There’s quite a tempest brewing over the Virtual Access Pass that our professional association, Meeting Professionals International (MPI), has introduced for its 2009 World Education Congress (WEC), which gets under way this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The conversation is an echo of a wider debate about when it’s legitimate—or whether it’s ever legitimate—to charge for online content. But even that issue is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Until we see anything approaching a sustainable business model for online or social media, there will be no agreement on whether, why, when, or how much to charge for different categories of content.
The quickest, surest way to reach that point will be to experiment with a bunch of different approaches, celebrate when someone succeeds, learn what we can when there are failures, and share the knowledge in the best tradition of the interactive Web. Which is why it’s been frustrating to see MPI take such a pounding for the Virtual Access Pass.
The conversation began with a blog post and Twitter poll by Jeff Hurt, an educator, meeting planner, social media maven, friend of our firm, and former MPI staffer based in Dallas, Texas.
“Did MPI think this through?” Jeff asked. “Did they honestly think members who were not attending were going to jump up and down with glee that we had the opportunity to pay another $300 for content? Did they think about how upset some of us might be?”
There followed a long, intense debate that was a credit to the ability of social media to generate wide, varied conversation in a short period of time, but probably sold the Virtual Access Pass short.
The concept may or may not work.
If it’s edgy enough to be truly innovative, it probably won’t be an unqualified success—and if we understand how innovation really works, we probably shouldn’t expect it to be.
Through our firm’s own, admittedly arcane lens, we can already foresee a possible next step: reinforcing the verbatim video with value-added summaries, picking up on the online format we’ve introduced through the Green Meetings Portal.
But at a time when the average conference is about as financially secure as, well, the average daily newspaper, it’s hard to fault an association of meeting professionals for field-testing a new approach that might help its members keep their own face-to-face meetings alive.
By taking this step, MPI is stepping into a turbulent, high-stakes debate that is already reshaping commercial media, and will echo back to our industry as long as conferences are principally about knowledge and content.
“The sustainability of ‘free’ as a business model is a rough climb,” wrote MPI CEO Bruce MacMillan in his first of two blog posts on the topic. The ground in this area is shifting every day, and until it settles, “any hard and fast rules around ‘free’ content are a ways off.”
That reality, compounded by a sputtering and cautious economy, is playing out on the ground for almost every conference we talk to.
Our firm happens to be in the midst of a very good year, almost certainly a record year. But we’re talking to clients who are losing 20, 30, or 50% of their onsite attendance this year, along with large chunks of sponsorship funding. We know of some events that are down 70% or more. If conferences aren’t reaching their audiences and budgets are hemorrhaging, why wouldn’t organizations turn to their online communities for an alternate channel that keeps members engaged, and opens up a new potential revenue stream?
In his original post, Jeff Hurt took MPI to task for putting a price on online access at WEC, after opening a free channel for the opening general session at its February, 2009 MeetDifferent conference in Atlanta. But let’s look back at what was happening in February.
The meetings industry was under attack, with a bill before the U.S. Senate set to prohibit any meetings or events held by companies that had received federal bailout dollars. The opening session at MeetDifferent had been rebuilt from the ground up (on very short notice) to address a serious threat to meeting professionals and their livelihoods.
I didn’t know at the time that the live streaming from MeetDifferent was a beta test for a future billable product. But if I’d noticed, I doubt I would have cared. MPI was standing up for its members, finding common ground with other affected industry associations, and doing everything it could to get the word out, as quickly and widely as possible. Our association was doing what an association should do, and doing it well.
The industry’s response to the crisis wasn’t perfect. But that opening session is widely seen as the best that MPI or any other meetings association has ever put on, and streaming it at no cost was a smart and obvious move, given the issues and priorities the association faced at that moment. Five months later, it’s just as legitimate for MPI to charge for content, depending on the objectives and strategy behind the decision.
Even if the Virtual Access Pass crashes and burns, surely it’s part of MPI’s job to try out ideas and concepts that challenge our understanding of content, of community…or, for that matter, of conferences. A thousand criticisms would bloom if the association decided to stand pat and do nothing new, and rightly so.