If your current event model isn’t working for you

Try one of the models Julius Solaris outlines in this brilliant post on the EventManagerBlog: 10 Alternative Business Models for Events. They may not all work for your purposes, but I’d bet they all get you thinking about what else you can do, given your market, attendees, and other environmental factors.

Get Started with Google Alerts - Part 2: How to Get Better News Alerts

In Part 1: How to Set Up News Alerts, we covered the basics of Google Alerts. Your first few Alerts may show a lot of irrelevant information mixed in with the notices about your website, blog, or cause. No problem! A few tweaks of your search terms can make Google Alerts work much better for you....(read more)

Should I Lead or Should I Follow?

I don’t usually link to comments I make on other blogs, but I’m going to link to this one, because I think it’s an important conversation.

Moving the “free” discussion to medical meetings

The debate on “free” when it comes to whether or not to charge for repurposing conference content for the Web (for links to the posts that started it all, see What is the cost of free?) got me thinking about a similar discussion that’s been raging in the industry my new job covers, medical meetings.

Everyone from the pharmaceutical industry and medical device organizations to congressional leaders to state legislators have been working to sort out the problematical relationship between healthcare provider education and the industry folks who shoulder most of the financial burden for providing that education.

The easy answer, at least for some people, is to cut the commercial support ties altogether and just have docs pay full freight for their continuing medical education. No ethical issues, no worries about commercial bias creeping in, no more marketing disguised as education, the argument goes.

But docs are decidedly unhappy with the idea, because it means they’d be paying a lot more for what used to be either reasonable or even free (sound familiar?). And education providers aren’t happy, because they wouldn’t be able to afford to put on all the education healthcare providers need to keep current these days. Those workshops on rare diseases? Gone, because the audience is too small to make it worthwhile. And the commercial supporters aren’t happy, because they lose the opportunity to get in front of the docs. You should hear the resounding “no!” that echoes from almost every quarter every time the suggestion comes up.

Would HCPs be willing to pay out of pocket if the education truly was amazing? Maybe. Would some pretty lame CME finally bite the dust if people had to pay? Assuredly. Would there be a lot less variety of offerings? Probably. Would physician education, and patient health, suffer? Most likely.

Like the arguments over “free” in online content repurposed from meetings, the argument over “free” (in this case, aka commercially supported) education is far from over. I happen to think sponsorship is a good happy medium, as long as there are controls in place, which in CME there most assuredly are. Someone suggested in another discussion over on Facebook that we need to recondition people, whether HCPs or not, to accept the fact that we have to pay for what we get. Sounds simple, and it sounds right. But the reality is a lot more complicated.

Get Started with Google Alerts - Part 1: How to Set Up News Alerts

If your nonprofit is active in social media, you already know the importance of closely monitoring what’s being said online about your organization and your cause. Set up a few key Google Alerts, and your listening task becomes a whole lot easier....(read more)

What is the cost of “free”?

Jeff Hurt poked a hornet’s nest when he posted his dissatisfaction with Meeting Professional International’s Virtual Access Pass for its World Education Congress, coming to Salt Lake City in less than a week. The VAP lets people purchase online access to much of WEC’s educational content (or you can purchase just access to the opening general session). Go ahead, read his post and all the comments around it. I’ll wait.

Looks like he really touched a chord there, doesn’t it? I don’t really have a dog in this hunt, not being an MPI member and having never been to its conferences, but, as someone employed by an increasingly e-media company, I do have great interest in the whole conversation around “free” content and the Internet. Obviously, I’d love it if every word I wrote was so golden that people would pay hundreds of dollars to read them, but that isn’t the case–and wasn’t the case even pre-Internet. Most trade magazines, whether published by for-profit companies or by associations, have always followed a free circulation, paid-for-by-advertising model. Most association magazines provide conference wrapups and session writeups in their post-con issues. There’s nothing new with the concept of free content supported by advertising and/or sponsorship. The only thing that’s new is the media (Internet) and quantity (tons, and growing exponentially daily) of content that’s free for the taking.

I think MPI’s president Bruce MacMillan did his best to lay out the association’s reasoning behind charging for online access. But it’s not good enough, IMHO. I understand that the decision likely was driven by finances–or lack thereof–and good intentions. They wanted to bring the show to those who wouldn’t be able to make it in person, and to cover the production costs. Nothing wrong with that.

Instead, they ended up alienating and angering a lot of very vocal people. In my book, that makes it a bad move. If MPI offered a more limited access for free (or at least a lot cheaper), it could have reaped tons of goodwill, won over some members who maybe were thinking about dropping their membership, and possibly enticed some new people to join.

Plus, when it comes to conferences, all providing the free stuff does is get people wanting to go in person next year. TED is the example that keeps coming up, but I’d say it’s true for every conference that I’ve seen do it. It is the best promo you could possibly give, makes members feel valued, makes nonmembers want to join and come to the conference. The cost, while not negligible, would be less than a regular marketing campaign, I would think.

Instead, they get lots of negative PR, ticked off members, and probably won’t make enough to come close to covering costs anyway.

This debate won’t go away any time soon, methinks. Jeff has listed some great thoughts from great thinkers in his post, The Rise of the Gift Economy and Freeconomics that are well worth reading and thinking about.

If you think this won’t affect you, think again. Whether you’re a content consumer, a content producer, or both, the rise of “free” is reworking some fundamental aspects of society. This is not just an MPI issue. It’s an everyone issue, and let’s not be too hard on MPI for stumbling along the way. None of us know exactly how the Internet economy will shake out, and in the meantime, we’re all bound to do some things that, in retrospect, we may wish we hadn’t.

The Folly of Free

An interesting take from Mark Cuban on “live by free, die by free.”

What Are You Reading This Summer?

What are you reading this summer? In my beach bag for light weight summer-reading are three paperbacks: * the dog-narrated, zen of auto racing book, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein; * the Pulitzer winning Olive...

Off topic: Rewrites

I was in the middle of editing something I wrote when someone (thanks Larc!) sent me this YouTube clip of Hugh Laurie as Shakespeare undergoing the indignity of a Hamlet rewrite.

I don’t know if this is just hilarious to English majors, but I actually did ROTFL at this one.

Best of AJam - Association Links for June 2009

In the spirit of " 30 Great Links for Associations ," here are some of the most popular blog posts, articles, presentations, and other web resources submitted to AssociationJam.org in June 2009 — one hot link from each topic category: Membership , Events , Board , Volunteers , Fundraising , Social Media , Technology , Other and, of course, Fun! Membership New Members and Twitter Rookies — Why Do They Leave Us? : Reid All About It New users of Twitter leave for some of the same reasons that new members...(read more)