A recent story in
Successful Meetings about a new Business Barometer survey by Meeting Professionals International Foundation says only 12 percent of meeting professionals interviewed expect the economy and our industry to improve by the second quarter of next year.
Wow! That's a pretty low number, and at first glance a bit depressing. [more]But it's a giant boost over the August survey that MPI took, in which only 3 percent foresaw improvement. Further, I was happy to read about some of the other findings of the survey, including the very positive one that nearly one in five think their organization's current meetings business conditions are better than they were in October of last year. Unfortunately, 63 percent said conditions were worse.
But what I was really pleased to read, given the recent seemingly unrelenting and negative glare of media attention about
corporate events, is that only 6 percent of respondents cited "poor perception/coverage of meetings" as an industry trend, a huge drop from 15% who reported this trend in August.
We're not out of the woods yet, as a majority of respondents reported both meetings attendance and spending is down compared to last year. But it's clear to me that we're getting a bit more confident about a meetings recovery, and we're becoming less intimidated by all those meetings critics out there (especially the ones who don't know about the economic benefits of events).
Kevin Iwamoto is vice president of enterprise strategy at StarCite. This post is syndicated from his blog, Strategic Meetings Management