Maybe it was the 6-month-old strapped to my chest in the baby carrier, but the service I encountered while traveling was unexpectedly above par. It was so good, in fact, that my husband, who’s not a comment card kind of guy, actually filled out a feedback form when the airline sent the request to his email. We even had a slight delay, and it still didn’t matter, because the desk agents, flight attendants and other people we encountered on our trip left us feeling very positive.

Customer service is the practice of treating people as individuals with different needs. As meeting planners, you are providers and your attendees are your customers. By focusing on them as individuals, you may be able to plan better events. In our first issue of 2012, we’re focusing on trends in meetings in the coming year, and one of them is focusing on your customers, not yourself. It’s time to make it about them.

We want to know what changes you’re making to your meetings and events in 2012. Comment here, or email your ideas to me at lhoppe@collinsonmedia.com.

The co-founder and CEO (he defines his title as chief executive optimist) of the Life is Good Co. pushed his message about the power of optimism to a packed room at the San Diego Convention Center, Jan. 11. “It’s not just what you have, where you are, what your title is, what kind of car you drive, or anything else—it’s the way you view your world,” Jacobs said. “When we see what’s right with the world rather than what’s wrong with the world, possibilities open up.”

It’s a welcome message, especially as the national media hammers away at negative news coming from the Republican primaries and continued reports about a stagnant economy. Even more heartening was Jacob’s call to find a cause and weave it into your work every day. “Selfishly, it puts a bounce in your step,” he said. “It’s the reason I want to work—because you can do something meaningful.”

Jacobs started the company with his brother, John, in Boston in 1994 with $78 in the bank, building it to the $100 million privately held business it is today, by promoting an optimistic message on T-shirts, hats and other products.

Meeting planners are an optimistic lot. (Actually, it would seem to be a requirement for a job that involves juggling many tasks while dealing with sometimes disgruntled or difficult people.) They have been in the forefront of the movement to involve event participants in activities that benefit the needy in host cities. Today, planners regularly incorporate programs or align with groups to raise money or support for worldwide causes as part of every meeting. These efforts contribute a broader meaning to the Meetings Mean Business campaign created by the industry a few years ago. What began as a marketing message to focus attention on the positive contributions of events to the economy and jobs has almost been co-opted by planners and their attendees, who have taken their events to a higher level that delivers rewards to them as well as the groups they adopt.

Read more about the giveback efforts of some meeting planners.

Looking for more optimism and inspiration to kick off your planning year? Our first-ever Cool Issue is chock-full of the wonderful, weird, exciting, creative concepts, places and trends from our meeting world in the February/March 2012 edition of Rejuvenate magazine.

Beyond my personal property, I should also protect myself. I recently read about a hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, that conducted a study group, and half of the “influential and well-traveled Danish women” responding said they’d prefer to stay on a women-only floor because it provides both a sense of security and it feels more hygienic. The Bella Sky Comwell hotel opened in May and it features a women-only floor with a slight upcharge for rooms.

A few hotels in the U.S. also have all-female floors, including the Premier Hotel in New York City, Ellis Hotel in Atlanta, and Crowne Plaza properties in Washington, D.C., and Bloomington, Minn. The rooms have amenities you don’t find in most rooms, including flat irons, curling irons, yoga mats and kiss cams to say hello to family back home. As planners, you’re always trying to figure out what will make your attendees’ stay—or your own—more pleasant. Offering female attendees the safety, security and amenities of a women-only floor is an interesting thought.

“I believe in the power of [social media], but none of that replaces face-to-face meetings,” keynote speaker Michael Hyatt—who has more than 100,000 Twitter followers—told CollinsonTV following his general session. “In fact, if social media doesn’t lead to face-to-face meetings, then you’re really kind of deceiving yourself. That’s where all the juice is. That’s where it really happens. That’s where all the really important decisions are made.”

Social media is a catalyst for real connection. Anyone who followed the Twitter stream witnessed collaboration taking place between attendees. CollinsonTV interviews with speakers and attendees on YouTube allow anyone to experience a piece of Marketplace beyond the in-person event. Attendees return to Facebook and Flickr months after the event to look at pictures and remember what took place.

Social media is just a tool. It doesn’t replace what I experience at Marketplace. It can’t replace finding out in the hallway about a feature film being used to inspire young people to get involved in social justice programs or hearing in an educational session about planners trying new ways to incorporate play into their meetings or learning at breakfast about specific ways a planner will change an event she held a month ago for next year.

Social media is just a tool, but it’s a valuable one. Now that Marketplace is complete, keep the innovation coming by sharing your ideas with us. Talk to us in the comment section below, on Facebook and Twitter, or by emailing testimonials and ideas to editor@collinsonmedia.com.

How do you use social media as a catalyst for your in-person event?

What they haven’t done is change the age-old structure of meetings, something pointed out in a couple of recent meeting industry blogs.

The same almost sacrilegious thought struck me while looking through some photos from TEDGlobal2011 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July. There are the talking heads on stage; there are the people in their seats, clapping on cue: top speakers, time limits, intriguing subjects, but still top down. They’re lecturing to their subjects.

Instead of planning the production of meetings, we need to start with the involvement of the participants. (Change the language from “attendees” and consider the impact.) How do our colleagues, associates, clients feel about traveling to a gathering? What is their emotional connection? How do they want to engage with others? How can you involve them?

Rethinking meetings means ground-up work. You might be asking why: Your meetings might still be producing results that you and your organization want. Will they two or five or more years from now?

Innovation has almost become a tired word, but it does not mean simply refining or upgrading or improving something that already exists. Innovation means a truly new idea. That is something that is rare and difficult—and worth thinking about and discussing.

Our new special series, “Rethinking Meetings,” explores these questions, presenting ideas from inside and outside the meetings industry, beginning in the November issue of Rejuvenate.

You’ve been asked to develop and execute an innovative conference program designed to attract a record number of participants including exhibitors and sponsors and to generate income to support your organization. Where do you begin?

When I started my meeting planning business more than 30 years ago, I had recently been laid off as a teacher from the NYC Board of Education and I worked as an outside travel agent. I was invited to go on a one-week cruise for $9.56, and not wanting to go without my husband, I paid his fare. He won $100 playing blackjack and gave it to me to start my meeting consulting firm. One of my first clients was the president of the Association of Retail Travel Agents who asked me to create a one-day educational program for travel agency owners and managers. Next, I partnered with two travel publications in creating, developing and managing conferences. I learned by the seat of my pants.

Some Rejuvenate planners are in the same position and others have education and experience behind them. Both are welcome at my Marketplace educational sessions. During “Program Design and Development” small groups of attendees develop ideas for successful conferences that fulfill the objectives of the meeting sponsor, attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. They learn the importance of creating the right learning environment, educational formats, selecting the right speakers, and balancing the sometimes conflicting needs of attendees and exhibitors. Participants are encouraged to submit programs they’re currently working on for feedback from colleagues.

No doubt you’ve been asked to do more with less like the rest of us. Join the brainstorming session “Doing More with Less” to learn and share cost-saving strategies to weather the economic storm. Attendees pool the creativity, ingenuity, knowledge and experience of industry colleagues, and everyone takes away a truckload of ideas for reducing the bottom line, without sacrificing quality.

Want to know more? See the rest of the educational sessions Wallsh and other speakers are presenting here.

This week The National Conference Center in Leesburg, Va., released information about EventCamp East Coast 2011, scheduled at the D.C.-area center, Nov. 4-6. The conference will use a BarCamp-style format in which there are no predetermined topics and presenters.

Participants share learning goals during the opening roundtable session and later suggest topics and cast votes on what sessions they would like to see given. “Sessions are facilitated by your fellow EventCampers and bring out the many years of experiences of fellow attendees,” says event organizer Traci Browne, president of Red Cedar Marketing.

Sound a bit reminiscent of the crowd-determined (and shouted) agendas at the Occupy Wall Street gatherings? In some ways, it is. BarCamps, MashUp Camps and other unconference-style gatherings are often organized over social networks and tap into crowd-sourced expertise and energy.

We currently are working on a series titled “Rethinking Meetings” that will look at the changing nature of conferences, conventions and meeting planning from the spaces we meet in to the strategies employed in planning and presenting events. We’ll explore the subject with experts from every discipline in and out of the industry: business, design, education, social media, technology and more. As always, we invite you to share your experience, intelligence, comments or opinions.

Most conference education actually inhibits learning. In a typical presentation, attendees sit and listen while presenters stand and deliver. That is the sure sign of learning failure.

Lectures And Bicycles

I remember my first bike complete with training wheels. After a couple of days of riding with the training wheels, I was ready to take them off. I wanted to ride my bike like my father did. I wanted to be a big boy.

My father took off the training wheels, held the bike steady and told me to pedal. He gave me a gentle push. He ran beside me and encouraged me with additional instructions. It took several attempts to balance without crashing.

I experienced a temporary sense of sensory overload while I was trying to steer, pedal, balance and listen to his instructions. Amazingly, I was able to turn all that information into a new skill rather quickly.

My father did not sit down and review the history of bikes with me, discuss bicycle mechanics or the principles of balance before we started. Had I been required to sit and listen to my father’s lecture before ever attempting to ride a bike, I would have disconnected. I would have looked for something else to do.

The same situation applies to today’s conference education.

Meaningful Conferences

Our brains are meaning-driven. Meaning is more important than information.

Did you catch that last statement? Meaning is more important to our brains than information. We are constantly trying to find meaning in associations, connections, data and patterns. We are trying to make meaning out of the information that is being presented. We try to connect new information to past experiences and knowledge stored in our minds.

When we find a pattern that is meaningful to us, we add it to our perceptual mental map. If it connects to the knowledge already stored in our minds, we learn.

When we can make those connections, we get a sense of relief from the anxiety, confusion or stress that accompanies data, facts and figures. If we can’t connect it to past experiences, we feel a sense of confusion and are overwhelmed. We don’t understand.

Processing Time

If we have to sit and listen while the presenter stands and delivers for 30-, 60- or 90-minutes, we lose the ability to learn. We need time to process and connect what is being said to our own personal experiences or knowledge.

Presenters who attempt to maintain an audience’s attention 100 percent of the time, in fact, hinder learning. They are counter-productive to their goals.

In order for us to really learn something, the brain has to internalize in order to make meaning from the information. We need time to stop listening, think and reflect on what is being said.

Want to know more? Don’t miss the Wednesday morning general session: Creating Brain-Friendly Conferences with Jeff Hurt. See the rest of the educational sessions he is presenting here.

Do you use both sides of your brain—the right creative side and the left analytical side—equally? Or have you, as someone who plans meetings and events, adapted and use mostly your logical left side?

How cool for me, the learning facilitator (aka speaker), and you, the learner (aka participant), that in the sessions I’ll facilitate at Rejuvenate, we’ll use both sides of our brains.

As meetings and our industry have become more complex over the years, it is increasingly important for us to use our creative right brain skills right along with our analytical left-brain skills to plan and execute meetings. No more can we be “coffee cup counters” only and plan and execute logistics. We have to go far beyond that to help increase the ROI of all stakeholders by presenting meetings that are interesting. Our jobs are to ensure that our logistical planning keeps people safe, our knowledge and practice in ethical grounding keeps our reputations solid and above reproach, and that we bring new ideas to our work through the learning we do.

In “Meetings Beyond Logistics: Principles, Practices, and Play,” you’ll be exposed to and experience new thinking about audience-centric room sets, interaction among participants and play. Play always seems like a bad word when it comes to meetings; we’re told meetings have to be very serious. Yet, research about how our brains work tells us play and laughter allow us to open up to better learning by releasing endorphins. We’ll explore what that means and how to make meetings, while still delivering meaningful content, better for participants so they retain knowledge and look forward to returning.

That was for the right side! Two other interactive sessions will bring in some right-brain techniques to talk about left-brain subjects: “Business Ethics: We Won’t Judge You—Your Employer or Client Might” and “Safety First: Risk Anticipation and Emergency Management.”

“Business Ethics” will explore what ethics means and how business issues we face lead us to consider how and from whom we buy, how we present ourselves, with whom we interact, and about how social media use reflects back on us, our employers and our clients. It’s a challenging topic and one that should spark your interest especially if you are a CMP or are thinking about attaining that designation. In my capacity as chair of ASAE’s Ethics Committee, I’ll bring some interesting feedback. I promise this session will make you want to talk more about ethics…really!

My passion for preparing for any eventuality is well-known. Even my husband and friends laugh at me. When we go to restaurants, I want to know where the exits are and know our plan to escape in the event of an emergency. In “Safety First,” we’ll look at our responsibilities as planners to anticipate, from site selection on, what could happen and how to anticipate and manage any meeting or event risk. You’ll learn a great technique called Q-storming, which enables you to ask better questions during site selection and other phases of planning and executing events and meetings. We’ll talk about priorities while developing a risk management plan and putting it into practice.

The learning will be engaging, the tips, invaluable, and you will be a stronger, more appreciated planner after you implement these changes at work.

Review the education schedule to see when Joan’s sessions take place at Rejuvenate Marketplace, Nov. 7-9, in San Jose, Calif.