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challenge is really informing and educating people as to why these are important. With our culture, you have to take a bit of a softer approach, so we built a lot of outreach programs really to do that — to engage people in part of the process.
Has your meetings program been affected by the economic and political climate over the last few years — the AIG Effect, the GSA spending scandal, and so on?
Lisa Schelle
‘We tend to be a certain breed of people that come into this business.’
SK AIG/GSA really did not affect what we do very much. Everything we do we have always been very cautious about to begin with. But I will say the economy certainly affected what we do and how we do it. Our attendance has certainly been impacted at times, based upon whether the storeowners were doing well at retail or not, and that affected our sales on the show floor, which also is economically driven. We have seen some meetings canceled very last minute, mostly when looking at how the retailers are doing and what our sales are like.
KQ Obviously the economy did [affect Microsoft’s meetings program], and so we were much more financially aware of what we are spending and why, and the measurement piece is so much more pronounced and important to be able to show the real need for ROI. So I think in the long run it actually made us a lot smarter about our spending, rather than doing things just because they have been done before.
CP Our meetings program was affected by the economic impact. In 2009, Cisco took a bold step to reduce costs by eliminating internal travel and meetings, replacing them with virtual alternatives — meaning we used our own “Cisco on Cisco” technologies to have internal meetings, either by Webex or Telepresence. Three years later, it’s been interesting to watch. Some travel and face-to-face meetings have been returned; however, the new behaviors that were created from not being able to travel made people more efficient in utilizing webcams/collaboration technology, and finding ways to achieve the same results. It also spawned a whole new culture of hybrid meetings, so that today almost every physical meeting has a virtual component, and those events that went purely virtual have added back elements of physical attendance. The
56 PCMA CONVENE JULY 2012
PCMA 2012 Global Corporate Summit
PCMA is convening its first-ever Global Corporate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, this month. Our five roundtable participants played a role in helping shape the event, and all of them will be attending. We asked them what they’re looking to get out of it.
Carolyn Pund I am excited about the opportunity for the group discussions. Whenever you get the caliber of individuals together that PCMA has invited for this summit, the one-off conversations and relationships provide camaraderie and value- sharing far beyond the days of the summit.
Lisa Schelle I am interested in learning new insights or perspectives from people outside of the U.S. There are just so many differences in the way that we view our tactical work
— in hotel contracting, for example. From a more strategic piece, I think a lot of the conversation will be about SMM or things very similar to that, and how we work to help our organizations leverage and reduce spend and manage their costs.
Kelley Butler From my perspective, we have been so U.S.-centric here at corporate in the home ofice. While I do have the opportunity to interact with a lot of our world communications partners, just really understanding what our world means in their world — how we can enhance and influence it, and then how they can help reciprocate back.
Susan Katz I am really looking forward to hearing from other planners what their challenges are and some of the creative solutions as to how they are working with them. Our time frame these days has really shrunk as to when we get information and how quickly we have to turn that information around into meetings, and I would love to hear how people are using new technological solutions in order to help expedite the process.
Kati Quigley The women on the phone [for this roundtable] — we have been working on the program itself. So I am so excited to spend time with them. It goes back to the value of face-to-face.