Case Study: Meeting Professional International WEC

Background

Meeting Professionals International is one of the largest organizations of meeting professionals worldwide. The World Education Conference (WEC) is their flagship event, drawing thousands of meeting planners and suppliers from all over the world and focuses on educating their members both in the “basics” of the profession as well as new trends and innovations in the industry.

MPI Goals

• Connect attendees with their peers
• Help attendees learn from each other
• Build a lasting sense of community among attendees
• Educate attendees in the use of social media tools
• Help attendees plan their session schedule attendance

Solution

Pathable provided an attractive, professional on-line social network that integrated directly into MPI’s existing web experience. For the several months prior to WEC itself, attendees received invitations as they registered, filled out profiles that included their career information and interests, hobbies, and Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social network information.

Pathable’s tools allowed them to:

• Start conversations around common interests
• Identify and contact attendees who’s profiles were similar to their own
• Find which of their friends from other social networks (such as Twitter) were attending
• Browse educational sessions, build a personal schedule, export the schedule to Outlook or print it, and start conversations with attendees attending the same sessions
• Download session hand-outs and slide decks
• Promote WEC to their Twitter friends

Pathable aggregated activity in other social network services, such as Twitter and blogs (e.g., aggregating the #WEC09 hash tag), so that all on-line activity came together in one place.

Results

• 890 attendees completed their profile and participated in the community
• 280 public conversations
• 1,200 private conversations
• 18,000 profile searches
• Tweets “reached” 12,800 potential attendees

The WEC 2009 community continues to attract traffic and searches from its attendees, months after it is complete. When attendees are ready for the next event, their profiles automatically become a part of it.

“Introducing Pathable to the MPI MeetDifferent 2009 and WEC 2009 was a great. The Pathable platform helped MPI add to the interactions that happen before, during and after the live events. We were able to engage attendees well before the events started and have continued the conversations well after they were done.”
– Alan Baptista, MPI Director of Community Development