Audience Response - Feedback from your audience!

42 years in business, 20,000th event behind us.

2012-01-27T11:42:00.000-08:00

Meridia Audience Responsereaches 20,000...

Earlier this month, we have provided group polling and accreditation reporting for a National MedicalAssociation. This event was our 20,000^th live event in our 42-year history and demonstrated how anestablished company continues to push the limit of technology as a way ofinteracting with an audience.

We started humble: in the beginning, we were servicing the live event industry by providing slide services for the Fortune 500 companies. As this technology was replaced by computers and then the eventual acceptance of PowerPoint, Meridia transitioned from slide imaging services to audience response technology. Beginning first with wired keypads and then being the first company in the US to utilize wireless RF keypads, Meridia has led the nation in wireless polling system innovation and software development for the last 27 years.

Wireless keypads kept the audience in touch with the live surgery
on the screen.

For our 20,000th event, Meridia combined audience response keypads with live tele-surgery, allowing 1,200 cardiologists to interact with operating surgeons during a procedure. The cardiologists viewing the surgery used wireless clickers to share their thoughts with their colleagues on what they felt should occur next during the procedure, or what was the proper stint for the required task. The doctors performing the operation then viewed the consensus opinion of their peers in the operating room and often replied to the viewing audience regarding why their opinion was correct, incorrect or different. Both the event and the live surgery were a success and a great example of how audience response technology is utilized as a learning and interactivity tool.

By continuing to incorporate cutting edge technology with live event polling Meridia has well positioned itself to conduct another 20,000 events in the years that come.

Group response technology empowers both the audience and the speakers.

2012-01-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

Leadership is listening.
Technology allows employees to speak their mind.

Many companies claim that their employees are important; that their “People Culture” is what sets them apart from the competition and that it is the skill sets and mind share of their staff that allow them to succeed and will propel them forward in the future. Well, one such company actually matches their public image campaigns and company slogans with their operating mentality.

In the last month of 2011, the nation’s top professional service firm conducted its bi-annual leadership meeting and used audience response system to truly listen to their employees. For many, it may come as a shock because the traditional concept of an annual meeting is not to listen or gather feedback, but rather to cheer or lambast the staff over last year’s fiscal numbers and future organizational goals. However, this firm wanted more than a temporary boost in morale stimulated by the hoopla of an open bar and special guests. Instead, they needed their executive staff to permanently lift profits and employee drive.

The difference was in looking forward to long-term results rather than short-term pats on the back. This company wanted to gather feedback from their staff on key issues such as:
• Company direction
• Brand buy-in
• Corporate strengths and weakness
• Training and advancement
• Turnover & recruitment

The group feedback technology allowed each of the 3,500 employees at the event to respond to topics and questions posed by the speakers and the Q&A panels. The responses were instantly displayed and addressed by the CEO and other speakers. At one point, the results took the company leaders by surprise so much that they’ve spent next 30 minutes discussing what they could do better to address the problem the audience was alluding to.

This type of interaction not only showed the employee base that the management was listening, but demonstrated that their ideas and thoughts mattered and will affect future corporate decisions. Often the consensus of the employee base differed greatly from what the CEO and senior leadership believed to be true, but thanks to technology, the firm can learn, change, and utilize that knowledge to remain the top professional service firm for years to come.

Think twice before using cell phone polling!

2012-01-12T04:29:00.000-08:00

Most audience response clickers
only require a single click of
a button to submit a vote.

The comparisons of audience response keypad polling and cell phone polling are not well documented. There are uses for cell phone polling that we'll talk about in another post, but here, we'd like to point out the main differences. The technologies vary greatly in speed, accuracy, reliability, security, and cost, but these features are rarely observed by the participant. However, what every participant will notice is the ease (or lack thereof) of the voting process.

Let's take a look at two of our recent meetings. Both of them were Continued Medical Education (CME) programs and had about 800 participants. The difference between them was that one group used cell phones to vote (so called “asynchronous polling” - not unlike an electronic survey that you fill out on a website) and the other used audience response keypads (so called “real time polling” – one with near-instant results).

Following both events, the client received detailed reports regarding participation, pre- and post- question comparisons, and demographic trends. When we analyzed the reports, it was immediately clear to us that the group who used cell phones only 1/10 of the votes of the group who used the audience response system. Both us and the client are used to significantly higher response count from previous events we did together, so we asked ourselves: “What happened?

As before any event, the cell signal strength and quality were tested and found to be strong. But with that many users sending at once, we knew that the message transmission would be slow. Our client said that overall, the cellular voting part of the event was OK, but that several attendees approached her after the show to complain that it was a little difficult to respond to the live polling questions because they were used to using wireless clickers in previous years. Some people were upset that the phone polling took so long that the presentations had to be cut short because the speaker’s time ran out.

A known fact in the live event and polling industry is that audience participation is directly linked to the ease or burden associated with that participation. For example, clapping is very common and if a speaker is particularly good, clapping carries with it a near 100% group participation because of how easy it is to bring a pair of hands together. Similarly, audience response polling has a high level of audience participation because of how easy it is to pick up a keypad and press a single button.

However, cell phone polling or mobile device polling consists of many steps, which makes it much more difficult. Therefore, as the number of participant steps increases, group participation dramatically decreases. For example, to place a vote using a mobile device a participant must:

Turn on their mobile phone at the risk of receiving inbound calls
Activate the device’s text messaging or web browsing function
(Optionally, they have to register their phone to the polling session)
Type in either the event’s polling phone number (9 digits), “short code” (4 digits), or the event’s polling website (length varies)
Enter their response by either hitting a single button or typing the full answer choice
Submit the response

Depending on the type of mobile polling system that is being used, the number of button presses required to submit a single response ranges from 8 to 20. As our cell phone client discovered, the increased burden on the audience dramatically affected their participation rate. We offer cell phone voting solutions, but cannot recommend it for events where ease of use translates into quick and smooth meeting flow, or where data quality and response density matters most.

As for our client, she is going to go back to using wireless keypads for her next event.

How to deliver on promises

2010-02-11T18:02:00.000-08:00

It seems as though many companies forget that they are eventually serving PEOPLE with ALL of their products and services... Today, you see many products and service act as just that - products and services. They don't have purpose, or 'soul' to identify with... They lost their human 'factor.'

Also, many times, our competition sells their product or service without any regard to thinking through the solution and the ultimate benefit to the client. They never consider the fact that if they fail (and they fail more often than not), not only they will never get another order from the user, but also the reputation of audience response as a piece of technology is in jeopardy.

In our area of business, new technology cannot be just cool. It must fulfill the desires of the client. Whether it's data they value, or the effect that the technology has on their business goals, the idea of pushing and implementing the newest, best and most modern 'bits and bytes' is going to come to a halt immediately after the clients sees that what s/he paid for didn't bring anything in return. Google, Microsoft, HTC and Apple are probably today's most innovative companies, but no product of theirs is going to make it big (Apple's iPad, MS's Courier, HTC's and Google's Nexus One), unless its purpose satisfies the core needs of the consumers. It's the same with services: if you're an ISP (or want to become one - right, Google? :)), you need to not only provide a connection, but also a human being to help you set it up, maintain it and/or troubleshoot it...

Same 'human' theory applies to a sale. When we get a request for a quote, or are challenged with complicated requirements for our client's next event, we first consider what's in it for them and what are they trying to achieve. If there is a solution available, we offer it and customize it for them. However, we have recently turned down a job that we knew wasn't feasible from a technological standpoint. Our current solution allowed for a smaller-scale deployment of the technology and while we already had a proof-of-concept for the large-scale requirements, we felt that it wouldn't serve the client's best interest if we used them as a test subject. We were being honest and responsible in taking the time and get enough testing under our belt to be able to say with confidence that their next event will be a huge success and we won't have to 'clean up' after our clueless and incompetent competitors.

So what did we learn here?

Audience response is the only thing what we do...and audience response is what we understand. I believe that without specialization, you cannot deliver on your promises and without understanding of the needs of your clients, you cannot satisfy them (or yourself - i.e. your business goals). We don't just sell the keypads, or provide a trained specialist who will run the ARS at your event. First and foremost, we provide knowledge and guidance. Clients don't necessarily understand the ARS technology, or how to make it work to satisfy their needs, but they do understand the value that it will bring to their event. If it's data they are after, we can guide them in creating the questions that will provide the desired insight. If it's fun they want to create at the meeting, we can be creative and make it memorable. We make everything easier to understand, manage, digest and we DELIVER!

Visit us at www.meridiaars.com

New website...what's next?

2009-12-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

Well...I've been in the office for just a little over a year and it's time to look back and evaluate whether I've done my job of integrating with the team and fulfilling the goals that I've set for myself and that were given to me.

Generally speaking, I am not happy with myself, because I'm about three months too late in accomplishing all that I wanted to get under control in 2009, but I also feel like a lot has been done so far. I wanted to:

- Learn the ins and outs of this company

- Redesign, rebuild and bullet-proof the internal IT infrastructure

- Design and launch a new website

- Replace the old (but trustworthy) professional ARS software

- Release an upgrade to Get Feedback - the PowerPoint add-in

- Install and train the staff on the new CRM system and integrate it with the accounting software

- Make everyone comfortable with the changes

- Create a plan to become a dominant force in the audience response industry

Not a small feat, so let's see where we are now?

- The new website is up and running: www.meridiaars.com

- The new Beta of the Get Feedback for PowerPoint is out in public testing

- The Beta of Phase 1 of the NexGen professional ARS software is out in internal testing

- The power-failure protection has been put in place

- All emails, data and other important components are on quadruple backup system

- CRM is up and running and we're getting sales analytics that we have never heard of...

- Meridia is the best-known audience response company that offers fully-staffed ARS events

- Meridia received well over 100 positive and complimentary testimonials from our clients

- We ran a hugely successful 25-site multi-site event for a big pharma client

- As the only company on the market, we maintained a manageable set of highly-trained ARS system specialists

It wouldn't be without the help of our amazing Sales Department, but we have:

- Increased sales by 10% against the previous year in the worst economic situation in our lifetime

- Increased our sales force of solid performers

It seems like a month, but in fact, a whole year had passed (well, flew) by. With tremendous help from my spectacular team at Meridia, from the Project Managers to Staff Managers and on-site ARS Specialists, we managed to do all this AND run well over 300 professionally staffed ARS-enabled meetings, provide personalized one-on-one training and deliver hundreds of customized reports.

Thank you all for this amazing accomplishment and I KNOW for a fact that the year 2010 will be at least twice as good as 2009 was!

From the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you!

New year - new challenges

2009-12-21T18:04:00.000-08:00

It seems like time will always be faster than me. It's been over four months since my last post. I can't believe it! I can't get enough sleep because of work at times, or enough runs down the hill, when the snow falls and I am in the mood for some of Poconos' white powder. Time will never stop.

This time of the year, everyone stops and reflects at what they did. And whether IT made a difference. How could we make it better? In business terms - could have we done it cheaper, faster, better?

In February, one of our clients is going to try. They are going to put together 95 of their locations together in one big meeting. No, not in one place. They are going to to do it CHEAPER and BETTER at the same time.

Multi-site meetings and audience response goes together cookies and milk at Christmas time. Deploy a wireless keypad system that connects directly to your host site's audience response portable mainframe. Repeat 94 more times. Then watch the votes come in, observe how people learn, react, interact and have fun.

Oh, and nobody had to flip their schedules upside down, or spend huge amount of money and time on travel arrangements either. People joining these 95 small polling groups will be able to be home for dinner that same day, back to their families or evening TV shows.

However you decide to spend your company's time and money, don't forget to take time off and spend it with your loved ones!

Happy Holidays!

TS2 2009 post-show observations

2009-07-23T15:28:00.001-07:00

TS2 2009 in Chicago was quite a surprise. Despite knowing that the economy is taking its toll on attendance of any trade show event, I thought the organizers at NTP would not experience it as much, because their events are always well thought-out, propagated and definitely exceptionally managed.

However, something did go south - there were visibly less people in the North Hall of the McCormick center and as exhibitors, the speakers also felt the decreased number of the visitors.

On the bright side, every breakout session, the keynote on Tuesday, as well as the expert panel discussion on Wednesday, was a quality event with volumes of great, useful information on the most current trends, strategies, tips and tricks for all marketing managers - from face-to-face, to print all the way to internet marketing gurus.

Audiences were able to participate, give immediate feedback, and be part of a team competition that got them involved and retain more of the material that was taught in the classrooms.

Next year, we're going to ask them about it and measure how much they've remembered.

Overall, from one man's perspective, the event produced focused, quality learning experience and a showcase of wide variety of industry suppliers on the show floor.

Next year in Boston, TS2 plans to become a hybrid meeting - thousands of people from all over the world will be able to participate in the sessions and the learning that will go on, interact with the speakers and the audience, and perhaps experience a walkthrough on the show floor - and shop as if they were there...

I can't wait for 2010!! How about you?

Save money with audience response!

2009-07-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

I hope your summer has been as good as mine. Family visit, vacation, the beach and all the other good things that summer on the East Coast brings with it...

Also, summer seems to be the time to save money. A client of ours used audience response to conduct their annual elections for the board of directors and not only they shaved a day off the time allocated for the entire election process, but they also saved $40,000 by doing that!

Audience response technology can be used to gauge the knowledge of your audience before you started to give a presentation on a certain topic, and then compare it to the results at the end of the presentation, when they were supposed to learn something...and see how successful you were.

You could also develop a great, interactive and involved game that would make your participants remember the event more and better results in terms of attendance, revenue, or accuracy of the data collected.

Those are just a few thoughts...leave a comment, if you have any questions, please...

Enjoy the nice weather!

Peter

Spring into the spring time!

2009-03-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

Hello!

I can't believe I haven't posted anything in so long. It's the long hours that I've been working, I guess. Unlike others, we are busy and continue to grow through this period of heavy cuts. People suddenly realize that they need to invest their money, not just spend it.

Investment in audience response pays off in many ways. ARS is a tool that ensures that the knowledge you're trying to transfer is transferred. If you're probing your audience with market research questions, you get the most honest and fastest vote count with the audience response keypads, not the paper surveys! If your electing your officials into their posts, no other method is faster and more accurate!

MAKE EVERY VOTE COUNT!

Are you cutting down on travel costs? Are you holding fewer meetings? Are you wondering how many attendees can you bring into the meeting?

Don't worry, we have a solution for you. It's called "multi-site"!

Let people gather at their local facility, connect them via our Instant Private Network (IPN) polling device and we'll take care of the rest. You can plan your meeting as usual - do a satellite broadcast, webcast, locally-moderated event, or anything else you're used to. When the overall vote of hundreds, or thousands of people matters, there is nothing that deploys faster, costs less and performs more reliably than Meridia's IPN!

This week, we provided our IPN solution to a 15-site doctor's dinner meeting across various cities on the East Coast and in Midwest. Our major pharma client was extremely satisfied not only with the actual event and the speed at which we received hundreds of votes from all sites in just a few seconds, but also complimented the ease with which we prepared for the event in a very short time.

Try us out! We guarantee our work!

I wish you all the best in these hard times and hope to hear from some of you soon!

Peter

Back from the holidays

2009-01-14T05:11:00.000-08:00

Hello!

I hope you all had a great time during the holidays and that coming back to work was not one the worst experiences ever. If it was not, you are lucky...I envy you. If it was, then you are like me.

Well...what I really wanted to talk about was the exciting year of 2009 and what this year holds for audience response as a tool and the ARS industry in general.

We have seen some turbulence in the past two quarters. No, I am not talking about the last trip on the plane. I am talking about the vendors, competitors, but also the clients, frequency of meetings, and everything else that was thrown into the violent air full of vorteces and falls, which have resulted in some bankruptcies, layoffs and generally caused disturbance in the industry.

We would like to say that none of those statements can be made about Meridia. We have been around for 30 years and will be at least for the next 30. Our current clients, as well as anyone who would like to become our client because their current vendor is unable to fulfill their obligations, can count on Meridia's professional, strategic and client-oriented team of people who will only consider the project if it benefits both parties and if the overall goals and objectives for both partners are met. We do not make compromises that will endanger our client's commitment to excellence, just like we will not undermine ours.

This year, we have a few very large meetings lined up and we are excited to say that Meridia has been chosen as an official audience response vendor for organizations such as IAEE, Training Magazine, TS2 and many others for two or three consecutive years.

Our long-term investment in a knowledgeable sales force, professional and courteous on-site System Specialists has paid off on many occasions. For us, as well as for these valuable clients.

Training industry is undergoing a major change due to the introduction of blended learning. The power of instant audience feedback has always shown as invaluable to speakers, educators and analytical specialists. It is the ability to measure the outcomes of learning and the ability to analyze the gaps in knowledge, among audiences and among the various methods of learning that make audience response so powerful.

However, in the very near future, we will see much more of what we started to call 'hybrid' learning and meeting. The concept is based on the fact that many of us cannot travel to the location of the meeting, yet we would like to participate anyway. While we all know how a remote meeting software works and we have probably used a variation of it at least once in our lives, Meridia has been the pioneer in combining the on-site audience response with the online tools and providing the most comprehensive ARS tool on the market.

Please feel free to contact us at rsvp@meridiaars.com or call us at 610-260-6800 to learn more about Hybrid Meetings, Multi-site and Blended Learning concepts.

We are looking forward to the year 2009, and we would like to make your success possible through our professional efforts.

Audience response technology as viewed by the trade show organizers

2008-11-01T09:46:00.001-07:00

Hello,

somehow, I am finding more time to post a new item on my blog. I guess it's the comfort of finally being settled down in PA and having my time at work organized and scheduled properly.

I am a big fan of the MeetingTechOnline.com website and just recently, I came across an article that our Marketing and Advertising department published in cooperation with a trade show organizers at NTP - the producers of the annual TS2 show.

You can read the article here:

http://meetingtechonline.com/articles_Making_Smart_Technology_Decisions.aspx

It is apparent that choosing the right technology is crucial to achieve your trade show goals. It's important to have the right lead retrieval system, the best registration software, audio-visual partner and an audience response system. TS2 used Meridia for a second year in a row and gave us the opportunity to measure the impact of the economy, rising gas prices (which have fallen since the end of July, thank you very much!) and subsequent decline in air travel that we were all experiencing.

Meridia's technology provided the TS2 show attendees with the ability to share with the rest of the audience the thoughts about the critical topics of today's trade show management. We, in return, were able to provide everyone with a TrendWatch report that helps guide their future decisions. You can read the report here:

http://www.ts2show.com/images/pdf/2008summary.pdf

That will be all on this beautiful, sunny Saturday morning.

2008-10-29T17:45:00.000-07:00

Hi there.

I wanted to share some of the images from Meridia's tradeshow, meeting, training and seminar activities, but I did not want to just post photos here.

We have a gallery that you can visit by clicking on the slideshow on the right sidebar, or click here.

Then I found a way to mesh the pictures together into a video that would represent the best of the initiatives that we have done in the past.
Our tradeshow division provides our clients with:

Here are a few examples:

2008-10-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hello!

My apologies for not posting anything for an extended period of time.

Meridia had a very busy period of few weeks mostly due to a multi-site audience response project that took place. One of our major clients in financial industry wanted to get 1500 of their regional managers together for a large 'brand awareness' training seminar. During the training, Meridia provided an audience response polling system that allowed all 13 sites vote on the questions asked at the host site and displayed on all 13 screens around the country. Thanks to the power of internet connectivity, we gathered all votes successfully in a period of few seconds and allowed for the members of this wide-spread audience to see what they know, or don't know. That's what a successful training seminar should be about: learning what your weaknesses are and learning how to overcome them.

Here are some pictures from the event:

In the end, the client was extremely satisfied and Meridia can put another 'notch' on their belt of successful multi-site meetings. Besides being a very cost-effective way of conducting meetings, elections, market research, training, opinion polls and other events, multi-site and remote-site meetings promote ecological/green way of doing business.

Would you like to learn more? Please call us at 610-260-6800 or email us at rsvp@meridiaars.com

New technology, new trends, old quality and reliability

2008-09-21T13:36:00.001-07:00

Hello!

Exciting changes are coming up not only at our company, but in our industry, in general. I can't wait to see what the next year will bring.

In the audience response business, you have to stay ahead of the pack by innovating and by having the best reputation on the market. Let's talk about this last project we did last week. It was a project similar to "1 vs 100" game from the TV. We had our audience response equipment and keypads in about 16 different rooms where a simultaneous activity was taking place. It wasn't all about the game. Traditional learning was taking place as well. This was a sales seminar and the votes that were captured really mattered. No only people had fun, but the client also received some great data from the valuable questions they asked and at the end of the day, we are sure that nobody else could have done it better than Meridia!

On the innovation field, we have successfully ended a small-scale testing of our multi-site technology and within a month, we are going to do a large-scale test that will prove that remote sites of your organization can do the audience polling and collect votes using our keypads, while there is no computer setup needed in that room. The votes are transmitted over the internet and displayed on a screen of the hosting location, where the results are shown on the screen. Clients may choose to show the screen of the host computer by using a screen-sharing program of their choice...but it is not a requirement.

I will try to get back on the blog later...but I have to say good bye for now...

P.B.

Moving into the Greater Philadelphia area

2008-09-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

Hello!

It's been officially a week since I moved into the neighborhood somewhere between Norristown and Plymouth Meeting, PA. All people at Meridia (www.meridiaars.com) were giving me the their warmest welcome and I thank you all for that!!!

Technology behind ARS

2008-09-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

Meridia's ARS keypads & base work flawlessly together, using a frequency hopping spread spectrum, which ensures uninterrupted communication between the keypads and the base, that collects the votes.

This technology prevents interference from other sources of wireless signal: Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, radio transmitters and other wireless devices. Not everybody in the industry is using such sophisticated technology, therefore, not everyone can say that their system is 100% accurate, collecting ALL votes.

Besides the ability to avoid conflicts of frequencies, Meridia's system uses two-way communication between the base station and each keypad, in which the base keeps asking the keypad for a response until it receives it. Other systems rely on the keypads sending the votes to the base in a hope that it (the base) is not talking to another keypad at that time. If it is, unfortunately, the vote is dropped and forever lost.

We are proud to claim that with Meridia, "each vote is counted...every time!"

Introduction

2008-09-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

My name is Peter Babel. I work as a Director of Operations at Meridia Audience Response in Plymouth Meeting, PA.
We provide our clients with state-of-the-art audience response systems and services, as well as lead retrieval, qualification and management services. We provide the corporate meeting environment, CME & other medical education, and higher education sector with the ability to poll their audiences, test their knowledge, elect officials, or entertain with game shows.

This blog is intended to explain the technology, offer suggestions for best practices, answer any questions the readers might have and generally spark conversations leading to better understanding and perhaps new ideas for this great, interactive way of gathering information.