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It’s Not Just Technology – Getting Back to
the Basics of Event Management
It’s an exciting time to be a meeting
planner!
Meetings technology has been rapidly evolving,
driven by dramatic growth in cloud computing, mobile devices,
and moved along by the parallel growth in the overall world of
technology.
Every month, meeting organizers are
being bombarded with all types of new tech to consider! Every
month there is a blog or magazine article talking about what
is new, what is coming and what is on the horizon in meetings
technology.
We’re all talking and discussing things like
augmented reality, body heat mapping, the Internet of Things,
beacon technology, wearable devices, event intelligence, and
that oldie but goodie, virtual meetings.
It’s
exciting, it’s fun, and it has great potential to make our
meetings more effective, efficient and less costly. What’s not
to like?
The short answer is while there is a lot
to like, there’s a lot of reasons to exercise some
caution!
From a technology perspective, almost
every meeting planner fits into the technology life cycle in a
pretty predictable fashion.
There will be early
adopters and there will be late adopters and a few other
categories of adoption to boot. Amazingly, this theory was
discussed as early as 1962 by Everett Rogers in his
book The Diffusion of Innovations. The theory
has great practical implications for today’s meeting planners.
Essentially, the Diffusion of Innovation theory
will identify the following categories of technology
adopters:
- Innovators
(16%) – the folks who take the risk and are first
to adopt a new technology
- Early Adopters (13.5%)
– these are the folks who are second fastest in
adoption and tend to be younger and more socially engaged
than other users
- Early Majority
(34%) – This category takes the most amount of time
and tend not to have leadership roles in their organizations
- Late Majority (34%)
– More skeptical than most and tend to be older and
less socially engaged
- Laggards (16%)
– These are the folks who are last to adopt. Traditional to
the core, they tend to stick with what works and refuse to
consider innovations
What type of technology adopter are you?
For many meeting planners, the answer is not quite
so easy to pin down. Meeting budgets and a varying demographic
of meeting attendees often drive the pace of technology
adoption. Additionally, meetings tend to be extremely cost
sensitive and early adoption of new technology can often lead
to unacceptably higher budgets.
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