All Together Now

Today’s corporate meetings aren’t what they used to be. For large organizations with several national or international offices, uniting an audience in a single venue carries budgetary and logistical challenges.

The costs of travel, housing and food are compounded by the expense of large venues and challenge of event management, not to mention employees’ time lost to travel and jet lag. Hold separate meetings, however, and you run the risk of losing messaging consistency, as well as what has traditionally been the very essence of the corporate meeting — the creation of unity and collaboration across an organization.

So, how can organizations create that big meeting feel without all those big meeting challenges?

By taking advantage of the latest in communication technology, organizations can now bridge gaps of space and time among dispersed meeting sites. Personal satellite networks, hand-held wireless devices and interactive workstations can all work together to provide meaningful, real-time interaction among attendees, no matter where they’re sitting.

Better still, the result is a technologically sophisticated, multiregional event that brings interactivity to a whole new level — while reducing some of the costs and management challenges of large, centralized meetings.

Your Personal Satellite Network

While staying connected around the world has become the norm via the Web, the Internet is lacking in the ability to handle the volume of real-time data or quality needed to merge multiple meeting sites into a shared interactive experience. Consider, however, satellite networks. Formerly thought of as a large, complex broadcast solution for television or government, satellite technology has gotten personal. Able to transmit, as well as receive, high-volume, high-quality data in real time, a personal satellite network (PSN) provides a comprehensive core for the decentralized meeting.

The PSN is a highly mobile, secure, satellite-driven network capable of linking multiple venues to create a single, multifaceted event. Encrypted and secure, individual signals can originate from all venues at once and be interlinked to create a unified message that engages participants in a shared experience wherever they are. Leaders can deliver presentations live, from any venue, and be transmitted — live — to all the others. What’s more, each venue’s two-way networking capabilities make it possible to be a site of origin for any number of parts of a total audience experience.

How it Works

Each meeting site is equipped with mutable cameras and a satellite uplink unit transmitting to a central control room. Much as with broadcasting TV news, a single director calls all the satellite feeds from the hub, queuing preproduced presentation material such as video rolls and individual PowerPoint presentations.

As a presentation occurs at one location, it is transmitted live to all the others. Even real-time polling and audience Q&A sessions are possible, with results displayed across all venues. The network transmits live for eight hours, pausing only for local site breakout sessions.

Maintaining the Big Meeting Feel

Maintaining that collaborative, big meeting feel can be accomplished by blending presentation technology and a creative environment treatment in each venue.

For example, each site can incorporate multiple projection screens and flat-panel monitors into staging design, allowing presentations and audience responses to be seen and heard in real time. Polling results can be acquired locally via a wireless network and uploaded to a central global server, where the results are combined and displayed for the entire network to view. Mutable cameras capture not only the speaker presentations but, equally important, the audience, their reaction and questions regarding the presentations.

The takeaway is a unified experience with an expansive feel.

Boosting On-Site Collaboration

To help boost collaboration within each meeting site, consider replacing the usual row seating with pods or interactive workstations. Each workstation seats a group of attendees together, creating a team-focused environment. Equipped with monitors, workstations can offer close-ups of presentation content and the ability for teams to drill down into specific content for more detail, as well as allow teams to work together in polling, quizzes and Q&A sessions.

Content management takes place behind the scenes at each venue, where questions are answered, specific content is pushed to individual work stations, and data is gathered from Q&A sessions and polling. Results are then displayed across all venues, allowing the entire audience to share in real-time interactions with presenters, content and each other.

Make it Personal

With so much teamwork going on, adding personal technology can help emphasize the importance of each individual in the success of an organization, while adding a layer of personal interactivity. Enter the wireless PDA.

Custom software applications deployed via a wireless PDA or similar device literally puts interactivity into the hands of each attendee. Many of these devices can be customized for each recipient with meeting agendas, presentations, and other meeting guides and materials. It can also enable each user to blast messages to the entire audience simultaneously or to an individual attendee.

One of the most powerful features of wireless PDA technology is its potential for live audience polling and generating real-time feedback on everything from the state of the business to the content being presented. Each wireless PDA can be programmed with a unique signature that allows an application to monitor which attendees answered questions and how they answered. An organization is then able to view individual and overall trends over the course of a meeting and to collect data points on a wide range of important issues.

In addition to initiating dialogue among attendees and leadership about important topics, these data points can be aggregated and analyzed post-event to identify hot topics and trends that can guide future meeting content.

Separate, but Together

Incorporating the latest technology to unite separate meeting sites in real time is not just a cost- and management headache-saver; it also allows attendees across distant geographies to participate in a unique and unified experience. Participants receive consistent messaging, can engage in open, collaborative dialogue and interact in a true working environment. They may also come away with an enhanced sense of unity, having shared in an innovative experience with cutting-edge technology.