SWIVL PERSONAL CAMERAMAN
Swivl is an interactive motorized tripod with a wireless mic for your iPhone or pocket camera. The device consists of a base and a wireless marker, attach the marker to yourself and the base automatically follows the marker up to 33 feet away. The Swivel is able to rotate 360º horizontally and +10 / -20 degrees vertically when commanded from the Marker. Great gadget for filming presentations, training videos and lectures.
5 Ideas for Using Pinterest in Your Business
Pinterest is a free website and application that allows you to bookmark images you find on the web and put them in your “pin boards”. You can follow other users, comment on their pins and repin their images to your boards. Like any social network, Pinterest does require an investment in time. When I first joined Pinterest, I wanted to look for and share wedding inspiration with my clients. I am still surprised at how much it has helped with other things in my life such as fashion boards (which have inspired more than a few new outfits), simple cooking techniques, home décor ideas, exercise tips, craft ideas and entertaining inspiration for the holidays.
Here are 5 ways Pinterest can help your business:
1. Client inspiration boards. You can create a different pin board for each of your clients to pin inspiration photos and ideas for their wedding or event. This is a really easy way to create inspiration boards online that you can share with the bride, the floral designer, cake designer and other wedding professionals who are working with you on the wedding or event. You can also encourage your clients to create their own inspiration boards on Pinterest.
2. Business branding ideas. You can save patterns, photos, websites, logos and icons that inspire you. Even if you aren’t looking to re-brand your business anytime soon, it is really helpful to save these for future reference.
3. Increase your current business brand. Pin photos of your office and your team to increase brand exposure. To get more visitors to your Pinterest page, use your Facebook page and Twitter to promote your design ideas and inspiration boards that are on Pinterest.
4. Pin your own work. Just like Twitter and Facebook, you will get the most benefit when you interact with other users and pin from other sites. You don’t want to use Pinterest solely for self promotion however it’s perfectly fine to occasionally pin content from your own wedding and blog. I am surprised at the amount of website traffic we get from people who have pinned photos from our event planning website and blog.
5. Office inspiration and organization. Event planners are such creative professionals. The environment we work in influences our design, our style and our productivity. Use Pinterest for inspiration ideas to create a clean, creative, organized and inspiring work environment. You may be surprised at how much better you work.
article courtesy of plannerslounge.com
MTCC Launches New Site
The Metro Toronto Convention Centre has launched a new website at www.mtccc.com. With a clean contemporary design and intuitive navigation, the new website makes it convenient for attendees and exhibitors to access event information quickly, and provides meeting planners with innovative tools to plan their events.
Event Mobi
Mobile Event-Guide for
Venues, Events & Conferences
EventMobi is an interactive mobile app that takes the experience of attending events to the next level. Easy to create, easy to use and cost effective, EventMobi is the mobile solution of choice for Venues, Festivals, Tradeshows and Conferences.
Creating an event guide has never been this easy before. Effortless data integration and online content management (agenda, speaker bios, sponsors ads, maps, polls, etc), with instantaneous update on your attendees mobile phones.
Interact with your delegates using polls and surveys integrated within EventMobi guide for your event. Collect general event surveys, or use real time results to influence seminar content, get delegates engaged or facilitate discussion based on participant feedback
Give sponsors new advertising opportunity to enhance branding & exposure. Generate revenue by offering mobile banner-ads and enhanced exhibitor-listings on EventMobi. Mobile marketing for events using EventMobi is interactive, effective, and measurable
Use the power of social media to help your delegates connect with each other before, during and after the event. Simple delegate bios, profile pictures and social media links allow for effective networking between speakers, delegates and sponsors.
Help your event become more eco-friendly. Reduce waste and minimize printing costs by moving your event guide and exhibitor brochures to EventMobi. For attendees there is no more flipping paper and no need to carry a tote bag full of printed material
What that means, is that as more people carry around phones that are connected to internet (such as the iPhone or Blackberry), there is less of a demand to print pages of information as hand outs at tradeshows and conferences, which in less than a day ends up in a trash can.
We have essentially created a viable, affordable option to reduce paper waste using mobile apps, while enhancing the way sponsors and organizers provide information to attendees at events. Most recently NetChange a conference that was held at MaRS Collaboration Centre in Toronto was able to put this to test and go completely paperless. Although this may not be practical for all events, it is never too early to start phasing in this transformation for any event.
Event Mobi is featuring a new CSEME APP designed specifically for our conference in March. Download it now to your smart phone, i-pad or laptop at www.eventmobi.com/cseme and stay up to the minute with CSEME.
Capture Your Memories.
MPI Chooses Cvent As Official Tech Partner
Cvent, the world’s largest provider of online event management, meeting site selection and web survey solutions, announced that Meeting Professionals International (MPI), has renewed its alliance with Cvent as its preferred technology partner.
Trendwatching.com
Trendingwatching.com
This site’s free, monthly Trend Briefings are not to be missed if you want to see the forest for the trees, showing the larger trends underlying diverse examples from around the world. A recent briefing cited corporate bloggers and tweeters, a San Francisco-based chocolatier that produces “beta editions” of its chocolates, and Google’s Latitude (which lets you see where people are geographically) as part of its “Foreverism” trend on how consumers and businesses are embracing conversations, relationships and products that are never done. For spot-on analysis, global perspective and big-picture context, this is your go-to resource.
trendwatching.com
The Future of DMC Has Arrived
e-DMC, an online B2B platform for the distribution of destination services today announced its partnership with Panther Production Company Inc (an associated company of Nasco Staffing Solutions), a leader in the event production, destination management, and staffing industry of Canada.
Through their exclusive partnership with PPCI and Nasco, e-DMC will now have the destination expertise to service Do-it-Yourself (DIY) clients in British Columbia (including Vancouver and Whistler, home of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games), Alberta, and Manitoba. "The wealth of knowledge and expertise in the destination and event management field held between Panther Production Company Inc and Nasco Staffing Solutions makes the partnership as the exclusive Destination Expert in 3 provinces for e-DMC a perfect fit for all involved."
"e-DMC will allow us to better service our existing clientele as well as reach new heights in servicing the market as a whole" says Alex Bickers, Director of Sales and Marketing
"As the Destination Expert in Western Canada for e-DMC, PPCI and Nasco will ensure users will get the best local expertise available while saving time and money as they schedule their programs at their own convenience online," says Wayne Beaubien, Founder of e-DestinAccess and the brain behind e-DMC. Online Distribution of Destination Services is fast becoming a hot topic for DMCs.
With players like Kuoni Connect going after the marketplace, currently valued at $100 Billion in the U.S. alone, individual DMCs will find it increasingly hard to compete in the DIY space.
Each month 250,000 people search for a "Meet & Greet" provider using Google's search engine; each month 750,000 people search for an airport transfer provider via Google; and each month almost 2 million people also search for teambuilding providers.
Those Do-it-Yourself planner purchase destination services without the help of a DMC.
With e-DMC, selected DMCs can swiftly and thus competitively market destination goods and services, and from a broader perspective, level the playing field with larger competitors.
According to American Express and MPI's report FutureWatch, the "DIY" market has a value of $100 Billion in the U.S. alone – estimated to be well over $300 billion worldwide.
And, as aforementioned, ALL of that business is bypassing traditional DMCs, into the coffers of the large DMC giants, the true retail DMC competition or alternatively, transferred to private "DIY" planners.
e-DMC is designed to give individual DMCs the opportunity to compete in the growing "DIY" market.
For more information, please contact Alex Bickers at abickers@nasco.ca or 604-683-2512
Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a blog post!! Able to leap through platforms with a single click?
Welcome to Toronto – POST G20…
I’m not going to discuss protestors, politics, police or commentary. If you are looking for answers regarding what transpired in downtown Toronto last month, close this window and search the many news portals throughout the interweb!
Today, I’m going to discuss the speed of meaningful and hurtful message delivery online. Companies can be reluctant to maintain a positive online brand because of the possibility of negative posting by users! Yes, WE ALL have a voice now with ‘super powers’ acquired through concepts like “Broadcast Yourself”, “Interact & Engage” and “Join The Conversation”. With all these powers developing at ever increasing rates, the phrase “With great power comes great responsibility” comes to mind! Yes, cartoon super heroes (and their uncles) have a lot to teach us!
If anything, the G20 summit proved how quick messages can be delivered, consumed and passed along to shift public opinion. Think about how many real time tweets were posted right from the centre of the protests accompanied by pictures and video of “protestor aggression” or “police brutality”! Without the proper journalistic skills and research, who is to say what really happened? A 140 character message really isn’t sufficient to justify cause and action but today it really has become a driving force in the broadcast news industry. The mass collective are now socialized to receive quick answers to quick questions without the flow of information being bogged down by things like integrity, diligence or plausibility.
Content Snacking
Content snacking is the way we consume messages and information online. It’s like receiving an executive summary on elements of interest. Users get headline feeds, snippets of articles, mobile episodes of TV shows and news broadcasts in quick, bite size form. Think of Twitter and how fast posts flow through your feed. In five minutes, a message is posted and gone – not lost, just off your feed! By searching the hashtag #G20 (or any topic of interest), you can find thousands of posts from EVERY angle and viewpoint, but most times, posts are disregarded!
So it comes to this – what catches the eye of online users? What makes them click a link and read/watch? What is it that gets a meaningful post viewed, RT’d (Re-Tweeted) or reposted to other platforms? Similarly, what makes a hurtful post stand above the positive ones? Before the planning process even begins, these are the questions that companies MUST answer in order to understand the social sphere!
Steps to creating meaningful content
I am very fortunate to know Lara McCulloch, a.k.a. @ready2spark . She is a thought leader in the event industry and a social media marketing and branding enthusiast who speaks around the world. Lara is an inspiration to me and to thousands of #eventprofs across North America! I have asked Lara her views on this subject and below are her five essential qualities that will help your messages spread across multiple platforms:
1. Relatability - If you write for everyone, you'll find it hard to captivate anyone. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the thought of all the people who can read your post. I often tell my clients to imagine sitting in a cafe with their target market across the table from them. Write as if you're talking directly to them.
2. Obvious Value – Your readers have to see (very quickly) what they stand to gain from your post.
3. Emotional Connectivity – Whether they tug on our heart strings, get us angry or inspire us, messages that incite emotions are much more likely to spread than those that don't.
4. Clarity – The more convoluted or complex your point is, the more likely people are to move on.
5. Originality – There are a lot of blog authors that regurgitate information from other sources. Blogs that have gained notoriety and have a high share ratio are those that contain original thoughts and content.
Most importantly, when writing meaningful messages, ensure that it is easy to share! Avoid creating too many steps for the end user. “Incorporate social sharing links that make it easy for people to share your content in one click” Lara says. If users have to jump through too many hoops, your content will not travel!
How to avoid hurtful messages
With everyone having a voice through social platforms, it is virtually impossible to avoid hurtful messages. Lara says that “With the advent of social media, the number of connections we have and the sheer number of people who can be exposed to our thoughts have grown exponentially.” What is fantastic about this is that we can now dive into the minds of our customers and improve on our brands by using their feedback – negative or positive! We can listen to what they are saying deeper than ever before and improve ourselves, our teams and our companies as a whole. If you are successful at taking negative feedback and turning it into a positive, you are able to create better experiences for your followers and customers.
Is time a factor?
Web 2.0 has created a stage for all to become Lois Lane or Clark Kent! As responsible marketing/event professionals, it is important when developing your company’s online brand to remain as candid as possible. Create a welcoming and accessible presence in order to help your brand stand out against the digital clutter. I’ve always said to clients beginning their online journey that you cannot hide behind your logo and push out content like an indifferent machine. Your posts will get lost and disregarded. Meaningful posts are personal, intuitive and contain original content. Sounds pretty easy, but has proven difficult for a lot of brands because of one MASSIVE issue – TIME! Who has the time to sit online and post consistently? To lead the conversation, you truly have to be accessible online as much as possible to prove social worth. It does take time to build yourself as a thought leader who CAN provide meaningful posts, but once you reach that status, the benefits of being able to get your message heard are huge! Yes, time is a factor, but the payoff is worth the investment!
Thanks and feel free to connect with me anytime!
PRP Inspires The World With Stellar Paralympic Closing
