As you know since you were brave enough to send 2 of your folks, on Halloween Kevin Whorton and I held our second in a series of seminars on association marketing called State-of-the-Art Association Marketing (www,associationseminar.com). It was held at SHRM in Old Town and we had about 35 pretty high level association marketers attend.

The event was part traditional “lecture” by Kevn and I and then part audience participation. As far as I could tell the attendees got a lot of information out of both pieces.

We did let all attendees and potential attendees know that they were going to play a role in the content for half the day so everyone there was very prepared to do participate. Our #1 goal was to get every attendees primary marketing challenge solved before they left the room. I would say we succeeded with 90% of the folks and to me that is pretty darn good.

We are going to be sending out a survey asking attendees what they thought but if any attendees, including your folks, are reading this feel free to share both the good and the bad as I think it is useful to the entire community as we all plan meetings for the future.

I attended a session where three CEOs were to explain how they managed turnarounds. I’ve managed turnarounds so I was very interested to hear what they did.

After describing the circumstances facing them, they asked the audience to break into groups and discuss what they would have done in these situations. After that, the presenters would reveal what they did.

I wasn’t interested in what others would have done. I wanted to know what these CEOs actually did.

So, I walked out and caught the second half of another session.

The breakout (which was not advertised) was inappropriate for that topic. It might have been OK for another topic, another audience, or a turnaround workshop.