Meetings With Mobile Technology

The fast development of mobile technology is one of the most popular domains in all industries; its extensive use in conferences is undoubtedly inevitable. Smartphone is now not only widely accepted in people’s personal life but also in professional areas. Meeting this trend in holding conventions and conferences could improve meetings’ efficiency and also emerge professionalism as well. Why should we care about mobile technology? The term “mobile apps” is the word of high appearing frequency as more and more smartphones arise. More and more mobile applications have started making dramatic changes to people’s ways of living, travelling as well as job meetings. Nowadays, a large amount of people depend on searching their trips’ ideal destinations through 3G or 4G internet with their smartphones, which means that hotels, restaurants, and conference centres need to be aware of their publicity and reputation on Internet. The influence brought by mobility gradually expand itself by bring individuals’ abundant information and finger-tip convenience. “ Global smartphone wholesale revenues were expected to hit $97.3 billion in 2010, according to New York City-based ABI Research — a year-over-year jump of nearly 57 percent.

ABI expects revenues to climb to more than $175 billion by 2015.” Due to the fact that majority of meeting and convention participants are Smartphone users, conference management should pay more attention to mobile technology. According to researches, there are mainly two categories of mobile apps particularly aimed at meetings. One is for meeting planners, which allows managers to immediately input data and information into their smartphone, ipad as well as syncing with PC at any time. This application changes the traditional way that people carry big blinders which may be a little bit difficult to organize and heavy to move. What’s more, it also meets the requirements of green meetings which are completely free of papers.

The other one benefits the participants, which offers meeting attendees opportunities to skim through colorful screen and master information without delay. Social media also leads the popularity of mobile technology become much stronger. It gives platforms for people to communicate with each other. It seems that social media provides people free opportunities to begin some conversations before the real meetings start. As we all know that Linkedin is famous for its wide use in professional domains, people put their education levels and work experience on Linkedin in order to look for some really great job opportunities. It builds connections between hiring managers and job seekers. For conference attendees, they can also interact with each other by simply adding each other on Linkedin. Information on M&C website indicates that Facebook boasts more than 500 million users, Twitter has 175 million and LinkedIn claims more than 85 million registered users.

Twitter is also a popular way for meeting attendees to share their opinions. Before a conference begins, people start tweeting about meetings and feeling the atmosphere of conferences. People will still keep tweet what they have listened during the meetings. They use twitter as a tool to write the good highlights and also can retweet for people who are absent from that conference; consequently, twitter itself has been totally shown its value on conventions and conferences. For meeting planners, setting their professional twitters for spreading their current information and improvements would be a good idea for attendees to better be familiar with their conference information and attract business groups. In the final analysis, we could see that mobile technology has been bringing benefits to not only meeting planners but also conference attendees. The meeting trend with mobile technology would constantly blossom into our industry.

References

http://denverconvention.com/blog/details/11-meeting-trends-that-will-shape-2012

http://www.meetings-conventions.com/articles/how-meetings-benefit-from-today39s-technology/a38382.aspx

http://www.industryreview.org/opinion/seven-reasons-why-twitter-hash-tags-benefit-conferences