Let’s Meet

When the Gartner Group held a five-day meeting in Orlando, Florida, for its top clients, it broadcast portions of the event over the Internet, including presentations by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy. When Digital Equipment Corporation held its annual distributors meeting in Orlando in February it used the Internet to register attendees, share attendee information with distributors and broadcast presentations at the meeting.

The two companies demonstrate how the Internet has enhanced corporate meetings, making them easier to plan and more productive to run. Kim Bollo, manager of corporate Web strategy at the Gartner Group, says Internet use at its Symposium/ITxpo ’97 in October “tripled the size of the event,” because more than 23,000 clients or potential clients who weren’t at the meeting viewed portions of it on the Net. “We really expanded the symposium to people we wanted to reach and people who have never come face-to-face with our services,” she says.

Alex Tellert, director of communications at Digital Equipment, says using the Net enabled attendees to register for the meeting in one smooth step, making hotel and airline reservations as well as registering for the event online. In addition, attendees could log onto the site to see who else was attending, which enabled them to set up appointments with colleagues who came to the event from around the world. Using PowerPoint files, Tellert says Digital Equipment broadcast presentations on the Net “that gave partners the flexibility to access the information so they didn’t have to walk away with hard copy, slides and notes.”

The major meeting elements that have Internet applications are registration, premeeting promotion and meeting broadcast.

HMR Associates, an Austin, Texas, firm, designs meeting registration forms for company Web sites or processes client registrations on its own server. Registrants can fill out forms online, then send them back where they will be stored in a meeting database for processing.

Attendees receive confirmation by fax or e-mail. The service is readily available, but company vice president Rodman Marymor says, “Online registration is up in the air; it hasn’t really been done except by the computer industry.” HMR hopes to change that by sending tech audit experts to companies to assess their registration process and help them automate it. He will meet with Reed Travel Group and Kaiser Permanente soon.

Time savings seems to be the major benefit of registering meeting attendees online, Marymor says. “Normal registration takes five to seven minutes, but you can cut it to two. You can reduce the rote and spend more time being strategic.”

McGettigan Partners, a Philadelphia firm, helps companies use the Internet to promote their meetings. They give attendees a password enabling them to call up a site that provides information about an upcoming meeting, including pricing, content, biographies of speakers and session agendas, according to director of marketing Mark Jordan.

They can also fill out surveys about their own backgrounds and interests to help meeting planners customize the events. McGettigan Partners can share the information with speakers, who can tailor their speeches to the group that will attend.

Fusion Productions, Webster, New York, calls its service Meetings Without Walls. The company works with meeting planners to create sites that promote meetings with schedule information, session descriptions and speaker bios. In addition, attendees can respond with questions for speakers to address at the meeting.

Promoting meetings online “provides important information that makes attendees even better prepared for the events and the small time they have to spend together,” says Doug Fox, president of Doug Fox Communications, which produces EventWeb, an Internet site for meeting planners. Of course meeting brochures can do that too, but a Web site can do it better because there is no limit to the amount of information a company can offer on a Web site.

Fusion President Hugh Lee says sites have a long shelf life.

Companies can use them after meetings to promote new products, store customer information and more. They can become a valuable sales tool “designed to get information faster to salespeople and make them better prepared to influence or focus a message or sales call,” he says. The site can contain ad slicks for new products, or databases with territory management or top account information which salespeople can use to push their products or manage their accounts. Salespeople and clients can hold online discussions about new business, Lee says.

Once a meeting actually begins, the Internet takes on a broadcast role. Live and prerecorded broadcasts are possible. Technological limitations make live broadcasts difficult because broadcasting to a 28.8 modem, the common speed, produces a five-frame-per-second picture that is much poorer quality than a TV broadcast. But Eric Grafstrom, manager of business services at AudioNet, a Dallas company that produces live broadcasts, says they are becoming more popular, especially for such time sensitive events as keynote speeches that companies want to broadcast in real time. The company broadcast a shareholders meeting live for Bell & Howell Co., including speeches, a slide presentation and video images, Grafstrom said.

Show Digital in New York also offers live and prerecorded broadcasts. Marketing director Mary Ann Pierce notes that prerecorded broadcasts are more popular because they are easier to produce and less expensive. For a meeting held at the Sheraton hotel in New York in September to debut a new conference center, the company videotaped the event and then encoded it so it could be broadcast on the Internet seven minutes after it occurred.

Broadband Associates, Littleton, Colorado, delivers M-Shows that combine text, graphics, video animation and audiovisual clips online. Dick Schulte, vice president of sales and marketing, calls the service distance presentation, which permits “a virtual extension of the meeting,” by linking it to other sites where executives can hear a speech from a meeting and respond to it through a two-way audio feature.

Cheetah Broadcasting, Fremont, California, offers speech-to-text translation. It broadcasts the audio portion of meeting speeches online with the text of the speech printed on the screen. The company doesn’t broadcast a live picture of the speaker because the quality of the picture is low, according to senior vice president Mike Cleland. Instead, it projects graphics, such as PowerPoint presentations. Viewers can respond to the speeches and ask questions by submitting a text response. The responses are filtered by a moderator who can submit the questions to the speaker on an orderly basis.

An important benefit to broadcasting a meeting on the Internet is that it can be viewed anytime. It may be viewed live, in real time, or any time later by anyone who enters the site. The term “archived” describes the process of storing a broadcast on a site, where users can call it up on demand. Archiving a meeting broadcast prolongs the life of the meeting, enabling anyone to refer to it later.

Another benefit of using the Internet in association with meetings is money savings every step of the way. Registering attendees online cuts costs because companies “don’t have to process registrations manually and can get the attendees to do the data entry work themselves,” Fox says. Promoting a meeting online could save the cost of producing meetings brochures. Even the cost of meeting broadcasts is reasonable. “The cost of distributing audiovisual programming is less than other forms of communication,” Fox says. “It’s a fraction of the cost of satellite broadcast.” Sherry Manow, a spokeswoman for AudioNet, says costs range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars depending on the audio and video features used.

Meeting sites are often restricted to attendees and others who must have passwords to get in. But the Gartner Group opened its Symposium/ITxpo ’97 site to all because it’s the company’s biggest event of the year and Gartner uses it to solicit new business. To see the site and how the meeting was presented online, check it out at www.gartner.com/gartnerlive.html.