Midwest Meetings took five with Dave Serino, Founder of the Social Media Tourism Symposium, at the Explore Minnesota Tourism Conference to discuss social media engagement, strategy, and more.
 Justin Baer, CheckInEasy Founder Q: First, a little background: how did you become involved in providing mobile app technology for events?
A: Our sister company, Charityhappenings.org, is the master calendar of nonprofit events happening around the country. We have so many great relationships with event planners around the country, and the topic of eliminating stapled Excel spreadsheets and ugly clipboards kept coming up. We set out to create a much more efficient way to run check-in, and built CheckInEasy. Q: So, what is CheckInEasy? A: An extremely easy-to-use guest list and event check-in iPad/iPhone app that was recently used by Google at their holiday party to check in 2,600 guests at the New York Public Library. We just launched but have already gotten some exciting traction with users such as Tory Burch, Emory University, Ferrari and Masarati of Cannes, Elle Fashion Week, Nestle Water, AVT Technology, and more.  The New Year brings new possibilities for virtual meeting technologies and virtual meeting organizers, reports Michael Doyle, founder of Virtual Edge Institute. As the organization brings together leaders from the digital meeting industry at the 2012 Virtual Edge Summit in San Diego, CA from January 9-12, Doyle released his top seven predictions for the virtual meetings industry for 2012.
1. More movement toward a simpler, “less is more” approach. The trend toward a more simplified, Web page-based graphical interface for online events and meetings will continue in 2012. Platform vendors are moving in the “less is better” direction with their new versions. 2. More embedded event and meeting solutions. Events in 2012 will be open and easily accessible to attendees wherever they are located. Many event and meeting producers will want to take some code and embed their events and learning programs into their existing websites to simplify the attendee experience.  Think events and conferences are no place for fun and games? EventMobi’s GamifyApp™ – the world’s first smartphone-based platform designed for event professionals – challenges that notion by injecting entertainment and healthy competition into events.
The GamifyApp allows event planners to build and customize games to enhance the overall attendee experience and solve the common problems they are typically faced with, such as engaging attendees at educational sessions or compelling attendees to walk the tradeshow floor and interact with sponsors. The GamifyApp integrates game mechanics into all aspects of the event experience – education, team‐building, and networking – by encouraging attendees to use their smartphone or tablet device to complete quizzes, solve challenges, and perform tasks.  Certain, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based event management software for the global meetings and events industry, today released its 2012 predictions on technology trends that will drive increased business value from events. Based on insight from visionary industry leaders, customers and partners, Certain has identified key shifts that it believes will shape the industry over the next 12 months.
"2012 will kick off a breakthrough for the industry that will revolutionize the value that attendees, meeting professionals and executive sponsors derive from events," said Peter Micciche, CEO of Certain. "A tsunami of connectedness, driven by social, mobile and virtual, will ultimately enable the attendee engagement experience. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are mainstream, making integrated event marketing the new normal for event professionals. This integration of digital solutions with event planning software will result in 2012 as the 'year of the platform.' Software-as-a-Service solutions are now seamlessly woven together into a comprehensive ecosystem architecture designed to meet, track and measure planner, marketer, sponsor and attendee needs."  Eved, an online marketplace for the meeting and event industry, today announced it has raised $9.5 million in a series B round led by New World Ventures and MK Capital.
The funding will enable the Chicago-area company to scale and expand its proprietary online platform, which has been adopted and championed by leaders in the meetings community. The $263 million industry, with 1.8 million annual U.S. corporate meetings and events, is one of few that have yet to migrate online. Eved’s global, proprietary online platform provides all companies in the event industry supply chain a complete sourcing, marketing, and e-commerce solution that allows buyers, sellers, and resellers the ability to interact and transact online.  The International Special Events Society (ISES) today announced a new strategic partnership with Eved.
ISES believes that shared technology platforms and online communities can help member companies by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes, position members to provide value to their customers, and promote growth opportunities. Eved has developed the next-generation technology solution for the meeting and special events marketplace to network, market, create service proposals, and buy and sell event services online. ISES sees Eved’s online B-to-B platform as a significant step forward in integrating technology and streamlining the special event planning marketplace as the industry advances towards more efficient business processes. photos courtesy Brandon Williams Midwest Meetings took five with Dave Serino, Founder of the Social Media Tourism Symposium, at the Explore Minnesota Tourism Conference to discuss social media engagement, strategy, and more.  Dave Serino, SoMeT Founder Here at Midwest Meetings, we’ve been hearing all about how anybody who’s anybody in tourism should be at SoMeT - that is, the Social Media Tourism Symposium, which took place in Tunica, MS in November.
What’s SoMeT? Just another conference about social media marketing in the tourism industry? Not even close - it’s way cooler than that. For starters, SoMeT is an actual product of social media marketing in the tourism industry. In fact, the whole thing is practically planned on Facebook. Once we got a grasp of just how all-encompassing this event experience is for tourism, hospitality, and destination marketing professionals in the social media space, we started wondering… from a planning and logistics perspective, how on earth do they pull this thing off? So we got founder Dave Serino on the phone to tell us all about the vision, process, and community behind SoMeT, and why this is probably the conference model of the future. App of the Week: Emergency Radio App byEdgeRift, Inc. - Stay Tuned to Your Event Destination12/16/2011 Risk management, anyone? Far more than just a police scanner, Emergency Radio has it all with live police, fire, EMS, railroad, air traffic, NOAA weather, coast guard, and other emergency frequencies.  Larry Covert Are the days of meeting planners hauling around huge binders full of every detail about a meeting going the way of the dinosaur? Yes, according to Larry Covert, the ASAE Director of Information Technology, who led a session on “Green IT” at the ASAE Technology Conference in early December. The session was sponsored by the ASAE Convene Green Alliance.
“We are seeing big cost savings plus a reduced carbon footprint by transferring all the information that used to be printed in three 10-inch binders into an iPad,” Covert said. Judy Bausch, CMP, the ASAE Meetings Manager, manages a 10-member onsite team at the Annual Meeting that all used to work with these large binders. Today, however, ASAE uses an app called iAnnotatePDF that is available in the iStore for only $8 to handle all the data electronically that used to be printed. | 
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