Meetings -- there are thousands held and attended every year by associations and their members and by companies and their employees. Not the 10-20 person meeting, but the large annual event or symposia where hundreds to thousands of people are present.

Why do we hold and attend these meetings?

Is there no other place to get the information that is presented live and onsite?

We all need to take a step back and reflect on why we as product managers, associations, sales managers, etc. hold so many meetings. The most common responses to the why meetings question look like --

• it is my only venue to reach these people
• we need to have a presence at the live events where we can hold satellite symposia
• we need non-dues revenues and meetings accomplish that
• we need a forum for our exhibitors and members to get together and network
• meetings are a good way to provide ongoing education to attendees
• I need to reach the people that are at the meeting, it's a convenient way to capture a critical mass of mindshare

Now, let's say we've convinced ourselves that our meetings have value and capture some mindshare of those in the audience that we want to influence. The problem is a large gap exists between the number of people in your audience and the number of people you are actually trying to reach. You probably have a few hundred people in your audience (if you're lucky) and your target audience is probably in the tens of thousands. Making the current problem worse is the amount of money spent on getting those few hundred people there looks like close to a couple thousand dollars a head when all the expenses are summed.

How do we fill the gap between the live audience attendance number and our true target numbers? How do we reach and influence our total target audience? Certainly we can hold more meetings and hope that more people show up. Very few of us, even billion dollar companies have enough budget, or stamina, to hold an infinite number of meetings.

The answer is strategy and technology. Affordable technologies exist today to make all live presentations available to more people. But not so fast. Throwing technology at the reach and influence gap without a strategy is like driving in your car without knowing where you are going. The car is a great piece of technology, but it is useless if the driver is clueless about where to go, doesn't know enough to put gas in the tank, or make sure that there is oil in the engine, etc.

Go back to the original "why meetings?" question. If you have meetings because somebody did it before you, it makes no sense for you to spend money and time on integrating technology because you need to figure out the "why meetings?" question first. What is your association or company goal for meetings, when you open up your strategic marketing plan, what is articulated about meetings and how they play a part in the strategy?

Whether you're a product manager, a meetings planner, a communication specialist, or a sales manager, here's a seven-step roadmap for integrating technology into your meetings to solve the reach and influence more people gap.

Seven Steps for Integrating Technology to Extend the Life of Your Meeting and Reach and Influence More People

Step 1 -- Know the difference between strategy and operational effectiveness

Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School gets it right when he says that OE is seductive because it is actionable. It's easy for an executive to say "go re-engineer this department" or "make sure we're using Total Quality Management."

What's not easy is strategy. Strategy, as Porter puts it, is "choosing what not to do". When opportunity abounds at every corner, it's the wise executive who keeps the focus on what the core goals of the organization are all about. Charging a premium price when everyone else is lowering price may be difficult, but if that is your strategy, then stick to your knitting. It's about making choices.

Step 2 -- Use the Technology Adoption Life Cycle to guide your thinking

The technology adoption life cycle puts market acceptance and technology use into focus. See the graphic above. It looks like your standard bell curve with gaps in between certain areas. Technology acceptance and diffusion works from left to right. Innovators and early adopters are the first to use and experiment with any new technology. If the technology has features and benefits that a greater majority can take advantage of, the early majority of the market uses the technology.

The down slope to the right is represents the late majority and laggards. These are folks that are never quite sold on any new technology and want the earlier groups to test and use the technology and put it through its paces. This can take years. By then, some technologies are gone as if they were never around. But if the technology works and has widespread benefits, these later groups will use it. The cellular phone is a good example of a technology that has made it into the late majority and laggard groups. WiFi and WiMax are now in the early adoption, early majority region.

Step 3 -- Ask, is it real? Can we win with it? And is it worth it?

Three simple words posed as questions will make all the difference in the world when evaluating new technology for customer benefits at meetings; real, win, worth. Ask is the technology believable or real for our use, that's not to say you're looking at some bleeding-edge widget, but does the technology make sense for us? For example, if no one in your organization uses cell phones, then implementing a meeting technology for cell phones isn't real for you.

Assuming there is a believability or realness associated with your technology, the next question is can we conquer all the obstacles that this new technology presents, can we win with it? This is actually a harder question than the previous one since there will be more assumptions presented here in order to answer the question. If you have to conduct an IBM type marketing campaign to get your users to adopt the technology, the answer to the can we win question is an obvious no, very few of us have that level of money and time or commitment to a technology.

Finally, is the integrating the technology to extend the life of the meeting worth it? If it's easy and inexpensive, maybe, if it's the reverse maybe so again, if it's going to make everyone give up a hotel room and a free meal maybe not.

At this stage you should have essentially gone through a reality check of the technology and juxtaposed it with your end audience and strategy. It's never just about the technology, if you find that is your case, you need to quickly exit the game and get your strategy hat on and figure out what you want to accomplish.

Step 4 -- Prepare a reverse profit and loss statement (R-P&L)

A simple part of the 7-steps, but an important one, here you are making sure that the numbers make sense and that you make a profit and that you understand all the steps involved in integrating the technology. It's amazing how many people perform a reverse P&L and find out that they've omitted the costs of marketing, the costs of service, and other major costs.

Another benefit of preparing a reverse P&L is that it challenges you to put your strategy on the line and verify it. At each expense line in your P&L, you have to say "is this right?", and "why are we doing this activity?" Each activity (e.g. marketing) and the amount of that activity forces you and your team to assign the activity to someone (part of your strategy), create a budget for it (strategy) and make it happen (strategy).

Step 5 -- Chart and track all your assumptions about you and your users regarding technology

The most often overlooked function, is making and tracking assumptions. The goal is to use all available information to make intelligent decisions and minimize assumptions, but we have to make some assumptions.

For instance, let's say that you want to make video streaming part of your largest meeting and the video stream requires cable modems at the user's end for a clean picture. You make the assumption, you may even do a survey of your users, that for a "go" on this technology, greater than 30% of your user population must have cable modems. Now, you find out that 10% have the required modems now, and the use is growing at 25% per year. You decide that in 8 months your target of 30% of the total will be realized. Do you go ahead now? Do you wait for another survey to verify the 30%? We recommend that you make progress towards the "go" and make a small survey about half-way through and more importantly, ask another question like "is our original assumption of 30% still valid? Do I still believe that the project can't move forward without it?" Here you might surprise yourself.

Step 6 -- Create a return on investment (ROI) model and measure everything that you do

So how do you measure your ROI on integrating technology into meetings? First, go back to the strategy question, and ask "why do we have meetings, and what are we trying to accomplish?" Measuring your return is fairly straightforward once you know why you're doing it. Let's say that one of your strategic goals is to raise, by 20%, the number of people that request more information for your product after attending a meeting. Measuring that is easy.

Now, how about raising donations to your association across the board? Now that is harder given that you're probably holding dozens of meetings a year and all of them contribute in some fashion to the money contributed. Once you bring technology into the mix, things start to change for the better if you create the right plan from the start. You may want to get your vendor who's supplying the technology to track the number of Web hits during an audio streaming seminar. Next, you then count what percentage of contributions made from the Web site. You can't mix and match, if the users are attending the conference online, you have to get them to contribute online for your ROI to make sense. Of course, the real goal is to get the money coming in so who'll complain if the user sends the check in the mail. The issue is you can do both technology and ROI with a little planning.

Step 7 -- Deploy, measure, and refine your plans and strategy and technology

Here's the fun, profitable, and sometimes stressful part. You've done your work, you crunched the numbers, you know where on the technology adoption curve you and your users are at, everything looks good so you go ahead. You deploy the CD-ROM or the video stream and watch what happens. You track usage, you reflect on your strategy, you measure how you did.

If things went well -- great! If things went poorly, you have the tools in front of you (TALC, RWW, Reverse P&L, etc) to figure out where you came up short.

Bottom line, you have a strategy, you're making technology work for you, you're delivering the service that your customers expect. That's fun and profitable.