Author Andrea Kay is an extrovert. However, she admits to cringing at the thought of talking to strangers. But in a column featured in USA Today, Kay shows how meeting face to face (and actually talking to strangers) can be magical.

"I am certain that when you put yourself in situations where you meet eyeball to eyeball, where you can develop a mutual interest with someone and they experience your enthusiasm, the odds of something extraordinary increase greatly," she wrote.

Kay's column, titled "Nothing Can Substitute for Meeting Face to Face," is a great example of the power of meetings and events and how strangers meeting strangers in person can result in better business, better ideas and better relations. 

Want to have better business, ideas and relations, too? Then attend this year's World Education Congress in St. Louis, Missouri, July 28-31.  

Google knows the value of face-to-face meetings.

Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist, was asked how technology is changing travel and what to cite a positive change on the subject:

Global business travel spend increased 8.4 percent in 2010, after falling 7.8 percent in 2009. And it's projected to grow another 9.2 percent in 2011 to just more than US$1 trillion. According to a GBTA Foundation research report, the global economic recovery is occurring at two different speeds, and that is reflected in the recovery of global business travel. Compound annual growth in business travel spending in Brazil, Russia, India and China is projected to grow two to three times faster than in developed economies such as the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K. 

Projected Compound Annual Growth in Business Travel Spend, 2011-2015

Taking Off 
China 11.2%
India 10.8%
Russia 7.1%
Brazil 7.0 %

Cruising Altitude  
U.K. 5.4%
U.S. 3.8%
France 3.3%
Germany 2.9%

Global business travel has advanced faster and farther than expected a year ago. The industry has benefited from a combination of positive factors that have allowed it to spring out of the recovery gate. 

First, corporate balance sheets and profits have been strong due, in part, to the stringent cost controls put in place during the global financial crisis. In fact, a 2010 GBTA Foundation study (ROI Refresh: Travel as a Competitive Advantage) found that travel budget cuts were more aggressive (relative to sales) during the recession than sales losses would routinely dictate. This contributed to a release of pent-up demand once the recovery got underway. 

Second, the recovery in global trade growth dramatically boosted international business trips. 

Finally, travel inflation, particularly in air fares, contributed to the rebound in travel spend.   

Rapid growth in the developing world is juxtaposed with troubles with debt, real estate and a slowdown in consumption in the developed world. New patterns of consumption, a relative change in the volume of major trade routes and industrial innovation have begun to shape a new world order in the patterns, volume and regional distribution of global business travel.   

Another key determinant of global business travel that should be a focal point of both global travel managers and suppliers is the volume and pattern of international trade. Historically, business travel and the volume of global trade have been very tightly correlated. Currently global trade is increasing at a rate of 9 percent per year, the same rate projected spending on global business travel will increase in 2011. As certain trade routes evolve and others simmer down, the landscape for global travel will continue its shift.   

Download the Global Business Travel Spending Outlook 2011-2015 study here.

The EEAA (Exhibition & Event Association of Australasia) Leaders Forum, held recently on Queensland’s Gold Coast, explored the impact of new technologies on the exhibition sector and how this will affect the evolution of the industry in the next 10 years.

Forty industry leaders took the opportunity to examine the exhibition sector’s recent performance and collaborate on future directions. Participants included CEOs and general managers from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin convention centers; leading organizers Reed Exhibitions, Diversified, ETF and AEC; and major suppliers including Moreton Hire, InfoSalons, Agility and ExpoNet.

Despite technology innovations and the explosion of social media, the industry leaders unanimously agreed that exhibitions will remain relevant and powerful, as the only marketing channel to offer a flexible face-to-face buying experience.

“However, exhibitions will still need to deliver an outstanding experience for their stakeholders – and utilizing technology and personal portable devices to complement the offering will be a key success driver,” said Joyce DiMascio, general manager, EEAA. “For every show, every exhibition, every event it is crucial that organizers, suppliers and venues collaborate to create experiences that drive exhibitor participation and visitor attendance. The exhibition must be delivered as an experience that can’t be experienced elsewhere – especially online.”

Exhibitions also proved to be resilient during the recent global financial downturn. While many marketing budgets were cut, research from CEIR (Center for Exhibition Industry Research) showed companies recognized that exhibitions remained a cost-effective way of reaching key decision-makers.

“Our challenge will be to continue to provide a compelling story to encourage exhibition participation by communicating the benefits of exhibitions as an integral part of any marketing plan – and a unique way of reaching a qualified target audience,” DiMascio said.

Will decreasing the number of boring presentations help the global economy?

Absolutely, according to Matthias Poehm, a veteran public speaking educator and founder of the Anti-Power Point Party, a group formed in Switzerland this week.

Poehm claims the economic damage from boring presentations—just due to spending on hourly wages each year—totals US$500 billion worldwide.

While blaming the popular slide presentation software is over simplifying the problem—PowerPoint can be used effectively and in non-boring ways and non-PowerPoint presentations can easily be boring as well—Poehm could potentially lead a national PowerPoint ban.

According to TG Daily, if Poehm gathers 100,000 signatures, a referendum to ban the software could be put to the people. At that point (ehem), would presentations then somehow become automatically enjoyable?

Our careers columnist, Dawn Rasmussen, once wrote that the key to a successful job search is tapping into your personal network. That strategy still seems to stick. 

According to a recent study of 60,000 participants by Right Management, person-to-person networking is a job seekers’ most successful tool. 

The findings show that traditional networking was the source of new career opportunities for 41 percent of job candidates last year, while Internet job boards accounted for just 25 percent of new positions landed.

“The job search is changing and some approaches are losing ground to others, but classic, systematic networking continues to be most effective way to find suitable employment,” said Carly McVey, Right Management’s vice president of career management. “Certainly technology plays a growing role. But online social networking may not always be separate from traditional networking since one so often leads to the other. A job seeker uses the Internet to track down former associates or acquaintances and then reaches out to them in person. And, just like a cold call, the Internet is a way to make an initial contact with a prospective employer.”

Other finding include:

• In 2010, for the first time “Online Network” was made a separate category and cited by 4 percent of the successful job candidates.
• The “Direct Approach” or cold calling is holding its own as an effective tool for many job seekers.
• Newspaper or periodical classified ads continue their decline as a source of new employment, while Internet job postings play an increasing role.
• Agencies, recruiters and search firms may be regaining their place in the mix, perhaps as a result of a strengthening job market.
• “Other” may mean some combination of the above, or perhaps serendipity, direct referral or even good luck…and will surely remain an aspect of a successful job hunt. 

A job search, though, is usually a more complicated and multi-layered process, McVey says. 

“Job candidates are encouraged to use as many tools as possible, every kind of research, any former contacts and every opportunity to reach out to people who may be able to help," McVey said. "So in practical terms successful job candidates rely on a mix of approaches to find the new position most suitable for them. Nevertheless, from year to year the data say that traditional networking is nearly twice as successful as any other job search method. People tend to trust people they meet.”

Score another win for face-to-face meetings!

The Melbourne Convention + Visitors Bureau (MCVB) has released the findings from an interim report on "The Holistic Value of Business Events."

The longitudinal study, conducted by the Centre for Tourism and Service Research at Victoria University, was commissioned by MCVB in February 2009 to identify and quantify the additional benefits associated with selected business events over a two-year period. 

The study covers four conventions, and their associated exhibitions, held in Melbourne in 2009, ranging in size from 400 to 800 delegates in the medical, scientific and environmental/sustainability fields, and will track the benefits pre, during and post event.

A year into the study, the interim report has revealed that there is strong evidence of the additional benefits arising from staging a business event. Results include

• 50 percent of respondents gained immediate information that enhanced their personal or business performance;
• 54 percent of respondents developed new business contacts and relationships;
• 63 percent of respondents found their industry sector profile was enhanced because of the event; and
• 82 percent of respondents built relationships with speakers, delegates, exhibitors and/or organizers on site.

Furthermore, more than half the recipients indicated they had

• Experienced additional “expressions of interest” from potential customers or investors;
• Gained increased investor and/or competitor knowledge; and
• Experienced innovation or opened business potential.

Sandra Chipchase, CEO of MCVB, explained that although previous industry studies had acknowledged the value of business events "beyond tourism," until now there had not been an attempt to quantify their additional benefits over a series of years.

“It has long been recognized that conventions create new and repeat visitors, attract accompanying persons, drive regional tourism and generate economic wealth and export orders for host cities,” Chipchase said. “The ongoing challenge has been in attempting to quantify the additional benefits derived from business events, such as the development of new business relationships, innovation, changing perceptions of a country, city or industry, increased market intelligence and/or improved performance.

“MCVB commissioned Professor Leo Jago and his team from Victoria University to address this research gap, and after the first year there is clear evidence to support a wider range of benefits," she continued. "Well in excess of 50 percent of respondents from all four conferences stated they had personally experienced some of these key benefits as a result of their involvement in the conference."

Professor Jago says that evidence gathered from self-complete questionnaires at the conventions, in addition to Web-based and telephone interviews 11 months after the conferences, had shown significant, positive results. 

“We will continue to work with MCVB on this study over the next year to see how we can further quantify this information and ultimately deliver robust, ground-breaking data for the business events industry,” he said.

People generally believe that collaboration helps memory—but does it always? How do people learn and remember in groups? How is memory shaped by being experienced in a social context? These are the questions psychologist Suparna Rajaram investigates in the lab—and addresses in a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work alone and the results are collated. The collaborative groups remembered more items than any single person would have done alone. But they also remembered fewer than the nominal groups did by totaling the efforts of its solitary workers. In other words, the collaborators’ whole was less than the sum of its parts.

This so-called “collaborative inhibition” affects recall for all sorts of things, from word pairs to emotionally laden events; it affects strangers or spouses, children or adults. It is, in scientific lingo, robust.

What explains this? One dynamic is “retrieval disruption”: Each person remembers in his or her own way, and compelled to listen to others, can’t use those strategies effectively. Sometimes that effect fades. Sometimes it squashes the memories for good, causing “post collaborative forgetting.” Then there’s “social contagion” of errors, wherein a group member can implant erroneous recollections in another’s memory.

On the other hand, collaborative learning helps—which is why people hold it in high esteem. Individuals recall different information or events; after time, they can get together, contribute their bits and reeducate each others’ memories and expand the group’s recall, mitigating the costs of collaboration. People can also correct each other’s erroneous memories, a process Rajaram and her colleagues call “error pruning.” Or they can “cross-cue”—bring up recollections that jog memories others have forgotten.

Rajaram’s work involves small groups in the controlled laboratory environment. Yet, like others in her field, she believes it can inform the understanding of the wider “networks in which social memory phenomena are occurring”—classrooms, institutions, communities, subcultures or nations.

“If a small group can reshape memories, we see how individuals come to hold certain viewpoints or perspectives,” she said. “That can serve as a model for how collective identities and histories are shaped.”

(Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson—two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and father of sociobiology—has caused an uproar in the biology field lately by trying to overturn a well-established theory about the origins of altruism. 

Yes, I'm writing about biology. And yes, I know I probably turned off half of you already. Trust me, though, it does have to do with meetings.

Wilson has for years supported the kin selection theory about altruism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Kin selection theory predicts that animals are more likely to behave altruistically towards their relatives than towards unrelated members of their species. Moreover, it predicts that the degree of altruism will be greater, the closer the relationship."

Not so fast, Wilson says. According to his revised theory—and here's where meetings come into play—organisms practice altruism because of groups.

"Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes—including the ones that predispose them to cooperation—are handed down to future generations," Leon Neyfakh reported for the Boston Globe. "This so-called group selection, Wilson insists, is what forms the evolutionary basis for a variety of advanced social behaviors linked to altruism, teamwork, and tribalism—a position that other scientists have taken over the years, but which historically has been considered, in Wilson’s own word, 'heresy.'"

Neyfakh writes that Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives; they do. 

"But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism—that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level," Neyfakh wrote. "That socially advanced organisms end up favoring their kin, Wilson argues, is a byproduct of their group membership, not the cause."

Wilson says that human beings have an intense desire to form groups and that they always have. 

“This powerful tendency we have to form groups and then have the groups compete, which is in every aspect of our social behavior...is basically the driving force that caused the origin of human behavior,” he said.

This is fascinating and adds to the noted benefits of joining associations, attending meetings, lobbying for industries, etc. We're good because we belong to something. I don't think that necessarily means those who are anti-social are bad. It does propose, though, that group membership leads to displays of good behaviors. This helps us understand how groups can change the world through meetings and their invaluable need in a world that is oftentimes bewildering and occasionally frightening.     

Jacksonville, Fla., is concerned about convention space, not having enough of it and losing hundreds of millions of dollars, according to an editorial in The Florida Times-Union.

"That debate [of whether or not to expand meeting and event infrastructure]--whenever it kicks in--will be a lot about the money it will take to build a new center. But it should also be about the money we'll miss out on if we don't at some point."