They didn’t even plan the matching outfits. Another Positively Cleveland employee had on a t-shirt that read “Lake Erie is Great!” #clevelandpride

2. Cleveland’s doing cool things with food and drink. Ever been to a champagne bar? I hadn’t until this past Saturday night when we went to Pickwick and Frolic. The basement is a swanky champagne bar with a small stage for live musical performances or presentations, all of which can be rented out as event space:

Guests have a choice of 65 different champagne and sparkling wines, along with select foods to compliment the bubbly.

3. When you’re in Cleveland, you’re gonna want to go to an Indians game. Our last night of the press trip we witnessed a close game between the Tribe and the Washington Nationals — with Nationals winning 7-6 in the last inning. Before you feel bad for the Indians fans, they still got fireworks and a Hot Dog Derby.

We ate dinner at the Terrace Club, a restaurant at the field that overlooks the diamond.

After every fifth inning of an Indians home game, they hold the famous Hot Dog Derby (spoiler alert: Ketchup wins this one):

And whether the Indians win or lose, after the game is an impressive fireworks display set to music. This one was to AC/DC:

4. Cleveland is home to the one and only A Christmas Story House & Museum. If the 1983 film wasn’t a staple in your childhood, you may not be interested in this one. But for those of us who said “You’ll shoot your eye out” every time their sister held a water gun, wouldn’t even approach an icy pole in wintertime, and desperately wanted a leg lamp (now on sale at the A Christmas Story Museum Gift Shop), this is kind of a big deal:

The museum will hold its 30th Anniversary Celebration & Convention Nov. 29–30 this year.

5. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is something to check off your bucket list. Currently housing 10 iconic rock-and-roll exhibits, including the featured Rolling Stones showcase, the Rock Hall, as locals call it, is hours of entertainment, full of rare artifacts from our country’s musical history. The current Stones exhibit is awesome. Here’s a sneak peek:

6. Cleveland’s getting greener and prettier every day. The emerging meetings destination is expanding park and public-square space in its downtown area. In fact, the new eco-friendly, underground Cleveland Convention Center doubles as a public park:

The Cleveland Convention Center, attached to the new Global Center for Health Innovation, slated to open this October, includes water-reducing fixtures, energy-efficiency lighting, and makes it a point to purchase materials with less environmental impact.

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One foggy night at Wrigley Field. Photo by Chris Durso.

I’m in Chicago this week for Reed Travel Exhibitions’ (RTE) AIBTM expo, where Convene oversees production of the show daily newspaper, and in between those duties I’ve had two great experiences that speak to the power of destinations using unique local attractions and resources to distinguish themselves.

The first was on Monday night, on the eve of AIBTM, when RTE and Choose Chicago hosted a few hundred attendees at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field, one of the great, storied ballparks. I’d never been there before, and since AIBTM is an event with an international audience, I’m assuming neither had many of the other people; depending on what country they were from, possibly this was their first live baseball game. What a perfect introduction to this most American of big cities — and the night became even more remarkable thanks to an uncharacteristic fog that rolled off Lake Michigan and engulfed the field for much of the game, almost like the experience was trying to enshrine itself in our memories as it was happening.

And then this afternoon I went to a press conference for the Leon Convention & Visitors Bureau, which has unveiled a new marketing campaign for its meetings and conventions program: Meetings & Fashion in Leon. The 437-year-old, 1.4-million-population city in the heart of Mexico has long been known for its leather goods and shoes — it’s responsible for 70 percent of the footwear produced in Mexico — and now the destination is fully embracing that. The tagline for the new campaign: “This is Leon, wear it!”

“History, tradition, and avant garde — that’s what our city is,” said Oscar Garcia, Leon CVB’s general manager. Incorporating exclusive showrooms, design-center tours, and other aspects of the city’s fashion infrastructure into its group-business offerings, Meetings & Fashion in Leon is intended to “generate a clear differentiator for Leon…. What does Leon offer? Fashion is what we offer. We are trying to restore our destination’s vocation and identity.”

Cubs baseball in Chicago. Gorgeous handmade shoes and other leather goods in Leon. Two experiences you can’t have anywhere else. And neither can your attendees.

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“How do you manage ‘work+life fit’ without clocks and walls?” asks Cali Yost, author of TWEAK IT: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day, “because they’ve completely disappeared.” As an editor of Convene, I work remotely from my apartment in Brooklyn. Between working from home and traveling to cover the latest events and destinations, the importance of Yost’s “work+life fit” philosophy makes a lot of sense to me. But it’s not just about when we work, it’s also about where.

“We seem to be concerned with when we’re going to get work done,” Yost said in an interview held at the new Regus Business Lounge at Midtown, when I toured the space last month, “but not where.” She explained that communal workspaces, like the Regus lounge, a new three-story, flexible workspace in New York City, “give you an option to think about the ‘where’.” The flexible workspace provides people with varying needs, capabilities, and work schedules with a space to convene.

Regus’s Thinkpods are intimate work stations that provide personalized space for individuals to concentrate.

The Regus Lounge at Midtown held its Grand Opening this past Wednesday night. The innovative, state-of-the-art space — that includes offices, eight Thinkpods, five meeting rooms, and a library — makes work/life balance a little easier by providing peace and quiet for people who need to hold an interview or work on a project alone, and more collaborative space for meetings or brain-storming sessions. The new lounge is one of 1,500 Regus work lounges in 100 countries worldwide.

Yost stresses that work+life fit is not one-size-fits-all. Everyone needs to find what works for them. She notes that a key component to making time for what matters is “giving power to the small things.” This means taking time out of your week to make that doctor’s appointment you’ve been putting off, get lunch with a friend, or pay those bills that have piled up. By giving just as much power to the small things, as you do the tight deadlines and stressful demands of your day job, it’s easier to strike a harmonious work/life balance. “People are always on, and we’re asking them to do more with less,” Yost said in an interview with CNBC. “People need to be engaged, and you cannot be an engaged worker when you are tired, when you are sick, and when you are just truly burnt out.”

Check out a virtual tour of The Regus Business Lounge at Midtown:

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The building is slated to open in May 2014, still very much a work in progress, and that’s where “Mad Men” came in. Possibly the show’s most iconic moment is this pitch, which Don Draper gives to executives from Kodak about the camera company’s then-new slide projector. “This device isn’t a spaceship,” Don tells them, advancing photo after photo of his own family. “It’s a time machine. It goes backwards. Forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” He sells them as much on what the projector represents, what it conveys, as on what it is or what it does. Much like Bill’s approach to selling the Washington Marriott Marquis.

Bill Wallace, behind the scenes at the Washington Marriott Marquis, opening in May 2014.

It’s going to be a beautiful property — 1,175 guest rooms, more than 100,000 square feet of event space, a soaring atrium, floor-to-ceiling windows and natural light and original artwork everywhere. But as we sat over lunch, before the hard-hat tour, Bill didn’t mention any of that. His job is to sell a building that doesn’t actually exist yet (a process that Convene has written about before), and to do that he told a story that began more than 15 years ago. In December 1997, the MCI Center sports arena (today called the Verizon Center) opened in a previously blighted neighborhood in downtown Washington, D.C., spurring a tidal wave of development — restaurants, shops, apartments and condos, hotels — that included Walter E. Washington in 2003 and that is only now cresting with the 10-acre CityCenterDC neighborhood complex and the new Marriott Marquis.

When Bill finally got around to the hotel itself, he started outside, with the view that someone would have as they first stepped into the lobby — a peek at the bottom of the 55-foot original metal sculpture that will dominate the atrium, drawing them further inside and inviting them to explore the space. He talked about how the names of the meeting rooms are tied to specific D.C. neighborhoods. How the new property will incorporate the historic AFL-CIO headquarters building that sits on the site. The history and context in which the Washington Marriott Marquis was developed, is being built, and will welcome guests, Bill said, is as important as the size of its meeting rooms and the quality of its F&B (although those will be top-shelf), and attendees will find that they’ve come to a city as much as to a hotel, and to an experience as much as to a meeting.

Bill communicated all that before we put on our hard hats and walked through the very active construction site. And while the tour was interesting and fun, I felt like I’d already been there. Such is the power of a good story and a good storyteller.

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Todd Henry

Meeting professionals may not think of themselves as creative types — more like the rubber-meets-the-road kind of people. But when you think about what goes into assembling the many pieces of an event from start to finish, I’d say it takes creativity, and lots of it. How can we dig deeper to come up with ideas that will keep our face-to-face events fresh?

The two speakers we have lined up for PCMA’s Convene Live program, July 28–30, in Ottawa, will not only share, but show — in interactive workshops — how. Collaborating together for the first time, creativity experts Todd Henry and Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., will help participants find innovative solutions to their own toughest on-the-job challenges. They recently spoke to Convene about what’s in store for them.

Keith Sawyer, Ph.D.

What could make getting this kind of hands-on help from experts and a small group of your peers an even better experience? It’s free. Convene Live is fully hosted for qualified planners — including airfare, accommodations, meals, and registration for the sessions and workshop. You can fill out an application to see if you qualify. For more information, please contact Katie Yandell at kyandell@pcma.org.

I hope to see you there!

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We got the word this morning from our PCMA teammates on the IMEX show floor in Frankfurt, Germany — where the announcement was made by the Choose Chicago team — that Chicago is the latest and tenth member to join BestCities, joining

Chicago joins Global BestCities

Houston, Berlin, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Dubai, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Singapore, and Vancouver.

As we reported in our February article, “every city in the alliance must undergo a stringent third-party audit to prove that it maintains a high level of service and meets certain qualifications, such as having more than 10,000 hotel rooms near its convention center as well as a major international airport.”

Check, check, and check, for Chicago — one of my favorite U.S. cities and home to PCMA headquarters.

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In order to keep lines moving at this year’s GoogaMooga — held May 17-19 — organizers avoided choice overload by asking that vendors offer only one food option per booth. There were also ten more vendors added to the roster, bringing the total to 85 food stands. And after the 2012 GoogaMooga received complaints for being too carnivorous, planners beefed up their vegetarian selection. Shorter lines meant we could actually try more than one type of food (a gourmet grilled-cheese sandwich with caramelized onions and kale from Little Muenster, and fall-off-the-bone brisket from the Hill Country Barbeque Market).

They did away with “GoogaMoola” — drink tickets needed to purchase alcohol — and instead implemented wrist bands, which were handed out by staff members walking around the festival grounds. We waited in line only ten minutes for the wine-tasting tent, as opposed to 45 minutes last summer. Which was nice, because the tent provided shelter from the rain that day.

Despite a constant drizzle and a persistent layer of gray clouds above, we actually had a really great time at GoogaMooga this year. The clouds prevented sunburns, the wine-tasting tent prevented us from getting soaked, and the lack of lines allowed us to over-eat to our hearts’ content.

Unfortunately for organizers, the second full day of the festival was canceled on Sunday due to thunderstorms (disappointing vendors, and festival-goers who’d purchased a ticket to a “rain or shine” event). I guess GoogaMooga isn’t totally off the hook just yet. The curse, perhaps?

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Great Falls — captured in a photo not taken by the author, who left his smartphone behind.

When is it time to unplug? Yesterday morning my wife wanted to celebrate Mother’s Day with a few hours of quiet, undemanding family time, so we took our two daughters to Great Falls Park, which straddles the Potomac River in Virginia and Maryland. We parked on the Virginia side, and as we were getting out of the car, we both decided at the last minute to leave our smartphones behind. Meaning we experienced nature off the grid, without photographing, Facebooking, or tweeting it. Instead we did a little hiking and a lot of sitting — among the jagged rocks and lush woods of Great Falls, overlooking a Potomac that was churning and excited from several weeks of bizarro weather. Without having to worry about framing the experience for digital consumption, I think we relaxed into it more than we might have, and just enjoyed ourselves and our girls and the beautiful, bright day. And driving home, I felt relaxed and thoughtful.

We talk a lot about using social media and other technology platforms to connect your meeting to a larger conversation — before and after the program, and maybe especially during. But my experience of late is that live, in-person meetings are something of a luxury in our on-demand world, because they take us out of our everyday environment, in which we’re constantly on call, and ask us to think only about who or what is in front of us at that moment. Once I got home yesterday and life began seeping back in, I wondered if the most engaging and fulfilling conferences would be those that unplugged themselves by discouraging tweeting and everything else-ing, at least in the moment, and by encouraging the here and now. (This overlaps a bit with a post I wrote a few weeks ago about the magic of live experience.)

I don’t know. I love technology, and I’ve found online communities and conversations to be a very rewarding complement to real-world communities and conversations. But might a meeting or conference be a place to draw the line, the better for attendees to immerse themselves only in their immediate environment — and the thoughts that are in their own heads?

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It’s a giant, human foosball arena, and we were soon divided into a red* and blue team (five players on each side, including the goalie) and strapped into harnesses set up along ropes, mimicking a traditional foosball table. Players were restricted to horizontal movement only, so it was pretty funny to watch everyone try to move vertically within the space, attempting to score or block the “foosball” (in this instance, something like a soccer ball). My group had already been at The Broadmoor for the previous two days, so we had gotten to know each other a bit — which helped ignite some competitive spirit without anyone feeling uncomfortable. But I can imagine what a great icebreaker this could be for smaller meetings or in smaller group settings. And with two ten-minute halves, it was a surprisingly great workout.

Here’s some of the game action:

*Full disclosure: My team (Red) lost, 2–0.

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Our team at Convene has been using Google Hangouts pretty regularly, both for our editorial meetings and when attending live events remotely. And with travel becoming more difficult, and attendees now desiring a virtual or hybrid component to their events, more and more meeting planners will need affordable, professional, reliable streaming outlets.

With HangoutMagix you can add captions, titles, and logos to your Hangouts, much like you would with film editing tools like iMovie or Final Cut Pro. The subheads make the footage look a little less homemade, and more like a polished broadcast. The graphics also help introduce the speaker, and help attendees keep up with the conversation.

Created by French technology expert Bertrand Diouly Osso, HangoutMagix is currently in Beta testing, but Google Plus users are invited to check out the website and begin creating their custom overlays. 

“This really does break new ground,” Osso said in a press release, “especially for professionals who want to use the Hangouts system while retaining company branding and staying true to their professional corporate image. The fact that it is free also makes it accessible to organizations of any kind.”

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