There’s a new issue of MICE.net magazine on the streets. This issue, my column questions the ancient convention of Q&A (the event kind, not the Tony Jones TV show that sends Twitter into hyperdrive).

Sometimes, meetings are no place for democracy. At a major event, you can spend a lot of time and money building up momentum and excitement, only to have it derailed by the sort of unrepresentative nutbags who write newspaper letters to the editor that start with: “Is it just me, or blah blah blah…”

You know what? It is just you.

Read it here.

Pic: Eventpix

Some months ago I was honored to win the first Miles Clarke Business Events Communication Award - seen being presented above by the adorable Elizabeth Rich.

I’ve been waiting for it to appear in print before I posted it. It’s now published in Brad Foster’s fine Mice.net magazine.

Read it here, it’s a PDF so you’ll need to click on the orange “Time To Embrace The Unvirtual” link at the bottom of the page.

It’s interesting to re-read it - modern trend articles always run the risk of being a bit out of date by the time they get printed. It was written about 6 months ago, during which time meeting Twitter has gone feral - at least in the US -  with sweeping implications for meeting etiquette.

The core message is that people need to get away from all their screens occasionally and actually do something real and memorable, surrounded by actual humans.

Jarvis Cocker, ex-frontman of Britpopsters Pulp, put it nicely in a recent Sydney Morning Herald interview:

The idea of a performance being a one-off appeals to Cocker.

“It gets on my nerves when people seem so intent on filming everything on their mobile phones. I just wish people would experience it and be in that moment,” he says.

“It used to be when you went on holiday you’d see families where the father couldn’t interact with anyone, so hed’s stand there with the video camera filming the whole holiday and you’d think ‘what a sad character’. Now young people are doing it - it’s bad. They’re becoming middle-aged before their time.”

Cocker says having something that lingers only as a memory is better, as it changes over time.

“It gets altered by your brain, by your perception, whereas if you’ve just got a crappy, handheld phone footage version of it, it brings it all crashing down to earth, you know what I mean?”