The 21st Century Meeting and Event Technologies

Powerful Tools for Better Planning, Marketing, and Evaluation

Seungwon "Shawn" Lee, Dessislava Boshnakova, Joe Goldblatt

• Publisher: Apple Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315355221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Here is the first book to specifically and comprehensively address the rapid changes and advances in technology in the planning, management, and marketing of meetings and events. The multigenerational trio of authors, including Joe Goldblatt and two of his former students, Seungwon "Shawn" Lee and Dessislava Boshnakova, cover the most important aspects of using technology for today's meetings and events, such as

• How to harness the power of social media
• How to use crowdsourcing effectively
• How to choose appropriate room layout design software
• How to manage and use guest-generated content
• How to measure and evaluate your success
• How to choose meeting registration software
• How to promote your meeting with blogs, websites, podcasts, and more
• How to hold virtual meetings and events
• How to use search engine optimization to advantage

The area of meeting and event technology is a fast-growing component of the meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibition (MICE) industry. With a foreword by Corbin Ball, an internationally renowned speaker, consultant and writer in the meetings and events technology field, The 21st Century Meeting and Event Technologies will be an essential resource for hospitality students and business professionals.

Faculty may request an examination copy from [email protected]. Please provide your name and title, course title, course start date, current text, number of students, and your institution address.

PART I

The Traditions and Trajectory of Meeting and Event Technology

CHAPTER 1

The History of Meeting and Event Technology

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, and the trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently … they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.”

—Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple™ (1955–2011)

LEARNING OUTCOMES

As a result of reading this chapter, you will learn how to:

■ Understand and describe the historical development of technology in the meetings and events industry

■ Describe the opportunities and challenges new technologies offer the meetings and events industry

■ Understand the key role social media technologies will play in the research, coordination and marketing of meetings and events

■ Describe the different types of technological resources available to meeting and event professionals

■ Analyze, avoid and resolve the ethical and moral problems that may occur with the incorporation of new technologies

■ Describe how the future of meeting and event technology may positively impact your career

■ Link the historical development of meeting and event technologies with the future opportunities for improving functionality through the development of new communication platforms, applications and other products

The meetings and events technology field has been painstakingly built by technology luminaries such as Reggie Aggarwall, Corbin Ball, Michael Boult, John Chang, Bruce Freeman, J’Michelle Keller and educators such as Pauline Sheldon, Patti Shock, and many others, whom future generations may also refer to as the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and even the trouble-makers. These individuals and their colleagues used their experiences in many other related fields to bring a new industry into being in less than one half of a century.

According to Professor Robert Rausch, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, individuals such as those who worked together bring something new into being may be referred to as symbolic analysts.

“We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century,” says Robert Reich. As we move into the borderless economy, the notion of national products, national technologies, and national corporations will become increasingly meaningless. The only thing that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who make up a nation. This shift has enormous political implications, according to Reich. It means that the traditional idea of national solidarity and purpose can no longer be defined in purely economic terms. It also leads to fragmentation, Reich argues, as “those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows.” (Rausch, 1992)

Traditionally, meetings, events and universities have been referred to as marketplaces of ideas. The marketplace was historically a geographically fixed place. This is no longer true. These marketplaces do not manufacture traditional goods and products in one place; rather they create information, provide education and transform thinking through collaboration in many different places. In order for these global market places to continue to thrive in the future, a new generation of meeting and event technologists is needed who understand the fluent nature of events and will be better prepared to design the applications and software that will promote even greater collaboration in the future.

In little more than half of a century, just about the length of Steve Jobs’ life, the meetings and events industry has experienced dramatic change. Table 1.1 provides a brief example of some of these significant changes.

Harry Baum of Great Britain, is a long-time leader in the international meetings, incentives, conventions and exposition industry. In the mid 1990s, Harry gave a lecture one evening at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, for a group of sleepy-eyed graduate students. Many of these students had just completed a ten-hour working day and now were in a dark and dusty graduate lecture hall to listen to their guest speaker from England.

Table 1.1. Paradigmatic Changes in Meetings and Events between 1950 and 2014

FROM	TO
Analog	Digital
Collision	Collaboration
Content	Context
Event	Events without end
Live	Blended
Local	Cloud
Hardware	Software
Human Staff	Technological Stuff

(Goldblatt, 2014)

Baum began his talk by slowly and carefully announcing in a deep, sotto British voice, “The modern meetings industry was created through warfare.” With those profound and intriguing words his audience was soon fully awake and most attentive. Baum explained that most of the computers and aviation innovations used in the modern meetings and events industry that were developed in the previous fifty years were the result of technologies developed for advancing warfare in World War II.

For example, Baum related the development of international airline travel to the need to develop airplanes for long haul troop transportation during World War Two. Further, he stated that electronic computing was developed and subsequently used to fire artillery. According to Baum, the development of the modern global meetings industry was directly related to the development of solutions for creating weapons and strategies for effective warfare.

There may indeed be a technological connection between meetings, events and warfare, and the strange and winding story stretches as far back as the mid-nineteenth century in Scotland. In this chapter we will explore the relatively brief but fascinating traditions and history of technology and will look forward to the future trajectory current and still undeveloped discoveries that may chart the twenty-first century meetings and events industry.

From Analog to Digital: How War Helped Invent Modern Technology for Meetings and Events

It is commonly believed that actual research on finding solutions to equations using mechanical devices started as early as 1836 with a mechanical analog computer called the “differential analyzer.” This wheel and disk system may have been one of the first computing devices.

The first description of this device is from James Thomson in 1876. Thomson was from Belfast, Ireland, but lived in Scotland from the age of 10. He called his device the “integrating machine,” and with his brother, the famous Lord Kelvin, he published additional descriptions of this early computer. Lord Kelvin later became a renowned mathematical physicist and engineer.

Lord Kelvin recommended that the integrating machine be first used for fire control. Various other scientists were also developing integrating machine technology at this time; however, the first widely practical differential analyzer was constructed by Harold Lock and Vannevar Bush in the United States at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1928–1031. The number of integrators used in these machines continued to grow, and scientists in Norway developed a system with 12 integrators in 1938. Only a few years later, once again in the United States, researchers would exceed this functionality through the development of the world’s first programmable computer.

ENIAC: The U.S. Army and the Age of Modern Computing

During the 1940s researchers Mauchly and Eckert lead a team at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to develop a programmable computer that would calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. In 1946 they announced the development of the first Electronic Numerator Integrator and Computer, or more commonly known as ENIAC.

If you were to enter a room to inspect the ENIAC, you would find huge cabinets containing 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. The ENIAC unit weighed more than 30 tons and was over 100 feet in length and required a room of 1800 square feet.

The ENIAC computer was programmable, and this was accomplished using punch cards and tape punched with holes. One of the first major tasks required over 1 million punch cards, and the ENIAC was involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb in Los Alamos, New Mex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Traditions and Trajectory of Meeting and Event Technology
• Part II: Meeting and Event Technology for Design, Planning, and Evaluation
• Part III: Successful Marketing of Meetings and Events through Technology
• Part IV: The Future of Meeting and Event Technology: Case Studies and Additional Resources
• Index