Who reads anymore? I mean, besides this…

A few weeks back, I had an unfortunate experience with a man and my dogs.  The man in question happened to be delivering phone books and in the course of his duties, he had to make sure (for whatever reason) that I received my copy.  Apparently, there is a high theft rate with unclaimed yellow books.  So, this guy decided to ring my doorbell, like 4 times in a minute and a half.  At the time, I happened to be on the phone, I think he saw me through the window and that is why he was oh so persistent.  His incessant ringing got my dogs into a frenzie and when I opened the door, it was hard to hear him mumble over the bark of Wrigley, my 130 lb. English Mastif/Boxer.

Anyway, after a not-so-friendly encounter and exchange, he left and I proceeded to take the yellow book he dropped on my steps and walk it right over to where I have kept all of the phone books I have received in the last 10 years or so…the trash!  Acually, not to split hairs, but the recycling bin (gotta stay green).

Anyway, I had forgotten about that until yesterday, when, again…I got a new phone book.  Apparently, in some sort of scheme to make money there is more than one company that produces these tree killing monstrosities.  This guy just left it on my porch and I happened to trip over it while walking the aforementioned Wrigley.

Again, I took this 4 inch thick canary colored biblio and tossed it with the sales ads and thousands of Victoria Secret’s Catalogs that my wife receives daily in the recycling bin.

So…this morning, I get a phone call.  It’s the phone book company (I’ll give you a hint, their name starts with a Y and ends in ellowbook).  They were calling to confirm that I had received my all important phone book.  I told them that I indeed had received it and politely asked them to take me off the recipient list in the future.  She said, “Sure, thanks” and hung up.  Cool.

About 20 minutes ago, I get another call…same company, this time they are reconfirming that I received the book and want to make sure that I have enough copies.  At that point, I said…”Look, I know you have a job to do, but I haven’t opened a phone book since Al Gore invented the Internet and I learned the wonders of google!”  Seriously, does anyone use a phone book anymore?  If so, why?  And a subset question, do you still use 8 track tapes, ‘cuz you’re old school?  Do you drink new coke?  I’m curious.

NO…nobody uses phone books.  So while it took me awhile to get here, my post-digression point is:  why are they still being ridiculously mass-produced?  Is there some sort of “do not phone book” list?  Like the (completely ineffective) “Do not call” list?  I have searched, but to no avail.

So, let’s band together and start calling the phone companies…I figure it should only take us a week or so to call each and every one of them…

Ready…set…dial!

For those of you who don’t plug & drive

Is this how you’re feeling? Join the club…if you have any involvement in the little industry that we like to call EVENTOPIA, then you know that travel is a big part of it…flying, driving, walking, sometimes even moving on those gawd awful Segways!

Well, in an effort to stay one step ahead of those capitalistic creeps known as oil companies, I offer the following little helper, you’re welcome.

In what I can only describe as a desperate effort to quell their guilt over the Vista Debacle (or as I call it New Coke 2.0), the great folks at Microsoft have given us this: http://autos.msn.com/everyday/gasstations.aspx?zip=&src=Netx

Just click here, enter your zip code and you will be given information on where you can buy the cheapest gas in your area–so, you can go and frequent that spot (maybe they have cheap meat on a stick, too?). Or, if you feel so inclined, it also tells you who is the most expensive, so if you like you can drive by there and…um…wave or something, scoff at them for having the audacity to make ridiculous amounts of money!

Do whatever you like, after all, it’s your world–we all just live here!

Does anybody really know how green it is? Does anybody really care?

 

Exhibitor Online features four stories of big corporations greening up their events.  BusinessWeek has at least one article a week about a company cleaning up its act or creating policies around Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. The event industry is the catalyst for a huge amount of waste and rife with opportunity to go green, but there are only a handful of companies that are willing and able to make changes to the routines we’ve become dependent on.

This week DBG is producing an event for the Wall Street Journal featuring speakers from large corporations making changes to their corporate culture, supply chain and client relationships – creating sustainable business solutions for others to follow. We love this type of thought leadership – seeing how it trickles into our business – aside from the occasional client with green dreams – will be an interesting story to watch develop.

MPI goes green at The European Meetings and Events Conference

In December, the British Standards Institution released  BS 8901, specifications for sustainable event management.  The European Meetings & Events Conference co-created by MPI and taking place in London, April 18-20, will be the first MPI event to try to achieve the Sustainable Event Standard with certification from an independent 3rd party.

• Since November 2007 has been providing pre-event education for suppliers, sponsors, stakeholders and delegates to attend.
• MPI and the host committee is working with all venues which will be used during the event to identify waste streams and put a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ strategy into place, including:
  • Sourcing local food and measuring food miles
  • Composting waste food using an onsite wormery
  • Recycling plastics, paper and cardboard
  • Sessions on sustainability have also been incorporated into the education programme and delegates have the opportunity to volunteer to be part of a sustainability team onsite during the event and learn first hand.

More about the event at Travel Daily News.

http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/show_page/24752

http://snipurl.com/2110u

It’s not easy being green. Especially wrangling many energy-consuming kittens.

Here’s a great article from the San Francisco Chronicle on green meetings and conventions:

Imagine a stack of a hundred plastic name badges, resting on top of 600 disposable water bottles, 1,200 Styrofoam cups and plastic utensils, thousands of pages of printed brochures and handouts, and an untold number of promotional geegaws such as plastic pens, mouse pads and magnets.

Then multiply that by a million.

And drive it all to landfills throughout the country.

That illustrates just part of the environmental impact of America’s convention and meeting industry – a $107 billion industry that serves 136.5 million people attending 1.2 million business events each year.

The article makes an excellent case for the need to be more environmentally conscious at every stage of the planning and production, but begs the question whether the value of green planning outweighs the procurement driven decision making process that tends to favor lowest cost over other factors.

CES goes green.

The 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) expects more than 140,000 gadget-lovin’ buyers for its show this week in Vegas. In addition to the small matter of putting on an event for 140-flippin-thousand people, the event team has taken several measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the entire program.

• The purchase of credits from CarbonFund.org to make it a carbon-neutral event.
• 75% of food containers and utensils are biodegradable
• Recycling containers throughout the show floor
• Leftover food and beverages will be donated to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission
• Recycled carpet is being used
• Light bulbs, batteries and electronics will be recycled

CES is also helping attendees get with the green program. In addition to several conference sessions dedicated to the environment, there are kiosks set up throughout the venue where attendees can go online and offset their travel with carbon credits.

I’m looking forward to hearing the results of the various initiatives in place at CES – but I’m more interested to see if the green news makes a splash in the media blitz that will follow each days sessions… more soon (we hope!).

David Byrne and BusinessWeek agree: CDs are irrelevant.

Say goodbye to those days of browsing the aisles of your favorite record store. Yes, some of us will have some High Fidelity type of nostalgia for dusty LPs or the thrill of discovering a new band via a hyper-intellectual conversation with the music-snob working the cash register. But mostly we’ve made the transition to shopping for new music online – reading a review on the Rolling Stone website and launching a Rhapsody widget to get a taste of what the editors think sounds so good. The revolution has been digitized.

Wired Magazine carries an article this month, penned by Talking Heads front man / PowerPoint impresario David Byrne, about “The Fall and Rise of Music.” Ironically, you have to pick up the print mag to get the whole article, but the web excerpt of the article features an interview with Radiohead front man Thom Yorke waxing poetic about his band’s much-heralded digital distribution coup back in ‘07.

The coup succeeded and even fat cats who haven’t listened to anything but NPR for decades now know who Radiohead is, what they did and the ripple effect it’s having on the revenue models for the interwebs.

BusinessWeek offered a similar perspective on their predictions for 2008:

The music industry is in crisis. The key reason is that CD sales are plummeting. Now, it’s going to get worse. This year, the most important retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores and Best Buy , will look to radically downsize their CD sections. Perhaps there will be no more than one aisle, chock-full of mainstream pop titles. Digital music will continue to grow in influence, from iTunes and Amazon.com to ad-supported site such as imeem and fast-growing upstarts like Pitchfork.

I’m happy to see the hard plastic part of the industry go away. I like burning mix-CDs from my digital collection, but since I got my iPod adapter for my car, I really don’t need CDs. Just playlists.

Is there a downside to the CD aisles going away? I don’t see it.

Is the Green thing really just a trend?

What do IBM, Siemens, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Daimler, Ford and Raytheon have in common other than being gi-hugic and really successful companies? Every one of them has a targeted policy in place reduce facility emissions and/or improve the sustainability of their operations.

Why should we (the Royal “We”, that is, the event/meetings industry) care? I believe the indication is that the phenomenon that is often referred to as the green “trend” is in fact here to stay. And today I read in Tradeshow Week that:

Tradeshows and conventions represent the second most wasteful industry in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

So let’s put this together. Some of the biggest companies on the planet have corporate goals in place – today – to be better stewards to the environment and the communities they serve.

They produce and participate in tradeshows and conventions regularly. If their goals are embraced by the entire corporation, that means each team within is tasked with doing their part to reduce waste and support corporate responsibility initiatives.

As a partner to any one of these companies, an event planner and producer would do well to have a decent understanding of how energy consumption is managed and measured. If you’ve only dipped your toe in the Green Pond – maybe put in a few recycling bins or using glassware instead of paper cups – here are some resources to get you conversant in some other interesting initiatives:

• Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Conventions
• Green Hotel Initiative
  
• Florida’s Green Lodging Program
• Green Lodging News
• Green Meetings Initiatives from the EPA
• Wikipedia’s Green Conventions Page

Some interesting initiatives are emerging. If they are indeed trends, as the cynics claim, then shame on us for not doing what just makes good sense.

As always, we welcome your comments for additional resources or ideas for greening up every aspect of the planning and production process!

Hotels in ATL getting green to cope with the drought

If you haven’t been glued to the Weather Channel recently, you may have missed the fact that Atlanta, and the Southeast in general, is experiencing a nasty drought. Water restrictions are in place, and our governor is hosting prayer services on the Capital steps to see if any or all higher powers can lend a hand.

Better than prayer is a little conservation and behavioral adjustments for some of the bigger consumers of water and energy – namely the big hotels in town that host a lot of meetings and events.

A Georgia Hotel & Lodging Association committee has put together a list of conservation suggestions for the state’s 1,755 hotels including:

• Switch to drought-tolerant landscaping.
• Discontinue pre-setting water for banquet functions.
• Serve water in restaurants and via room service only when requested.
• Encourage reuse of towels.
• Investigate options for recycling laundry water.
• Evaluate wash formula and water cycles for water-use efficiency.
• Install flow reducers and faucet aerators in plumbing.
• Reduce water use on toilet flushing.
• Replace appliances and fixtures as they wear out with water-saving models.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And perhaps those more fortunate cities with lots of water can count their blessings and start conserving as well?

A look across the pond: UK meeting budgets on the rise

The corporate event industry in the UK is poised for bigger budgets but more scrutiny from their procurement-daddies in the coming years.

According to the Meetings Industry Association (MIA) UK Conference Market Survey, 2008 will bring the biggest increase in budgets since 1999. Don’t think our friends with the strong currency are going to go nuts – they are as roped into procurement/purchasing departments as our boys and girls here in the States.

This means that event managers can look forward to demonstrating and documenting the precise “value” of having two, not one AV technician per breakout, or serving fresh local food over processed hotel-catered buffets. Such is life.

Overall, the UK survey paints a pretty picture of the market. Here’s some of the highlights:

• An increase of 27 per cent in the volume of corporate events in the last 12 months
• Non-profits have seen a 1.4% increase
• Associations’ annual average budget for events increased by 34%
• Corporate budgets were reduced by 4.5 per cent
• 24% of corporate respondents report that procurement teams are now involved in buying decisions – up 11% from last year

Here’s my favorite part – the UK is an acknowledged leader in environmental awareness (and action) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Those surveyed were asked whether CSR had an impact on corporate event teams. A whopping 64% of associations and 77% of corporations said that CSR will be extremely or somewhat influential to their work over the next 10 years.

Consider that fair warning that these trends will follow shortly in the US. CSR is gaining a lot of momentum within US corporations – who set measurable and manageable goals that every part of the organization must work toward achieving.

Imagine your bonus being tied to the carbon footprint of your entire company. All of your suppliers are some of the biggest energy vacuums on the planet – airlines, hotels, ground transportation…not to mention the trees killed to manage all the contracts and binders your on-site team carries around to remain sane. Even if you have no demands for “green meetings”, it’s my feeling that it will become important on some level to be aware of and able to measure the impact of your events in terms of sustainability.

I’m just sayin’