Also - the postcard was made out of virgin plastic, with a recycle count of ‘1′. There’s a URL pointing me to a website where I can learn more about how it was made but I don’t plan to take the bait. If this was really a sustainable material they should have said so right on the card. Maybe I’m old school but sending a big plastic postcard, even if it can be recycled, to a corporate prospect who probably doesn’t have plastic recycling set up near their office seems completely wrong - especially in the context of an environmental-themed event.

I also won’t share the links to the event or the company making the card. As marketers, we can do better.

Our latest webcast:

Crunching the Numbers: Maximizing Marketing Value During a Downturn

From the registration page:

At the beginning of 2008, it became apparent that a recession was coming our way. In the face of financially troubling times, companies tend to scale back on major marketing efforts to try to save some money. The net result is that these companies usually end up in worse financial shape.

During times of economic stress is the worst time to scale back on your marketing efforts. In fact, a downturn gives companies a golden opportunity to develop deeper relationships with their customers and partners through relationship marketing.

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Link: http://www.cramereventmedia.com/webcastseries/

As much as I love Surface, this doesn’t look like a good use of the technology. CNN has a multi-touch wall that is better suited for live television than the coffee-table format of Surface. With Surface, the camera has to constantly switch from a front to an overhead shot, which seems awkward. They use Surface’s unique object recognition to change the content on the display to correspond with labeled tiles placed on the surface by the host. This is cool and interesting, but seeing that interaction doesn’t help us as viewers.

See for yourself. I still believe Surface is an outstanding product for retail, exhibits, and corporate demo environments. But this seems a little bit of a force-feed by Microsoft.

Found on Engadget.

Found on Engadget.

To learn more about our presenters, check out:
Aaron Strout, VP of New Media, Mzinga (Twitter: astrout)
Rachael Happe, Sr. Director of Social Media Products, Mzinga (Twitter: rhappe)
Laura Fitton, Founder & CEO, Pistachio Consulting (Twitter: pistachio)
Scott Kiekbusch, Director of Digital Marketing Solutions, Cramer (Twitter: adjustafresh)

If you’re looking for me on Twitter, I’m still at foolthrottle.

The story is, indeed, related to cremated remains. But it’s also about personalized content. Yup - it’s about bringing your RFID card to a columbarium (or whatever they call it in Japan), swiping it in a private viewing area, and having a computer locate the cremains of your dearly departed from within it’s underground dead-abase and bring them up through a little viewport for you. It’s wildly high-tech and probably works better than those crazy RFID-based luggage handlers in airports. If the Japanese can use an RFID badge to bring you personalized contents doesn’t it seem more within your reach to use RFID badges at trade shows to deliver personalized content?

Video:

Oh, and my other title for this post? “RFID Technology Pulls Your Grandma out of it’s Ash Hole”

From CSCOUT

In fact, if you look at the stats they published below, they grew by about the same number of visitors as the entire Internet. Does that mean that 80 million new people flocked to the internet in the last year and they were all coming to use Facebook? Well, no, of course not, that would be statistically daft. But since the major news outlets routinely twist and contort stats like that all the time….why the heck not? Ladies and Gentleman: the stats below clearly demonstrate that nearly every new internet user in the last 12 months possibly connected to the internet simply in order to get their own Facebook page. It’s also possible they were connecting simply in order to check on their kids’ Facebook pages.

Source

Now that we’ve entered an age where everyone is connected through mobile devices that have immediate access to other people through text messaging, mobile applications, and mobile internet browsing, it was only a matter of time before we started to see a lot of background communications infiltrating face-to-face events. Consider, for example, that instant messaging was invented by a bunch of guys who wanted to communicate “under the table” when they were bored at meetings!

I recently wrote about another case where a general session was hijacked by twitter users. Since then I have been to many sessions where the presenter invited questions through twitter and other online methods. There is no question that your audience is no longer limited to the people in the room. The question is: what do you to with the people you can’t see?

“Hybrid Events”, which combine online and onsite audiences into one collaborative shared experience, will have to solve this question for sure, and it will require a sea change in attitude about what an “attendee” is. But until we have cemented “Hybrid Events” into the mainstream event vocabulary, we simply need to be considerate to both sides. In the case of the conference mention on Sue’s post, the folks in the onsite audience paid to be there, and clearly deserve to be given their presenter’s attention. That being said, the comments coming from online sources have to be monitored because they may contain questions from the onsite audience, who are reaching out through their mobile devices. They may also contain comments from online audiences who are following along thanks to the flow of information from the onsite audience, and these comments may be of value to those in the room. It is another example of the wisdom of crowds - the larger the crowd, the smarter we are.

So, rather than isolate the room, it probably makes more sense to have someone monitor the internet conversation for the presenter, off to the side. They can bring anything of value to the room at the request of the presenter, and when it seems fair to the audience at hand. I’ve seen this in action, it works, and it adds value to everyone involved.