Nowadays public relations both involves traditional channels (press clippings) as social media channels. By setting up a digital media hub, customers or their agencies handling PR/marketing can now effectively handle a wide variety of data sources that constantly pour into the hub. Effectively it is much more than a virtual newsroom for DMOS, CVBs, tourist offices and/or agencies representing them. It is a complete media broadcasting system. The hub can also be easily extended at a later stage to include more locations (offices) to include tools for social media monitoring, social media marketing and social CRM and to include more digital channels (like websites, mobile apps, TV) .
See here for a fill description.

 Although destination branding is a relatively young discipline, it is already facing its next big and tough challenge. The advent of web 2.0 and social media networking forces destinations to rethink their destination brand strategies.  

The most important touchpoint is the Web.  The Web more and more plays a role in the first two stages of the consumer decision-making process — product awareness and information gathering — for a sizable majority of all consumers…  The fact that most consumers seek out new products and information online should be a factor for destinations to increase spending on online marketing and social media networking tools to build their brands.

Branding has always been a two-way street. But it has always been a one-way conversation. Until social media came along.  With the advent of web 2.0 and social media networking there is a clear shift going on from the destination marketer to the consumer.  And the shift from marketer to consumer automatically means the weight on brand identity creation is shifting to brand image as perceived by the public community/consumer. This is especially the case of destination branding. 

Crossmint helps destinations understand why web 2.0 and social media are dramatically changing traditional branding relationships, what works and does not in efforts to create or reformulate engaging and unforgettable destination brands and how to use web 2.0 technology to support this. We will regularly blog about branding and the impact of social media. 

EuMediaNet’s platform also provides online editing tools including a virtual newsroom developed by EuMediaNet’s partner Burli:

• to capture content – including newswires, tweets, live video feeds, email, RSS feeds,  ftp files and much more
• to curate content automatically or manually: search; filtering by keyword, category, priority; and
• to automatically purge old data based on configurable settings.

EuMediaNet provides content (production) services for both non-branded content, branded content as well as commercial items. The focus is on creating and syndicating unique content ranging from art and culture, tourism, architecture, local news, to social media, creative advertising, interactive games and entertainment.

In 2011 and 2012 EuMediaNet will be setting up a cross-border urban screen network linking cities, companies and communities in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany for the purpose of providing engaging hyperlocal non-branded, branded content and creative advertising for targeted audiences. In this project EuMediaNet also handles the acquisition and installation of screens, mediaplayers and advertising and sponsored content on the screens.

But it can also be used for events. You can opt for creating a new and unique Foursquare account for your event and then add the venue of the event under the same name. Category: Home/work/other and select 'Event space'. Attendees can "check in" to the event itself, sessions and evening receptions. Individuals can connect and meet with other attendees (friends) and post during the event via Foursquare and link to Facebook and Twitter updates (including of course your event #hashtag). It also encourages mobile network connections that last long after the attendees travel home.

You can also think about customizing the event badges to allow Foursquare check-in. During the event you and other participants (like exhibitors) can send attendees Tips (go to 'Add tip'  in Foursquare). You can create special places (also created with 'add venues') in the venue where users can convene and check in. Mayors can be given a special treatment (VIP dinner etc.). 

After the event you can close down the 'venue', and delete all tips.

Anyone out there who has already tried this? We use it ourselves for a monthly event called 'TheBBoxCafe'.

Cynapse is a firm based in India that was founded in 2001 by Apurva Roy Choudhury and Dhiraj Gupta.  The philosophy behind the firm’s product was to design a collaboration portal that would be as easy as possible for employees to use and that would require as little learning as necessary.  As simple as Facebook and blogs.

cyn.in offers these 2.0 elements:

• Status Messages (like Facebook)
• Wikis
• Blogs
• File Sharing
• Images
• Events
• Links/Bookmarks
• Videos
• Discussions
• Forums (pure discussions)
• Contextual Discussions (surrounding a document)
• Audio
• Messages

2.0 Features and Actions:

• Commenting (on any content area)
• Rate Content (“like”)
• Tag
• Search Capabilities
• Advanced search options to search by category, title, description, author, and item type.
• User Profiles (current status, bio, location, contact information, recent activities (in blogs, wiki, discussions, etc.), presence in particular spaces, top user tags, top-rated items, and recent comments.

Other Key Features and Elements:

• Statistical graphs (for content and people) 
• Filter content activity stream by tags, content type, date, contributor, search phrase
• Desktop client option for persistent viewing of staff status updates
• Administrative Controls: Rules, Rights, Privacy: the administrator can assign specific rules and rights for each individual user and group. For each one, the administrator can choose to allow adding content, editing content, viewing content, and/or revising content.

All in all quite impressive. We will we experimenting with this solution in the next few weeks so come back to this site (or subscribe to the RSS feed) to read our reviews!

Often they are organized on the Web and on the fly, but more and more unconference techniques (like for instance ‘pecha-kucha’ or the ‘fishbowl’ are applied to all kinds of meetings. Unconferences can be short or long, held with a few to many attendees, to educate, to inform, to gain consensus, to make a decision, to celebrate an event, etc.  

They can be held face to face or, increasingly, in a distributed fashion across time or space. Quote from article by CNN: ‘at traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at ‘unconferences’, attendees like to say, it's all corridor’.

http://www.openspaceworld.org/ an approach for hosting meetings, conferences, corporate-style retreats and community summit events, focused on a specific and important purpose or task -- but beginning without any formal agenda, beyond the overall purpose or theme (source: Wikipedia)

http://www.unconference.net/

Virtual meetings will never entirely replace live ones. But the technology certainly has a place within face-to-face meetings.  With the fast growth of interactive and social networking tools it had become apparent that the traditional meeting, with Powerpoint presenters talking in front of a passive audience, has reached its end. We are already seeing Web-based peer-to-peer and audience-to-presenter interaction  being integrated in live meetings. Mobile phones have become interactive tools for sending text messages to presenters or to the large screen (‘back-channels’).

Meeting planners are increasingly learning how to use these tools to enhance their meetings and create interactive conversations between participants before and after a meeting or event. The biggest issue is that meeting organizers and presenters are not yet used to dealing with attendee real time feedback from social media (like for instance ‘backchannels’). Traditionally they get feedback after the meeting, like through evaluations. Learning to work with social media, and respond in real time is something people will have to learn.

Now it’s about how can technology complement physical meetings to increase engagement and reach to a virtual audience. This type of “hybrid meeting” can be as simple as Twitter conversations to as extensive as a virtual conference (or even presence in Second Life). Combining the two (offline and online) will produce high-performance meetings.

 Also web- and videoconferencing is fast changing from a solution for large organisations to a very effective way to reach small business owners and individuals as well.

Today anyone can turn their computer and web cam into a conferencing station. By turning what may have been a teleconference into something very much like a face to face meeting, it lends a more personal touch to the business at hand.

 The ‘webinar’ (a specific type of web conference, typically one-way, from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction) is effectively used for product presentations, education and collaboration software allows organisations to work together on projects from different places. All these are great alternatives or complements to live events and meetings.

 Web 2.0, also called the “participatory web,” enables users to collaborate and share online information more easily.  Virtual meeting and event technology can facilitate the objectives of meetings easily. Many virtual meeting and collaboration tools are available including LiveMeeting, WebEx and the free alternative Vyew. 

For The BBox! (see picture: visit the website here.

The meeting industry has been hit hard by the credit crisis. In 2009 especially meetings outside of the organisation have suffered from cancellations and "no travel / no meetings" policies introduced by organisations.

According to the he annual EIBTM Industry Trends and Market Share Report ([1]) launched on 1 December 2009 at EIBTM in Barcelona the key trends for the meeting markets in 2009 have been:

• many buyers have sought a technological solution to help them cut costs.
• greater use of alternative meeting methods, including ‘unconferences’, webinars, videoconferencing and web-based learning tools, as a way to control meeting and travel costs.
• growing use of social media for meetings; becoming an integral part of making an event successful both from a marketing and networking/learning enhancement perspective.

Also the increasing transparency due to the Web is leading to smaller and smaller margins for meeting planners and venues. When the cost of everything is available, when 2.0 reviews help the customer distinguish the good meeting venues and planners from the bad ones and when ‘comparison shopping’ is easy - margins will shrink for all meeting venues.

The MICE industry understands it needs to change. The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA), the IMEX Group and Fast Future Research have launched ‘Convention 2020’([2]) - a research study looking at the future of live events, venues and meeting destinations. The study explores the underlying trends and drivers that could shape the industry over the next decade and will centre on understanding the ‘meeting experience’ and the changing needs of live event attendees. So the industry is actively looking for new business models, new opportunities and new tools to re-invent meetings.

While organisations in the past decades have been re-engineering and improving nearly all business- and other processes one can think off, the one thing they really missed out on was the meeting and meeting venue. For ages most meetings have been taking place in drab, TL-lit meeting rooms with participants drinking lukewarm coffee, water or soda. And rarely we are satisfied with the results achieved in such meetings.

The premise is that we actually all hate meetings (and very often also the places where they take place). However, meetings are where everything important happens - deals are brokered, new strategies decided, information exchanged, business networks built. So we have to attend. And what do we do during meetings? We flip open our laptops and fire up our mobiles to read the latest mails, do status updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, etc. We all hate the traditional meeting, don’t we?

The credit crisis of 2009 has been a nasty wake-up call and the meeting industry has been hit hard. Corporates and other organisations have started frantically looking at ways to reduce meetings, improve them (introducing new meeting techniques for decision-making or brainstorming) or eliminate them altogether. In the US the industry even had to set up a ‘pro-meeting’ lobby (‘Keep America Meeting’[1] to fend off US politicians arguing that companies should stop spending so much money on meetings, travel (carbon footprint), etc. The current challenge of cancellations and "no travel / no meetings" policies will certainly shift as the economy improves. But meeting planners will need to ensure that something can be great without it having to be "over the top in expense". The golden days of the 80s and 90s will not return. So the meeting and meeting venue needs to be re-invented or re-engineered.

This will have an immediate effect on the way we meet and the layout of and services we need in meeting venues. Meeting venues will need to change dramatically and introduce what I would like to call ‘high tech – high touch’ services to accommodate the new meeting paradigm: the ‘hybrid meeting’, where face-face and virtual are combined. This creates new opportunities to design meeting models and processes that will help organisations to choose the most effective methods to conduct meetings across time and space, using the latest technology and distinguish themselves from traditional meeting organisers and venues. We are already seeing some fine examples of organisations that are implementing new offline/online conference concepts, setting up meeting ‘2.0’ venues.

In the next weeks I will explore the above subjects and blog about trends in the meeting industry. Please add your comments below.

No. 1: Money Transfer sending money to others using SMS. NP: this is indeed already becoming very big in Africa.

No. 2: Location-Based Services (LBS) as part of context-aware services.  NP: LBS is not a service as such but a feature of other mobile services

No. 3: Mobile Search NP: and will  Google will alo be biggest here?

No. 4: Mobile Browsing NP: again: will  Mobile Chrome become the killer app on phones?

No. 5: Mobile Health Monitoring to monitor patients remotely.

No. 6: Mobile Payment making payment when few alternatives are available; as an extension of online payment; as an additional factor of authentication for enhanced security.

No. 7: Near Field Communication Services (NFC) allowing contactless data transfer between compatible devices by placing them close to each other, within ten centimeters. The technology can be used, for example, for retail purchases, transportation, personal identification and loyalty cards.

No. 8: Mobile Advertising to monetize content on the mobile Internet, offering free applications and services to end users. The mobile channel will be used as part of larger advertising campaigns in various media, including TV, radio, print and outdoors.

No. 9: Mobile Instant Messaging especiallyfor users in developing markets that may rely on mobile phones as their only connectivity device. NP: what about mobile social networking, SMS? Will there be a Mobile Google Wave?

No. 10: Mobile Music 

So I am not so impressed with this list and think it misses siginificant trends.

But watch out Twitter. Google Wave is going to take this digitally-enabled conference back-channel a step further."  

Read more here: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/11/google-wave-vs-twitter-at-conferences/