Take Away

Speed vs. Polish With the advent of Twitter and Facebook and the repurposing of content in so many different ways, “speed to market, in my opinion, has over- taken production quality,” said Carol McGury, a senior vice president at SmithBucklin. “That said, we would not advocate someone taking their iPhone and capturing the video and saying, ‘Okay, we are going to charge $1,000 now for the presentation.’ You have to have some balance. “You really need to

understand your audi- ence to know if it is more important to get something quickly and accurately, or is it more important to get something that is a little bit higher level, in terms of quality, that folks are going to pay X amount of dollars for.”

Barbara Palmer is a senior editor of Convene.

Meeting Management: Online By Barbara Palmer

MakingContentCount

Technology doesn’t have to be new—or packed with bells and whistles— to add value to your education sessions.

In 2010, three IT user groups—the Interna- tional Nortel Networks Users Association (INNUA), the International Alliance of Avaya Users (InAAU), and Insight 100inc — joined together to create the InternationalAvaya Users Group (IAUG), which offers services including education and networking for more than 5,000 members. When IAUG hosted its first-ever Global Conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas last May, it was a big hit, attracting more than 3,000 attendees. What more could an association want? In the case of IAUG, it was to add even more

value, by capturing the nuts and bolts of its meet- ing content andmaking it available online, both to members who attended and to those who could not, said Carol McGury, senior vice pres-

IAUGbegan making the sessions available to

members through its website beginning in June, a month after the conference. The association added them strategically, in order to encourage repeat visits.Within three months, IAUG mem- bers had downloaded more than 10,000 individ- ual files. IAUG’s only cost, in addition to the software

and laptop rental, was staff time. Minimal speaker training is required,McGury said, includ- ing making sure that presenters speak into the microphone recording their session. “Obviously you want to be wise about dedicating staff resources,” she said, “andmaking sure you have some folks that are particularly skilled at that par- ticular software.” Although it wouldn’t work for every orga-

Screen-capture is a good fit for information-rich sessions.

ident for education and learning services at SmithBucklin, which manages IAUG. “A lot of our associations are really good at conference content deployment and building education for theirmembers and their communities,”McGury said. A logical next step, she said, is to capture that content and present it in different packages and formats, which can be used either to extend member benefits or to create potential new rev- enue streams. That’s especially the case given the availabil-

ity of easy, affordable ways to capture content, including using screen-recording software. At the IAUG Global Conference last May, IAUG used DIY software, loaded onto rented laptops, to record 180 sessions in 20 concurrent session rooms.The software—Camtasia, byTechSmith —records a speaker’s voice and synchronizes it with speaker slides. No Internet connection is required, nor is video used, keeping costs low.

nization’s meetings, screen-capture is a good fit for information-rich sessions, McGury said, including those offered by scientific and medical associations, where audiences care more about the content than seeing the presenter in person. The technology itself isn’t new, she noted.What is new is the need for flexible, on-demand learn- ing combined with members’ increased accessi- bility to such programs enabled by mobile devices. “I think the market has driven associations

to think more about being available tomembers year-round versus through in-person-onlymeet- ings,” McGury said. “So although the technol- ogy [has been] there, the need at the time wasn’t. Now with associations diversifying their prod- uct offerings and extending their reach again, beyond annual events, seminars, etc., content capture has become more of table stakes for many associations.”

ON_THE_WEB: Corbin Ball, CSP, CMP, of Corbin Ball Associates, makes the case for content capture at meetings at http://bit.ly/content-capture.

ILLUSTRATION BY GREG MABLY pcma convene February 2012 41