Certain

If there were a magical formula that would enable you to create the perfect event, you’d certainly take it, especially with worries that interrupt your good night’s sleep. In working with thousands of event planners over the years, we’ve identified a long list of worries and stressors that keep even the most experienced corporate event planning pro awake at night. Here are some of the biggest nightmares:

1. Your event website is taking too long. You put in your order for a special event website and registration tool weeks ago… but it’s still not up and running. Here you are, left to fret over the ripple effect this upfront delay will have on the rest of your timeline.

2. Your event website fails to reflect your brand. You fear that your site visitors will find their way to your event website or registration area and think they’ve wandered to the wrong place. (“Where am I?”)

3. Your attendee registration process is cumbersome. You’re afraid that potential event participants will give up on the registration process because of clunky, inconvenient, multi-layered log-in requirements.

4. Your event system fails to offer apps for mobile devices. You worry that you don’t have a convenient way to supply information to your attendees other than encouraging them to visit your website for announcements, agendas, or activities updates.

5. Your attendees will have to complete registration forms again at the actual event. You wish you had a way to capture registrants’ personal information to pre-populate communications or registration forms.

6. You’re working from an Excel document. You are overwhelmed by the time and effort it takes to correspond with participants via email and personalize each message to them.

7. You only offer links suggesting nearby lodging options. You wish your registrants didn’t have to think twice about finding a place to stay or be forced to deal with the time-sucking reservation process.

8. Your site is less than secure. You worry that potential event registrants will be turned off come payment time when there is no obvious assurance that their personal financial information is safe.

9. You’re using a calculator to manage registration fees. You long for a user-friendly payment method for collecting payments, applying discounts, adding taxes and fees, and processing refunds.

10. You have to design and print multiple forms and flyers to get important info to your attendees. You wish you could communicate simultaneously with each attendee via their mobile device.

11. You’re managing onsite check-in and registration with pen and paper. You fear that errors will easily occur without a foolproof technological method of confirming your attendees’ presence.

12. You dread the weeks following the event when you’ll be buried in forms, tallying stats. You fear that you’ll miss very telling results and indicators with your inefficient method of analyzing participant data and attendance.

13. You’re offending the disabled. Your registration site is not equipped to be compatible with assistive technologies or accessible to any disabled individuals who may wish to attend your event.

14. You only have paper surveys to gauge attendees’ opinions. You wish you had a way to gather critical feedback, allow your attendees to take surveys online, and access the results of these surveys immediately.

Any of these common worries sound familiar? Are they fighting for space in your head at night with those jumping sheep? Your prescription for a relaxing night of rest awaits you. Download our new complimentary event planning guide and discover a ‘Good Night Sleep Formula for Event Planners Everywhere.’  In this guide you’ll discover how the right event management software can alleviate your worries and enable you to easily plan, promote, manage, and track events in an integrated, cloud-based software suite.
 

Event marketing plans always rely heavily on email to build excitement and convert contacts to registrations, sponsors, exhibitors and more.  Many times, event email marketing programs suffer from a lack of precision and measurement.  “Register Now” emails go out repeatedly in the lead up to the event, many times still including folks who’ve already signed up in the recipient list.

Instead of focusing on just the subject line or call-to-action in an event email, event marketers must recognize that targeting the right audience matters.  Emails are the strongest weapons in your promotional event arsenal, and they should be optimized to the audience at every touchpoint throughout to ensure a reader interacts with the message and delivers the ultimate payoff – a click on the call-to-action.

Do you segment and measure your email marketing for events?  Do you use separate software to do this?  Do you scrub Excel lists against registration data?  Share your tactics with us in the comments!

PS! We have a new event marketing trend brief out! Click here to download the 16 Buzz-Building Event Tactics for Driving ROI.

 

One of the cornerstones of the Strategic Meeting Management (SMM) initiative is transparent metrics to define, measure and report success.  One of the most important SMM components is hotel contracts and validating negotiations success in the areas or risk reduction and cost avoidance.

In my two part webinar titled “Hotel Contract Trends, Challenges and Solutions”, I will address industry issues and trends that impact planner / hotelier negotiations, how hotels manage for profitability, methods to assess and use your leverage for maximum negotiations results, contract clauses that add meeting value & reduce risk and metrics that validate and report success.

I will also review a custom hotel contract (ready for signature) process that adds meeting value, generates real cost savings and assures risk reduction.  This process addresses all contract components, value added concessions, hotel feels and surcharges (eliminate or reduce), all hotel performance clauses (based on loss profit, not revenue) and company liability language.

Meetings are big investments and reducing risk and mitigating damages to your organization is essential.  This high impact webinar series will provide immediate take a ways on a new hotel contract risk reduction / cost avoidance action plan and process that will assure and validate success that can be distributed to senior managers.

Hotel Contract Trends, Challenges And Solutions Webinar Series:

            Part 1:  Wednesday, March 21, 2012 (11:30am PST)

            Part 2:  Wednesday, April 4, 2012      (11:30am PST)

Presenter

Tim Brown is the CEO of Meeting Sites Resource, a global strategic meeting management solutions organization.   This includes meeting site research and hotel contract negotiations, professional meeting support services, Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) consulting and advanced meeting technology.  Tim has spent his entire career in the meeting and hospitality industry and has been both a planner and supplier.  He speaks at many industry events and contributes to major industry trade publications.  Tim has been very involved in the hospitality industry including Past-President of two different MPI chapters, has served on MPI’s International Board of Directors and is a former “Supplier of the Year.”

Valentine's Day is upon us.  This day, generally characterized for showing your significant other some grandiose display of affection, generally goes uncelebrated in the business world. Until today.

At Certain, we take our relationships with our customers very seriously. We understand that people fall in love not only with products, but with the people who sell and help you manage these products. Long and lasting business relationships come with the challenges of personal relationships. We enjoy the opportunity to get to know you guys and grow with your valuable feedback.  We love our customers and we are thankful to have such devoted customers who love us in return.

On behalf of Certain, I would like to thank you (our customers) for your continued loyalty, your valuable feedback, and your partnership. Without your communication we would not be able to better ourselves and our products each year. Like all great relationships, you make us a better.

Certain is always striving to improve the customer experience.  In this spirit of “loving our customers” Certain has launched its Customer Success Team, added key features and GUI improvements to our Certain product, and recently invested in an industry leading infrastructure.  

Happy Valentine’s Day! 

Jane Holloway, the new CEO of F500 Inc. called a meeting with her Chief Marketing Officer, Rob Lopez and laid out a very ambitious vision positioning the company in the New Year and her goals for brand enhancement.  In a short period of time, Jane wanted employees, customers, partners and industry influencers on a worldwide basis to embrace the new approach.  Rob left the meeting with his head spinning.  Jane’s drive for brand improvement meant an extensive marketing plan including big events, small meetings, one on one briefings and she had further made it clear that there was a fixed budget and no time to waste.  While Rob was no stranger to demanding bosses, Jane had just upped the ante.  A lot was at stake for the company and for him. 

Early the next morning as Rob was in his office trying to get his arms around the scope of Janes’s initiative,  Don Hall, who ran the corporate meetings group and had been working with Rob to plan a series of client briefings, stuck his head in the door.  “You look overwhelmed for so early in the day."   Rob invited Don in and shared an overview of Jane’s plan.   “That’s some agenda!” said Don as he sat back sipping his coffee.   “I think I can help.” 

Don went to the whiteboard and quickly outlined an approach to capturing Jane’s goals in a focused, measureable way.  He then showed Rob how he and his team, which included meeting professionals around the world, could get an approach to planning in place which would give them the efficiency they needed for handling logistics.  “We can use one event management platform for all global staff to collaborate on the budgets, tasks and assets for the program, then roll-out a mobile application at the live events that will give us instant feedback on how the campaign is unfolding – session by session -- and track that.  By integrating mobile with social media we can tune into attendee reactions and behaviors pre-event and post-event.” 

“What about people that can’t make the events, Rob replied.  “How do I reach them?”  

Don opened his iPad and took Rob to a website featuring a virtual demo.  “Not only can we reach them simultaneously, but even those who miss it can still access your great session content in a virtual environment for months via the web.”

Rob immediately grasped that what Don was laying out was a comprehensive approach to blanketing attendees via face-to-face meetings and virtual events and leveraging it all with mobile and social media.

Clearly, Don had been doing his homework and was fluent in technology options and how to deploy them to meet marketing goals.  Rob was buoyed by the exchange and realized he could over deliver against Jane’s aggressive plan with Don’s help.  Don’s command of the inner workings of events and maximizing their value had led to an unexpected strategic assist in the F500 Inc.’s achievement of its mission-critical goals. 

 

The era of the Chief Events Officer

The meeting and event planning career has grown to incorporate a plethora of management-- from planners, to attendees to executive technologies and beyond!  Has it become such an important role for organizations that it’s time for another “C” level executive? 

In the world of IT, the CIO has come to be viewed in many organizations as the key contributor in formulating strategic goals for a company and driving their achievement through a combination of business understanding and technology.

The time is ripe for enterprises to consider what’s at stake in getting their meetings and events strategies spot on and aligning those strategies with, not only technology, but strong executives to spearhead the undertaking.  Those who understand that the potential return on events spend is tied to increasing the top line and profits and can do so on time and on budget can make a massive difference in measurable business results.

The meetings and events industry is undergoing the most profound change it’s seen in the last 15 years.  The advance of cloud computing, mobile, social media, virtual and other innovations are driving opportunities for all the key event stakeholders to rethink meetings and events planning and execution.

The explosion of technology choices for meeting professionals, attendees, speakers, exhibitors and others has given new meaning to planning events, conferences and key internal meetings.   Those savvy individuals who recognize that technology adoption is key to achieving internal or external clients’ strategic meetings goals are on a path to enhanced careers.  Marketing and sales executives in corporations, association CEOs and other executive sponsors are realizing the potential to dramatically enhance the business value associated with events.  Pre and post-event planning, promotion and execution via social media now enhance the actual event and add to the return on investment.  Virtual events extend the useful life of content investments and provide a basis for understanding current and ongoing attendee interests. 

Corporate profits and market position depend on successful sales and marketing promotion.  After all, events and meetings are all about selling something… be it a product, message, service or knowledge.  Events and meetings are critical to the advance of market share and revenues.  Today’s meeting and events software capabilities maximize the selling opportunities at events and extend that influence through social media driven connections long after the event. 

Additionally, the increasing need to manage attendees’ personal data has raised the bar for meetings technology infrastructure, and planners must take into account how to maintain a high degree of control and discretion over credit card information, profiles and other important attendee information. 

Increasingly, the fragmented enterprise meeting profile is coalescing around the need to aggregate event-related data across the business.  Understanding important demographic, economic and behavioral attendee data, along with preferences, is key to indicating the event drivers, which means the more consistency of technology deployment and data capture the better.  Integrated solutions deployed across the enterprise provide the best yield in understanding the entire attendee universe of need.

Meeting and events complexities by themselves create a demand for smart meeting professionals.  Add in the strategic goals of organizations and the richness of today’s technology landscape and it becomes time to consider raising the executive meeting professional to the “C” suite and embracing them as a true value-add business partner.

You can read the article based on this blog  Meet the Chief Events Officer: The New Exec in the C-Suite http://meetingsnet.com/news/cvo0207/

 

CEO Corner

“Annuit Coeptis” or “He approves our undertakings” are the words surrounding the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States and on the US dollar bill.   The pyramids of course, were early massive structures designed to house royal tombs and religious temples.   The design called for the bulk of the weight to be in the lower part of the structure and for the capstone to push down the lesser weight of the middle structure.  The result was a distribution of weight that allowed early civilizations to create stable monumental structures.

The events management software industry has built powerful capabilities to manage the logistics associated with events.   Many vendors have matured their solutions to handle the most complex events that meeting professionals design.  Certain has been one of those vendors and routinely provides software to manage challenging corporate, association and major sporting events with flexible, dependable software to take on all permutations and combination of event variables.   

Meeting professionals are master logisticians who tackle the complexity of events with the same attention to detailed planning and execution that supply chain managers or transportation managers bring to their profession. 

However, the events industry is rapidly moving beyond logistics and embracing change driven by the cloud, mobile, social and virtual technologies.  The ability to engage attendees and “digitally” understand their needs and desires is opening up a whole new role for the meeting professional.    Now, rather than be viewed only as an expert in meeting planning, the professional conference organizer is a true business partner that helps marketers, sales executives,  CEO’s and other executive stakeholders to extract measurable business value from their investment in events. 

If fundamental meeting planner software capabilities, such as attendee management, are the base of the pyramid, giving it the weight it needs for substance and dependability, then mobile and social is the middle layer with the “capstone” of events business intelligence solidifying the entire structure. 

The “Eye of Providence” is an apt metaphor for seeing  business results clearly.  Business intelligence provides the visibility into an event’s (or multiple events’) contribution to business goals.   Did we increase sales?  Has market share increased?  Were the new products understood?  What was the relationship between attendee preferences and the demographics? 

Delivering events business value requires all three layers.   A capstone by itself is useless.  A rich set of meetings software helps the meeting professional execute but can limit the contribution to logistics.   The middle layer of mobile and social is interesting and fun but only adds value when integrated with the core attendee management layer and is capped by business intelligence tools that produce the analysis. 

Like the ancients discovered, building lasting, substantial contributions requires multiple layers working together in unison to produce a desired, measurable result.   Events business value is dependent on a seamless layering of attendee management, mobile and social,  integrated with tools to turn data into information.

“Annuit Coeptis” or “He (or she) approves our undertakings” could be your event sponsor pleased with the business value generated from the investment in your event planning!

 

CEO Corner

It was a large software conference and over 10,000 attendees had flown in from around the globe. The CEO of the hosting company took great pride in embracing technology and being accessible to his contingency. He insisted that social media be a highlight of the conference and utilized, not only for communication amongst participants, but also as the medium of choice for any and all to be a “part of the conversation.”

 

Well, there was conversation alright. A very vocal attendee was lactose intolerant and had made his special dietary request during the registration process. He received his lactose-free salad box lunch but somehow, unbeknownst to the planner, catering had included a dressing which contained parmesan cheese. I think you know where this is going. 

 

Since the CEO had invited all of the participants to contact him directly through social media, that attendee went on to claim that “Catering tried to kill me by giving me a salad dressing with milk product when I am lactose intolerant!”  The CEO became involved in “The Dairy Case” and everyone participating in the event conversation via social media was aware of his near-death experience from the evil caterers who served him parmesan cheese. For the remainder of the conference, this particular attendee continued his diatribe and required more maintenance than a visiting dignitary.

 

As an event professional, I am sure you have dealt with your fair share of event snafus and unhappy attendees. Our jobs are difficult not simply for the sheer quantity of work expected in minimal time, but also for the impeccable attention to detail that is assumed to come naturally to those of us who devote our lives to planning events. We have to remember the most minute details and will likely be held accountable for them – especially in this age of instant, real-time communication. 

 

While this facet of your job may be the least interesting, it is important to carry out with due diligence. To do that well, it takes more than just good planning. It takes collaboration at every step of the event execution process. If that planner had been collaborating with the catering managers ahead of time, they could have had a real-time accounting of all dietary requirements as registration took place, and then uploaded menus with ingredients and nutritional information long before anyone got a lunch box. The entire embarrassing situation might have been alleviated.

 

The lesson learned here: Uphold your reputation by collecting accurate data from your attendees and actioning that data well in advance with an event management platform that lets all of the vendors in your ecosystem share the latest information – and the burden – of getting it right. After all, no one should let the likes of parmesan cheese sentence the rest of their life to the proverbial doghouse.

 

 

Customers, prospects, employees and industry colleagues have asked me for my thoughts about Active Network's acquisition of Starcite.  My take:  Net, net, it's good for the events industry at large; for their respective customers, it's a case-by-case situation.   

The good? It's another milestone signaling the maturation of the events industry, and amplifies a recognition that, like other enterprise software market needs, large customers require a broader array of products which seamlessly integrate with each other and with the existing enterprise technology infrastructure.  

Certain, like Active Network, recognizes that the enterprise market (which Active Network characterizes as a $10B untapped market) is the largest source of revenue for the meetings and events industry.  Corporations are the sponsors, exhibitors, and meeting and trade show organizers of the vast majority of event industry related activities which drive revenue, including event technology software vendor revenues.

We get it.  Certain's team is comprised of professionals with extensive experience in multi-billion dollar software companies who are specialists in the needs of the enterprise and the software ecosystem.  Our executive team is equipped with Cognos (IBM), Oracle, Siebel, Microsoft, and Nuance experience (to name a few), and yet also have strong backgrounds in fast-growing Silicon Valley companies that are nimble and agile.  This collective experience, coupled with our deep industry knowledge, has brought us to a pretty focused conclusion: 

The untapped business opportunity in the events industry lies in the strategic  business value from events and meetings. Period.

One source of business value is, of course, managing meeting spend. SMMP has been an important initiative to control meeting related expenses.   Unfortunately, the challenges in making a reality the promises of Strategic Meetings Management Programs (SMMP) have taken its toll on the sponsoring vendors and early pioneers of that initiative.    The slow SMMP adoption rate for enterprise-wide meetings management makes it difficult for vendors to maintain their independence.   Capital is readily available for rapidly deployable SaaS events applications that can drive revenues, but less so for “big iron” software.  While the concept is intriguing and attractive on paper, real world implementation for all but the most sophisticated enterprises has been difficult.  

The overwhelming focus on spend management has left a gaping hole in the other side of the business value equation for enterprises; revenue generation and market share increase.  Of course enterprises have to implement policies, processes and systems to manage spend.  (I endorse this.  My career began at GE where Jack Welch drove massive expenses out of the business by aggressive consolidation and elimination of duplicate processes.)   



However, effective meetings spend management needs to be balanced by at least equal investment in those same events to drive revenue performance and market expansion.  The complexity of SMMP and the challenges of applying associated technologies have created a confusing and expensive situation not dissimilar from the early days of ERP where enterprises invested hundreds of millions of dollars making implementation work.  The consequences of failure can be very high.   

The reason meetings and events exist is to sell something.  It may be an idea, a product, a service or knowledge.  The advances of mobile, social and virtual technologies are providing incredible opportunities for marketers to take meeting-related revenue, channel and partner growth and market-share expansion to new levels. 

This is the conversation that should be taking place on the trade show floor.  SMMP is certainly strategic, but should be an acronym for Sales and Marketing Meeting Programs.

New technologies are creating freedom for event stakeholders to get what they need from meetings investments.  When Certain became the first vendor to integrate mobile into its event management platform we did it not because it helped enhance meetings procurement but because it was the first step in a social business journey of connecting the attendee with the event stakeholders, including those in marketing and sales. This is the time to celebrate the role the meeting professional plays in enabling businesses to sell and market more effectively.   

Certain, like Active Network has an acquisitive past.  Our company grew globally to thousands of customers and millions of attendees by adding acquisitions to our organic growth.  We now are focused exclusively on pure PCI Level 1 SaaS and are fortunate to have experienced over 50% growth in 2011.  Fortune 500® companies, strategic event producers and large-scale world events (World Rugby Cup, Commonwealth Games, Olympics) have helped us understand how to create scalable, high-performance event technology solutions that deliver revenue.  

The Active Network and Starcite deal will take a long time to absorb as products, cultures and technologies work themselves out.  Customers will be impacted and the results will vary on a case-by-case basis.  We know.  We have been through it ourselves and know the toll it takes on customers and employees.  

Clearly, Active Network and Certain recognize that there is a substantial, expanding opportunity in business solutions for the meetings and events industry.  Where we differ is in the emphasis Certain places on creating market demand through meetings versus the Active Network/Starcite emphasis on spend management .

Social, mobile and virtual are making 2012 and beyond an exciting adventure for the events industry.  Imagine the impact you can have by  increasing business not just controlling expenses.  

I hope you join me and the Certain team on this exciting journey.      


CEO Corner

Ask any Australian what is significant about the first Tuesday in November and without exception they will say “the Melbourne Cup”.  This Australian institution goes from strength to strength and rightfully now holds its place as the World Championship for thoroughbred horses that are stayers (long distance racers).  Now in its 151st year, the race has recently been won by international horses from Japan, France and Ireland.

Whilst there is no denying the momentum of this event on the world stage, it is the reaction of all Australians from Broome to the back of Burke that makes this event unique. They don’t call this “the race that stops a nation” for nothing.  At 3pm on the first Tuesday in November, all Australians, no matter where they are or what they are doing, stop to watch (or listen) to the race. For 3 minutes or so, the entire country is captivated by “their” race. I can recall as a young boy pushing my way to the front of a large crowd gathered in front of a television shop to watch the race on the multiple TV’s on display. Of course nowadays ubiquitous mobile technology has made following the race easier than ever. But still-- families, friends and work colleagues gather in groups around the country to celebrate the race.

Certain Software’s Australia-based staff were no exception. Dressed in their racing finery, fit for the “Fashions on the Field” competition, the team enjoyed a few minutes of camaraderie whilst cheering on their hope. To gain the entire company’s interest across the globe, the Australia team assigned each employee one horse and created a pool for the winners! Whilst there can only be one winner in the race (although this year’s race was excruciatingly close to a dead heat), the real win is the connections and the memories that events like this generate.  The world needs more Melbourne Cups!

We have a couple of aces up our sleeve and I want to make sure you have them too. 

At Certain, we focus on developing software solutions for meeting professionals.  Our clients, though, often have event needs that go beyond what Certain provides.  Naturally, because of our central, enabling role, they look to us for assistance in registration services, badges, call centers and a variety of other important services that help to deliver successful events.

That’s when we reach up our sleeve and pull out a couple of aces to win the hand.  Those aces for Certain are two of our incredible business partners who take the worry out of delivering great events and make us look good along the way! 

Let me tell you a little about Attendee Management, Inc. and metroConnections.

Attendee Management, Inc. is an Austin, TX based company committed to the total equation of meetings support.  They take their expertise and  tailor it on highly personalized basis to meet your event needs.  Jeff Rasco, President, is focused like a laser on world class meetings services delivered with a smile.  Jeff listens closely to your needs and his team immediately goes into action to ensure your success time after time.  His staff live and breathe the meetings experience and sweat the small stuff so you don’t have to.
If you get down to their offices in Austin, make sure Jeff takes you out to the Salt Lick for some real barbecue!

 

metroConnections  delivers great conferences and events through design, planning and implementation that can meet the needs of the most demanding companies in North America and beyond.  Conference services, event production, production services and transportation can be leveraged to deliver great events and great business value.  Tom McCulloch, their VP of Sales & Marketing, understands the impact events can have on your business goals and has a rich background in meetings services and technology to help guide your choices. 

We are honored to have both of these partners in the value chain we introduce to customers.  Technology is important but is only a piece of the events puzzle.  With AMI or metroConnections at your side, you’ll find your chances of delivering a winning hand of business value to be overwhelmingly in your favor. 


CEO Corner

After countless hours of planning and seamless execution you have created the perfect event.  The speaker panel is powerful, the appetizers are legendary, and you are still unsure how you snagged that venue—but imagine if no one was there to eat those crab cakes?
All successful event professionals understand that an effective marketing strategy is vital in order to drive attendance.  However, among the draining hours of coordinating other crucial elements of planning, marketing can sometimes take a backseat.  Here are three easy tips that can seriously improve your marketing strategy and overall attendee turnout:

1. Use Social Media Campaigns
Most people today are using at least one social media platform to check in with friends or relatives and even to connect with businesses. Using social media to promote your event is not only free, but the most effective way to reach various target audiences.
If you create an event invitation on Facebook, you provide a central location for people to see updates and information about how to get involved and learn more about the event and your company. Once you invite people, they can share your event information through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This way, you don’t have to bombard attendees with a flood of emails every time you need to send them an update.

2. Take Advantage of Newsletters
You can also use your company’s newsletter to promote your event. People who signed up to receive it are already engaged with your company and may appreciate the opportunity to network and learn at your event. Be sure to build out a plan of action for your email marketing campaign. Determine how many targeted emails you want to send and the messaging that goes along with it. You can also contact other companies to see if you can advertise to their list in order to expand your reach.

3. Content Content!
Lastly, another easy way to promote your event is by offering digital whitepapers or eBooks that will drive traffic to your website and engage potential attendees in topics relating to you event.  Don’t forget to include an opt-in landing page for your larger content pieces so that you can capture new leads and nurture them!

Are you keeping up with the times?  Juggling a laptop, iPad and iPhone?  Logging in to five social networks daily?  The Arab spring, daily deals, protests in US major cities, Twitter, Skype, Amazon tablets, Facebook, mobile boarding passes, Google+,  iPhone 5 (or is it iPhone 4S?), social, virtual meetings….whew!

Bob Dylan (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+dylan/the+times+they+are+a+changin_20021240.html)  had it right forty years ago, but couldn’t possibly have anticipated the pace of change today.

Certain’s headquarters in San Francisco is at the epicenter of the changes driving our society, industry and daily lives.   Yammer, salesforce.com, Twitter, Open Table, Zynga, and StumbleUpon are just a few of the leading technology and internet service companies that are located within a few blocks of our building.  Drive thirty minutes down the road and Facebook, Google, Apple and countless others dot the Silicon Valley landscape.  Oh, and how about all the venture capital firms that fund innovation and change?  We love being at the crossroads of innovation and take full advantage of our location to hang out with our colleagues exploring and sharing new ideas.

The truth is all the lunches, tweets, news feeds, meet-ups and connections in San Francisco and Silicon Valley can’t compensate for the pace of change we are experiencing.  Why?

The reason is illustrated very well by the futurist and author Daniel Burrus in “Flash Foresight”, a book he wrote about seizing opportunities created by the pace of technological change.  Have you heard about Moore’s Law?   This axiom, by one of the founders of Intel,states that computing power doubles roughly every eighteen months.

So, what does that mean to each of us?

Well, back in the days when IBM was rolling out its mainframes, doubling computer power meant your airline ticket was processed significantly faster but didn’t alter the way you purchased a ticket.  In reality it wasn’t life changing.   Thirty years later, computing power has doubled multiple times and as a result we find ourselves with society, business and yes, your business planning meetings and events, being turned upside down. 

Here’s the illustration Burrus uses in his book.   Let’s say you take a penny on the first day of a thirty one day month and then double it every day for the entire month.  At the end of seven days, you will have sixty-four cents.  Big deal.   At the end of another seven days you will have eighty-one dollars and ninety-two cents.  Quite a jump.   How much do you think you will you have at the end of the month?   Let me guess…maybe three thousand dollars?   Tens of thousands?  Hundreds of thousands?



Most people are astonished that the answer is over TEN MILLION DOLLARS!!! Yes, it’s true (and fun to prove on a spreadsheet).   Add one more day and you have over twenty million dollars.   The point Burres is making is that we as a society are now at the “end of the month” in cumulative and exponential computing power.   The curve is very steep and we only have to pick up the smartphone (a camera enabled computer) to get a hint of the magnitude of change.   But what will happen on the “first day of the next month”?   In reality, we can’t fully predict and that makes it both scary and exciting.    We are approaching an era in which whatever you conceive can be created through technology. 

We’re seeing the impact every day.   Less than a year ago, Certain was the first event planning software company to offer an integrated mobile application with an attendee management platform.   Today, mobile solutions are taken for granted and your attendees expect to put their smart phone or tablet to good use at an event.   In lockstep with mobile advancement is deeper event-related social networking and more and more virtual events in hybrid or stand-alone mode.

Never mind the Arab Spring.   We’re talking about the Attendee Spring and it’s on the meeting professional’s plate to figure it all out (we’re happy to help of course).  

The good news is that rapid technology change driving connections and engagement can unlock the business value of meetings and events.   This is an opportunity for meeting professionals to establish a new, deeper level of business partnership with their clients.




CEO Corner

Certain is pleased to announce our PCI Level 1 Certification for the fifth straight year!  Level 1 is the highest level of PCI Compliance and the most demanding to achieve.

Certain takes responsibility to protect personal customer information very seriously.  Each year Certain processes hundreds of thousands of credit card transactions.  To ensure compliance, every year we must pass a rigorous audit of our network systems, data storage and encryption practices, access controls, security, threat and vulnerability management, monitoring and testing procedures, and information security policies.  Tests are performed by certified network engineers from independent auditors. The entire process takes weeks and the compliance certificate is issued only if Certain satisfies all 12 sections of the PCI Level 1 audit. 

Why is this important to our customers?  The simple answer is peace of mind.  Given the growing severity of credit card theft and liability issues from manual credit card processes, our customers inherently understand the risks of not partnering with a PCI Level 1 vendor.

I had a chance to reflect on Steve Jobs’ death last week as I drove up the California coast to Mendocino with my wife.   The weather was spectacular and it was hard to keep my eyes on the road as every turn led to a more glorious view of the ocean crashing on rocks.   We pulled over a few times along the way to walk out to the cliff’s edge and observe the beauty that eons of erosion have created. 

Against this backdrop of timeless nature, I thought about Steve Jobs passing and the mark he left on the world.   Many of us have heard the now famous commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005 and how he encouraged people to pursue their passions.   Steve Jobs pursued his passion from a young age and created a wave of digitization that touches every aspect of our daily lives.  

Isn’t changing the world enough of an incentive for everyone to follow their passion? 

 Many people pursue their passion only to discover that while the activity of writing or making music or being involved in sports may be enriching spiritually, it isn’t always so financially.  Steve’s passion, which fueled his maniacal focus, was hugely financially rewarding for him and his stakeholders.   However, those who would have the courage to follow their passion (assuming it’s not what they already do day- to- day), have to ask themselves, do they possess not only his level of passion but his standard of excellence?  Do they possess a set of interwoven personality traits, talents and level of intelligence that can support their passion and ultimately allow their passion to support them?  Will their passion allow them to change the world?

Most of us have talent.  Most of us have successful personality traits.  Most of us possess enough intelligence.  Most of us also have some sense of passion for an activity.  But, while most of us have all the necessary ingredients to succeed, most of us don’t have those elements combined in the perfectly unique concoction that approaches the extraordinary singular human being that was Steve Jobs.  

Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in history.   He was a rare example of the pinnacle of human achievement.   He was to the world of consumer information technology what Beethoven or Miles Davis is to music or what an Einstein is to science.   The iPad, as just one example, is a work of art that evokes much more than the sense of productivity it enables.  It delivers information in a tactile, pleasurable way.  Who else has achieved that?

Against the standard of a Steve Jobs achievement, most of us mere mortals could be excused from attempting to follow our dreams and passions.  But that would be a mistake.   Changing the world (whatever world you’re passionate about) usually starts with impacting one other human being.   Putting a mark on the world comes from impacting many human beings and influencing the way they think.  Changing the world comes about when most human beings begin to listen and follow you. 

You don’t have to be Einstein or Steve Jobs to make your mark on the world.   If you are reading this, you are capable of influencing a fellow human being.   If your passion, whatever it is, benefits you, it will probably benefit someone else, and, if that is true, then it just might benefit many others.   You could be well on your way to making your mark and ultimately changing the world.   Take your passion, add in a measure of excellence and intensity and see where it takes you and the rest of us.  At some point in Steve Jobs youth, that’s what he did, and look to where it led.  

CEO Corner

Event planning can often times be a stressful process. You have to make sure every detail is managed, and it requires a thorough eye and excellent organizational skills. Whether you are planning a small or large event, keeping track of all your tasks can sometimes be overwhelming. With the following tips, you can streamline your event planning process and save time, energy, and resources while ensuring that nothing is overlooked. 

1. Develop a Framework

Making sure you market your event effectively will ensure that you attract an increasing number of attendees. In the 1960’s, the Four P Classification was coined to in order to help those in the marketing industry implement enhanced strategies, providing marketers the proper framework for planning. The Four P’s and how they relate to event planning are:

• Product – Define what experience you want your attendees to have
• Price – Determine registration price and data collection
• Place – Location of your event and does it accommodate your Product
• Promotion – Your marketing strategy and unique selling points

After you compose a clear outline that encompasses all these components, it will be easier to decide what other aspects are necessary to consider as well. 

2. Do You Need Technology?

The use of technology is helpful for planning any event. Event planning programs can help you stay on top of tasks and make sure everything gets taken care of prior to their deadlines. If planning multiple or large scale events, it may be beneficial to use event planning software so that spreadsheets don’t get misplaced and everything you need is in one central location.

3. Take Advantage of Social Media

Using social media can help boost event attendance if managed correctly. If your company has a strong social media presence, you can send invitations out over Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Social media invitations help you reach your target audience because people that are connected to your company online are more engaged leads. These platforms are free and can increase the visibility of your event due to the viral nature of each.

4. Stay Organized!

Staying organized and paying attention to details will lead to a successful and well-rounded event. Making sure you have a framework in place as well as an effective marketing plan will guarantee that you meet your targets. By taking advantage of technology to help you stay organized and using social media for promotion, you will be well on your way to becoming a planning professional.

As a marketer who uses events as a component of integrated programs, I am well versed in the challenges facing event professionals today, and am familiar with the Excel spreadsheets and 20-lb binder you have to lug around. I have woken up in a cold sweat the night before my event and gone back through my checklist of items to confirm with the team to make sure not even the tiniest detail was overlooked. Do you want the good news or the bad news about our predicament? The good news: Technology can significantly reduce the amount of time and sweat you invest in delivering a seamless, successful event. The bad news: We are programmed to be worriers. We will always be perfectionists and no matter what tools we have at our disposal, we will always suffer from a last minute panic attack about the seating plan.

With the assistance of technology, event planning has become easier than ever before. It can help you stay organized, keep track of details, and make sure no stone is left unturned. Technology can also help you plan, analyze and budget for an event accurately and effectively. Planning large events can be complicated and stressful, especially when managing multiple coordinators, but with event planning software, you can be decisive and execute much easier and more efficiently.

Event Management and Preparation

By using software to help you manage your event, you can ensure that it runs smoothly and that nothing is forgotten. You can set up reminders and timelines for projects, and make sure that everyone involved in the planning stages knows about deadlines. By using technology, you can strategize and collaborate with others in a single forum that’s been designed to be visible to everyone. Emails will no longer be lost, and logistical issues can be addressed and resolved right away.

Effective Time Management

Taking advantage of event planning technology will save you both time and money in the long run. When planning a large scale event, lots of time can be lost in making sure communication is clear, meetings are arranged and that key players are notified of any changes. Trying to manage these tasks manually takes a lot of time and energy, but with a little organizational help, you can use your time more efficiently.

Save Money

Staying below budget is an important concept to keep in mind when planning any event. You can save a lot of money by managing your budget with software programs that allow you to keep track of all your expenses in one central location. You can track the overall budget, as well as individual line items to ensure that you stay within your means. By increasing budget visibility, you can improve accountability and easily show sponsors where their money went by printing out a report. 

Registration Tracking

By using technology to manage attendee registration, you can track variables such as fees, food orders and send marketing emails to your list of attendees. As soon as someone registers, you can be notified immediately so you can be aware of how many people are planning to attend. If certain people still need to pay their registration fees, you can print out a single report that lists their names and contact information all in once place.

Staying Organized

Staying organized is probably the single most important aspect of planning a successful event, and the use of technology can alleviate a lot of stress from an organizational standpoint. The events your company puts on are a direct reflection its value, so you will want it to be the best that it can be. The more organized and influential your events are, the more likely people will be to trust your brand and recommend your work to others.

A well planned and executed event can leave dozens, hundreds or thousands of individuals with a positive experience they’ll associate with your brand. As any event planner will tell you, pulling this off takes a lot of work, dedication and money. But how do you ensure the continued success of your event and future ones?

Measuring your event is crucial to understanding what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to change so that you can set forth a plan of action for future events. Here are a few tips on how and what to measure to ensure that your events have high customer satisfaction rates and an increasing ROI.

Define your Win

Begin your measurement on day one of planning. What metrics will you use to evaluate your event? What is the purpose of your event and what are you aiming to accomplish? A lot of your pre-event planning can help define your benchmarks. For example, how many participants anticipated vs. how many registered or how long did it take for sponsors/speakers to return contracts?

Build out a list of questions to ask both during and after each event so that you can keep tabs on what’s working and how long certain planning aspects take.

Post Event Data

Once your event is over, use the data collected during the event planning to be a benchmark for the next one. This will help you plan a better event and will allow you to focus on areas of improvement as well as capitalize on any new opportunities that may be available.

Update your workflow with new best practices and lessons that you may have learned. Make note of any unforeseen hurdles as well as whether or not your suppliers were efficient. Look for gaps and opportunities and where you can reallocate spend.

Ask Your Customers

Encourage attendees to fill out a post-event survey so that you can see how people viewed the event. Social media buzz and press shout outs are also good to follow and can help others understand the value of your events.

Whatever goals you set for your event, be sure to capture key event data components that will help increase attendee satisfaction and help you plan for success.

We’ve all been there. Cram in a power lunch behind the computer and all of sudden it’s five and you haven’t gotten out of your chair in hours. You get up feeling like you just got off a trans-Atlantic flight and trudge to the coffee machine. Logging hours in front of the computer is an occupational hazard you can’t avoid, but an increasing amount of Certain employees have found the secret to working healthy and avoiding the mid-afternoon slump. The solution: Ditch your desk.

It’s no surprise Certain employees are at the vanguard of desk technology. As product manager and standing desk early adopter Rajesh Krishnan put it, “I’m an inveterate trendsetter.” Jokes aside, Rajesh also said, “It was mainly because I was tired of sitting around so many hours in a day and figured standing would be healthier, burn more calories, and be better for my posture.”

It turns out there’s some hard science to back up Rajesh’s hunch. The Wall Street Journal reported on the spread of standing desks at tech companies like Facebook and Google whose employees were prompted to make the shift after hearing about the potential dangers of prolonged periods of sitting. Major medical studies conducted by the American Cancer Society and the American College of Cardiology found significant jumps in premature deaths for those who remained seated more than six hours a day.

Besides the long-term health benefits gained from using a standing desk, users have reported increased energy and a welcome relief from an achy, painful back. If the idea of tossing your chair out the office for good seems a little intimidating, don’t despair. Most Certain employees opted for a dual desk with a combination of sitting and standing space. Of the nine employees at Certain using a standing desk, only one braves his day without a sitting options. However, there are plenty of opportunities to fill the daily sitting quota in meetings and conference rooms.

There are those out there who aren’t satisfied with merely standing.

Some are taking the standing desk to the next level with a treadmill desk, a fad that hasn’t quite hit Certain. Although typing code on the run may seem a little over the top, a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that a combination of sitting and walking at the workstation can melt away up to 60lbs over the course of a year.

We asked Rajesh where he thought the future of desks was headed at Certain, “I’m planning to skip straight to the swim desk, when it becomes available. I’m sure there are no safety issues at all from a multi-hundred gallon tank of water every few feet in the office.”

For now, we’ll settle for a few less chairs.

If you’ve recently walked past a bus stop, opened up a newspaper or driven past a billboard, you might have noticed these enigmatic icons that look like a barcode crossed with a psychiatrist’s Rorschach cards. Before you squint your eyes to try to make out the picture, you should know that these icons are a new type of barcodes called QR codes. QR codes can be scanned using a mobile phone, and can store a lot more information than the traditional barcode. They can hold content like website links, personal contact information, and also just plain old text.

So why should you care about QR codes? The short answer is: they’re a great tool to market your event and improve attendee experience.

Consider all of the ways you can use QR codes at your next event:

1. Promote the event – Encode your event site URL or event registration link with a QR code and add it to any print material you distribute.
2. Provide a link to the mobile agenda – Use a QR code for the link to your event mobile site and print it on the back of attendees’ badges.
3. Facilitate networking and lead collection – Encode your attendees’ contact information and add it to their badge.
4. Get session feedback – Put a QR code with a link to the survey form on the welcome sign right outside of the room.
5. Provide sponsor information – Add a QR code with your event sponsors’ and exhibitors’ website and direct your attendees to interactive content online. This one makes everyone happy.

To generate QR codes, go to qrcode.kaywa.com or download a free app like QR Droid (for Androids) or Qrafter (for Iphones). Remember, your attendees would also need a QR code reader on their phone. There are plenty of free ones out there for iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries.

Tips:

1. Make sure that when you print QR codes, they are of a size that can be easily scanned by the camera on a mobile phone. For example, a code that goes on a sponsor banner would obviously need to be much larger than one that goes on the back of a badge.
2. Do ensure that whatever link you encode, the site that it directs to is mobile friendly.
3. Provide sufficient context when you are promoting a QR code, so that attendees know what to expect.

As the Product Manager for Certain Virtual, I get involved with numerous conversations with companies exploring ways to do Virtual Events.  Here are some of the unexpected and creative uses we've heard around here for Virtual Events.

1. Attendee communications with anonymity - Give attendees a way to contact each other via messaging and chat. It doesn't share email addresses, just user IDs

2. Detect issues earlier - Open up your virtual venue and ask attendees what they are expecting for the live event

3. Up the value of the sponsor package - By providing virtual booths for exhibitors and sponsors on the web site they can interact directly with attendees

4. Spread the love worldwide - One of virtual events' benefits is reducing hotel and travel costs; that's proving to be a bigger deal outside the US, particularly in Australia and New Zealand

5. Encourage events around your event - A event directory that spans both live and virtual helps people to create their own events that enhance yours, such as Birds of a Feather sessions

6. Automate attendance - everyone who attends a virtual event is logged, so you know who was really there

7 . Eliminate post-event document sharing - all the events are in the virtual version of your live event, and can be put there by you or the document authors (with the right permissions)

8. Coordinate the event team - set up a private virtual chat room just for your team

9. Spread out the work - give different access rights to different areas to different people.  Virtual event creation takes as much thought and care as a live event.

10.Get better data - See how attendees really are spending their time, not just did they show up for the webinar or not. It's also great information to prove how beneficial your event was.  There's proof of what engaged attendees and what didn't, measured in minutes and seconds.

And no one mentions this one, but it's true: It expands your job skills - Event professionals who can handle live, hybrid, and virtual events have a leg up on specialists in only one area.  It's an essential part of the resume of the future. I hope to see many of you on our July 28th Engagement Unleashed event, that I will be moderating.  Info at http://www.certain.com/CertainVirtualCenter.