Wednesday, August 25, 2010

KiKi's Top Five ASAE 2010 Annual Conference Experiences

It's hard for me to begin to explain how amazing the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Annual Meeting really was. I've spent the past two hours on the plane coming back from LA with the desire to write this blog post, but not knowing where to start. The reason is I am still processing everything that happened and all of the meaningful contacts and conversations I had over the past several days.

One thing I can do is talk about a few of my favorite experiences from the conference. I'll likely go into greater detail on some of these in later posts, but here is a quick sampling.

My Top Five ASAE Conference Experiences:
  1. Celebrating joining DelCor Technology Solutions (I met the DelCor crew at #ASAE09)
  2. Recording the first Social Media Sweet Spot with a LIVE audience
  3. Dancing in the YAP Flashmob on the Expo Floor
  4. Meeting friends from Twitter and Facebook in person (and not meeting Jeff Hurt in person for the first time while wearing my metallic gold leotard!)
  5. Jumping into the Westin Bonaventure hotel fountain on the final night
I feel motivated, challenged, inspired, and will be posting more about this amazing conference in upcoming days. All I can say is it feels good to belong to a supportive community and I think that's what we should all strive to create for our associations' members, clients, vendors, and online friends. But there is room for improvement (I'll be exploring the relationship between state associations in future posts).

Note: Not on my list of great experiences at ASAE 2010? The "Guilt by Association" sitcom shared at general sessions. Great concept, but not well-received, in general (at least not by the people around me...). They liked members being involved, but thought the laugh track was just one thing that pushed it into overkill.

Do you agree or disagree?

2 comments:

  1. KiKi:

    Nothing profound from me here, but the two words that stuck in my mind in reading your five highlights were (1) emotions and (2) memories. I think planners need to have those as criteria for a successful meeting design in addition to all the usual elements.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeffrey -
    Thanks for the comment! It really is all about the experiences...without the people, most meetings would be for naught. I absolutely had a blast at #ASAE10 because of the people around me.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comments!