablets to mid-sized TV screens and multi-panel digital walls. If there is video input, virtually any display screen can be adapted for use at an exhibit. But to help you pick the optimum hardware for your budget, venue, and expected audience, we’ve broken down the features, benefits, and strategies to mitigate risks of each type of display. In this article I will cover, Tablets, Kiosks, and TVs. In part 2 of this article, computer monitors, projectors and video walls will be discussed.

There’s no question that health and wellness has become a priority for people as they seek out ways to live fuller lives. But are they truly adopting wellness as a lifestyle, or just another fad? Insights from the Eventbrite platform, which powers millions of events a year, argue in favor of the former. From extended yoga retreats to essential oil conventions, Eventbrite saw a 44% growth in health and wellness events between 2017 and 2018, with no signs of it slowing anytime soon.

The latest artificial intelligence innovation from Google could make translating your conference speakers cheaper, more accurate, and more personal. Nicknamed Translatotron, the new AI-powered system is in the testing phase but so far appears to be able to provide simultaneous translation using a close approximation of the speaker’s voice, retaining the intonation and emphasis. Check out the Translatotron blog post here for audio examples and an explanation of how the program works. 

If Bill Gates dropped a dollar, would he pick it up? You may have heard some version of this question before. Following a 2011 experiment by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Internet was ablaze with the finding that Gates would have to stumble across $45,000 in order for it to be worth his time to bend down and pick it up.

What can you, as an event professional, do to help the 40.3 million people around the world who are victims in the multibillion-dollar human trafficking trade? It turns out the answer is: a lot. During a panel discussion of the many faces of trafficking, attendees at The Smart Woman Summit at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas learned that they could make a real difference by doing something as simple as taking a picture of their hotel room.

You don’t want to be the meeting planner in charge when your CEO, who’s vegan, gets served carrots for dinner at the awards banquet. And that cringe-worthy scenario will be the least of your worries if an attendee with an egg allergy is mistakenly served a salad dressed with a vinaigrette made with eggs.

As more than 5,100 meeting and incentive buyers plus 3,500 exhibitors from at least 100 countries gather in Germany this week for the IMEX Frankfurt show, the event's organizers delivered a half-day educational track on gaining gender balance and driving female empowerment during "EduMonday," a multi-track program that took place before the exhibit floor opened for business on May 21 and 22.

You’ve probably worked to improve your conference sustainability—waste diversion, less paper, fewer single-serve plastics—but have you thought about the carbon footprint of the food you serve? The Greenbuild International Conference and Expo has, and the 3,500 plated lunches it served at McCormick Place in Chicago at its November 2018 event were 100 percent vegan.

Within a few days of returning from a trade show, it’s important to get together with your team to review the event’s successes and failures. Your booth staff will have fresh memories of what went well or wrong, and those staff who didn’t attend the event will likely have early impressions of any resultant sales or leads. To ensure you capture this feedback in a way that can guide next year’s exhibit, we’d like to offer up the following list of staff questions.

Just like social media, event planning relies heavily on understanding ever-changing consumer preferences and behaviors. In order to make the best recommendations for clients in the event space, beyond examining platform updates and algorithm shifts, it’s important to evaluate broader cultural shifts and audience behaviors to anticipate the best way to deliver a strong message, while of course, ensuring those messages break through the noise.

As event and marketing professionals, we are used to keeping it all under control while everything around us is constantly changing. You track the competition, manage the timelines and budgets, and do your day job at the same time – all while managing your personal life whether that involves caring for kids, aging parents, partners and, hopefully, a social life. This can all come to a grinding halt when emergencies come calling.

As we watch news on TV or online, our brains hear things that scare us. If it’s not the upcoming weather forecast or flood warning, then it’s the scare of contaminated food, causing illnesses. For meeting professionals, these nerve-pulsating newscasts could be creating extra stressors, as those items might also influence our conferences, such as weather that grounds planes or sicknesses that prevent travel.

According to a report released by CareerCast, event planners made it to the top five on the list of “The Most Stressful Jobs of 2018,” right after firefighters, police officers, enlisted military personnel and airline pilots. The survey was based on 11 factors, including travel, physical demands, meeting the public and deadlines. Smart Meetings planner, Maria Cruz, has a few tips to help planners reduce stress before, during and after an event.

There are so many theories in leadership ranging from vision to self-awareness to service. The simplest way to develop your leadership skills is to have a work ethic mixed with a solid foundation of core values. Inspirational leaders have commandments they work and live by. Commandments, or guidelines, lay the critical foundation for the development of leadership and business solutions.