innovative meetings Barbara Palmer

Not Lost in Translation Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin sessions drew international audiences.

BREAKOUT

some of whom, Kopcinski said, “were not totally pleased.” Although MDRT promoted the ConneXion Zone thoroughly, mak- ing announcements about it from the stage, in printed material and signage, through social-media channels, and via its meeting app, the power of “what used to be” seemed to make it hard for some attendees to fully grasp what was going on in the new space. “This is good,” one attendee from Maine told me, gesturing toward a lively discussion in the ConneXion Zone, “but I wish it could have been added to the exhibits” — apparently not realizing that Exhibitor Zone spaces physically outnumbered the spaces offering MDRT-generated content. Organizers made sure there was plenty of room for people to gather

— sometimes, it seemed, too much room. Attendees, including me, often follow the crowd when choosing sessions to attend or exhibitors to visit — whenever and wherever a tightly packed knot of people gathers, I’m curious to know why. When we spoke with Kopcinski a

few weeks after the meeting, evaluation forms had not yet been compiled, nor had MDRT had time yet to conduct any one-on-one meetings with exhibitors. But the organization already was consid- ering making changes to the ConneXion

40 PCMA CONVENE AUGUST 2012

Zone for next year’s Annual Meeting, including adding presentation time for sponsors and tweaking the floor plan and schedule to create a tighter integra- tion of the elements. “All in all, however, we are very pleased with our first ‘run- through’ with the ConneXion Zone,” Kopcinski said, “and feel our attendees were well-served with its offerings.” One very satisfied attendee was

Paresh Shah, a representative with the Forest Hills Financial Group, in Queens, N.Y., who just happened to be walking through the ConneXion Zone when he saw the opportunity to sit down and talk to the sales superstars in the Great Conversations area. A day later, he was still marveling at the opportunity to be on the receiving end of their wisdom. Shah has been attending MDRT’s

Annual Meeting for five years, and dur- ing that time, he said, his business has grown as a direct result of the ability to

“grab somebody and sit down with them for half an hour.” MDRT introduces new concepts, Shah said, and “runs with them hard. Within two years, they become a model for everyone else.”

. Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene.

Twitter Tutors MDRT was founded on peer-to- peer learning — a principle that carried through to the “Tech Zone,” a laptop-equipped area within the new ConneXion Zone at MDRT’s 2012 Annual Meeting where attendees could drop by for hands-on training in using Twitter. The tutors were all MDRT members.

Who better to talk about the benefits of actively using Twitter at the meeting than someone who was already doing it? Liana Blum, MDRT’s website coordinator, recruited more than a dozen of the organization’s most prolific Twitter users to volunteer for short blocks of time during several

“Tweet Team” sessions throughout the four-day meeting. And a large plasma screen displaying a live Twitter stream with the conference hashtag provided instant gratification to the new Twitter users.

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ON THE WEB Read more about how MDRT mobilized attendees to teach others how to use Twitter at the Tech Zone at convn.org/ tech-zone.

Innovative Meetings is sponsored by the Irving Convention & Visitors Bureau, irvingtexas.com.

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ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP