The question: Which client got the better value for their money?

The show:  Both clients requested pricing for almost identical situations- a 500+ person sales conference, including AV, stage design, meeting room decor, graphics and PPT template design, special event design and decor for their awards banquet, and production support, including show caller, technical director, and production manager.  There would also be some post-meeting video editing of the footage.  Both bids were full scale meeting productions, but were based on some smaller work we’d done with each client, so this was a big inroad for us in each situation.  As such, very reasonable pricing was given out of the gate to help sweeten the deal, in order to get the larger portion of the total event expense.

Client A- The Negotiator.  Even given the initial generous pricing, the client negotiated the price even further down, until a lot of what we pitched was dropped down to at cost or below cost to get the business.  Many services were even thrown in for no-cost, including the post production editing, which is my time.  Hey, we all know this happens a lot, especially with new clients.  Once you get the business, you hope to recoup over the long-term relationship you build with the client.

They continued to question every single price in the process, citing non-realistic consumer level (think Home Depot) and internet pricing for room decor (which did not include labor, setup, delivery, etc). They changed one of their conference days from a half day to a full day, and seemed outraged that we’d charge more for labor for the AV crew.  They questioned the roughly 10% (a couple hundred bucks) in profit we sought to gain for arranging the hanging of several thousand square feet of ceiling treatments.  They tried to cut staff that we weren’t charging for anyway in hopes of further discounts.

On top of the negotiating, they also kept requesting more and more of the “free” services we were providing.  More graphics, more video, alternate edits, and “oh by the way”s galore.  We finally had to put our foot down and start line item-ing each and every addition, which inevitably meant more price negotiation on each and every item.

On site, and throughout the conference, there was even more of these add-ons, and truth be told I couldn’t help but feel like they thought they owned me for the run of the show.  We continued to line item every item, every request, and we only did what was asked of us and no more.

I also got the feeling they were looking for mistakes, cataloging every minor detail and filing it away, so that after the conference they could come back for more money off the bill.  We always strive for the perfect show, but in my 15 years in the business, I’ve only seen maybe one where absolutely nothing went wrong and this was no exception.  Additionally, a lot of equipment and crew redundancy was cut due to the budget concerns.  Unfortunately there are some clients that you can’t help but feel that they count on trying to get money back at the end of a program,  by accumulating a list of things they’re dissatisfied with and disputing the bill.  The entire conference run was one of stress and anxiety.

After the show I was tired, cranky, bitter, and feeling a little used.

Client B- Minnesota Nice.  Almost the polar opposite of Client A.  While budget conscious, there was never the feeling of constant nit-picking or chiseling.  They seemed to understand that things A) cost money, and B) we might make a profit on them.  Whenever things were added, they were always amenable to adding to the overall bill.  Above all else, they were always extremely polite, and very understanding of the time and effort that goes in to putting on a conference.  As their conference went on, I genuinely came to like the people involved- the conference committee, the executives, the attendees.  As a result, as I look back, I actually did a lot more for them than Client A.  All the little add-ons didn’t feel so bad, and I found myself wanting to help them make their conference better and better for their attendees.  They added a rush order to the post-production, and even after a week of travel I found myself wanting to work through the weekend to get it done for them so that they could get the conference materials into the hands of their folks in the field.

Due to hotel restrictions, we were forced to use the in-house AV, and unfortunately for our client, they really stunk up the house.  Tons of equipment and crew issues.  In the case of Client A, we might have been tempted to just shrug our shoulders and say, “Not our fault”, but instead we were right there in the fray, passionately advocating for our client, making sure they were dealt with fairly in the end.

Since the program, we’ve even provided some “at cost” services to help them out with the post production distribution. Why? Because they asked nicely.

After the show I was tired, but really looking forward to the next time we work with Client B.

My Take:  While we all agree that, in theory, all clients should receive the same treatment, I think we can also agree that that’s not human nature.  In the end, the two companies’ bills, minus the differences between the two shows, were probably only a few thousand dollars different.  I’d be curious to know, if they knew each other, which client thought they got the best deal- the best value for their money.  My guess is that they both would think so.  In my heart of hearts, I’d have to say that at least when it came to my time, my effort, Client B got the most value for their money, and will continue to do so as long as we have the privilege to work with them.

I am not anti-negotiation.  Around the office I have the (occasionally derogatory) nickname “Consumer Brandt” because I detest bad customer service and have no trouble telling people when I believe they’re giving it to me.  I will not hesitate to ask for fees to be waived, prices matched, or things to be thrown in.  But there is a line, and it’s largely a matter of tact, manners, and polite civility to know when that line’s been crossed.  There’s working the system, and there’s abusing the system…

As I move forward, I’m going to try and keep all this in mind as I work with our vendors.  I’d like to think to a certain extent that I do already, but it never hurts to try harder, right?

So what do you think?  Who got the better value?  Does it matter who the client is and who the vendor is?  Why?

Please join us on Thursday, Feb 16th from 12-1pm EST for a chat on this topic.  Just follow the #eventprofs hashtag on Twitter, and add the tag to your post if you want to chime in!

This DIR 601 is among the millions of vulnerable routers. Image source: Amazon.com

This is a legitimate and serious security alert regarding WiFi access.  Apartment-dwellers, businesses in strip malls, hotels, and convention centers all should be advised.  Basically if your WiFi signal reaches to a point where someone could park for a while (less than 24 hours), you are likely vulnerable to having someone hack into your WiFi network, even if it is secured.  This could be, for example, an apartment next door, a lounge in your building, a nearby parking lot, or a car parked on the street if your signal reaches that far.

As usual, making things simple makes them less secure. There is a convenient “feature” of almost all WiFi access points built in the last few years that allows you to connect a device to your network (such as a Windows 7 computer, a cell phone, a printer, etc.) by pressing a button or clicking a dialog box and then entering a short 8 digit pin stamped on a label on the WiFi device.  This is known as “WiFi Protected Setup”.

It turns out that the pin can be cracked and give a hacker access to your network in less than 24 hours (sometimes only a couple of hours) of brute force attacking because of a really stupid way that the password is sent/received between the two devices.  Once unencrypted access to your network is gained, the attacker can (at best) use your internet connection and (at worst) sit quietly and watch all of your internet traffic.

If you’re comfortable configuring your wireless router, poke around in the settings and look for something called “WiFi protected setup”.

THIS IS ENABLED BY DEFAULT.  If you uncheck this “feature” you should be protected from this type of attack until your manufacturer can push out an update.  Check your WiFi router’s manufacturer’s website frequently over the next couple months to look for an update for your device.

If you want to learn about this in great detail, I highly recommend this podcast, Security Now! with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte:

http://twit.tv/show/security-now/335

For more general info, just search for “wifi protected setup flaw” on your search engine of choice.

Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you may know with WiFi access points in their home or office.

TCF National Bank is dicking around with their checking fees. A mystery charge of $9.95 showed up on my statement this month. Apparently they sent me the notice in September on my statement, which I receive online. Yep, it was there, 3 pages deep after the canceled checks (four, by the time you get to the actual part where I could have figured out the changes). Basically, if I don’t have a minimum of 15 transactions per month, they charge a fee of $9.95.

Seems like every month I find a new reason I can’t wait to cease being your customer, TCF. I also know that I’m not alone in that desire. Complicated finances make it currently impossible for me to cut the cord completely, but for now my math is simple: I don’t make 15 transactions per month on that account, so I’ll be closing my checking account as soon as I can. I’m sure that works on somebody’s spreadsheet, probably something to do with the cost of maintaining low activity accounts. Considering the massive amounts of automation in banking these days, I can’t see how it would, though. Methinks it might have something more to do with another part of the balance sheet.

For those that did not see it, there was an almost comic meltdown of the Skype connections to the Pods.  A kind and well written summary from Mitchell Beer can be found Here.

Some of this is conjecture, as we had to tear down and vacate the venue in very short order, so further testing could not be done.  What follows is a rough compilation of the many things that contributed to not only the bizarre ending to ECTC11, but the Skype problems in general throughout the conference.

It has been asked, rightfully so, why didn’t we test all of this before going live.  I can tell you that as far as we were concerned we did.  They tested the lines, they tested the calls to all the pods, we tested the inputs, we tested the outputs, we tested the video inputs, we tested the video outputs.  It’s a valuable lesson in something we all know- that there’s no such thing as too much testing, or taking those test too far.  Sometimes it’s just not enough.

All of the following contributed and played off each other, and unfortunately it is the interplay that caused the most serious problems- most of which would not have shown up in anything other than full scale, live testing, with the actual participants in the actual rooms with the actual equipment.  And probably the correct alignment of Mercury thrown in just for good measure.   ECTC, in essence became the full size test.  At least it’s an environment that’s theoretically set up for that purpose…

So here it is, to the best of my ability:

1) The number of pods- Last year there were two pods.  In true Event Camp Twin Cities fashion, they pushed the envelope and tried to have 9.  Eventually that number reduced to 7.  Because of the number of pods, especially the original 9, it seemed impractical to have nine dedicated machines, and we decided to try the group calling feature of Skype and had 4 pods on one computer, and 3 on another.  So having so many pods is why we started combining them on machines, which leads to…

2) Combining Pods 1- Combining the pods created a lot of noise on each of the two Skype machines.  Instead of one person at a time, you now had bunches of people talking, waving, saying hi, and I think that Skype was clamping down on some feeds to “promote” others.  It’s certainly the way it sounded in the headphones of the audio rig.  The wrong pods were being brought to the front of the mix.  It would make sense that Skype is geared towards what it’s generally considered use is- chat between one or more individuals.  When individuals are chatting, we tend to wait our turn.  The noise from some pods seemed to be canceling other pods out, much like a Google Hangout tries to “decide” who’s talking, and that can be overridden by someone typing to loudly.  To make matters worse, there was the problem in #4, but we’ll get to that in a second.  All of this would be fixable if only we had the ability to somehow mute the audio of some of the pods when one was speaking, which leads us to…

3) Combining pods 2-  According to the Podmaster (as I desperately probed around for a solution to stop the madness), there was no way to mute individual pods on Skype.  I do not know this for sure, as I don’t personally have the premium version of Skype with the multi-person chat.  What I do know is that the recent redesign of the interface for Skype is a bloody mess, and if there were controls to mute the audio, good luck finding them.  You’re more likely to accidently bring up and call your Aunt Judy trying to figure out the right combination of hidden rollovers and hieroglyphs.

It should be noted at this point, that in a further attempt to salvage the segment, we hung up on all the pods and tried calling a couple of them one at a time.  When we knocked it down to a single call to Amsterdam, though, their audio feed was clearly being cut in and out by the noise limiter on Skype.   I am again not familiar enough with Skype to know if there’s a setting that could have been changed on their end, but it was again very obvious when listening via headphones.  It may have been possible to overcome with some time, perhaps by having someone come closer to the mic on the computer and by having all other hush, but before we got to that point I was told we had Silicon Valley on the line on the other machine.  When we connected on a single call to Silicon Valley, Mike appeared to be on a headset, and it sounded awesome.  I plugged and unplugged the audio jacks on the Mac so I could talk to him- the drawback of routing the audio signal through the house was that we didn’t have a good talkback method, and we were all set to go back to him.  Unfortunately, though, we just plain ran out of time.  We had a hard out at 2pm, Kurt was wrapping things up in the room, and the decision was made to scrap it.

4) Pod instructions/Combining Pods 3- (sensing a common thread?) Despite meticulous instructions, and without throwing anyone under the bus, it seemed like every time we went to a Skype machine, at least one of the three (or four) would have their audio turned up on the Sonic Foundry feed.  This contributed to the confusion, and exacerbated problems 2 and 3 because we couldn’t mute them.  People still weren’t listening to the right feed, and the delay ate us alive.  Furthermore, the audio in the room then contains the potted-up Skype audio, which contained the audio of the delayed webcast feed, which is now being sent back to the other pods.  Yeesh…

5) Panic.  I regret having to put this one in, but it’s true.  When things go south, your mind is racing, and you try everything you can think of.  Sometimes, though, the moment passes and it just wasn’t enough.  You don’t think of a solution until the next day.  Or the next week.  It’s like that great comeback for an insult that you don’t think of until the jerk’s walked away.

I can’t imagine what it was like up there for Sam, and he kept his cool very well.  The best description I heard was that he was the straight guy in a comedy routine that he didn’t know he was in.  My suggestion in perfect 20-20 hindsight, however, is that when the first one wasn’t answering, we needed to just stop and wait to see how long it took them to respond.  Discover their delay and deal with it.   Some have suggested some kind of in-room clock or audio cue in dealing with delayed audiences, as continuing to speak (while a perfectly natural reaction) only adds to the confusion.

If an actual 30 seconds went by, which I know is an ETERNITY, then we’d know that something was wrong beyond them just being on the wrong feed.  As it was, it felt like Sam would move on in what seemed to me to be less than 20 seconds, and then we’re suddenly being answered by the Pod he’d  just left.  He’d try and go back to that one, only to be answered by the one he’d just moved on to.

So that’s what happened.  Feel free to pick it apart and tell me what I may have missed.  And if you know where it is, for the love of God please share where the mute button is in Skype.

Otherwise, my recommendations coming out of this are:

1) Reduce the number of Pods if at all possible to 4, and put them all on their own machines.  4 inputs is where the lowest levels of video switchers tend to hang around, so you can have a dedicated switch just for flipping between Pods for not a lot of money.  That switch then sends its signal to whatever your main video switcher is.  If you need to scale up, scale at that point and get a bigger Skype switcher, but I really feel like 1-1 machines might be imperative to making this all work.

2) Maybe to reduce noise, perhaps you give “voice” to the leaders of the pods and give them a headset?  Just spitballing… It might overcome the limitations of combining pods.

3) If the machines are separated, your audio feeds will need to be separated, so again your going to need more channels on your audio mixer, or a completely separate mixer for the Skype machines.  Either way, it gets you individual control over the audio feeds, and you can mute whoever’s mixing margaritas in the background.

4) Did any of the pods notice they were being fed the main video feed instead of looking out the I-Sight cameras in the MacBooks?  What’s your feedback on the video quality, other than any buffering or obvious Skype-related things?  I’m still experimenting, and if I figure it out I’ll share.  We may try it again at Event Camp Europe.  Suffice it to say that it’s remarkably low tech and inexpensive, and I think could be a really nice key to making this all work.

5) It should go without saying, but I will.  When it comes to trying new tech, try and emulate the final use scenario as closely as possible during testing.  We thought we had, but clearly there were factors at work that we didn’t anticipate.  At least now you know to…

The Maelstrom

I intended to push this post off until after Event Camp Europe, and then to compare and contrast how that event and Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 each chose to deal with the complexities of hybrid meetings.  What worked, what didn’t work.  I intended to be working on my presentation that I’m giving at ECEU last night, but instead found myself immersed in a whirlwind of comments, criticisms, reflections, and suggestions for the future of Event Camp.  Some kind, some a bit harsh.  “Did you see this?” asked one sponsor in an email to me.  “Here’s a podcast,” in another email from someone else.  Suddenly I have my laptop, iPad, and phone, all actively engaged and I’m listening to Mike McAllen at 250% speed so I can get through the podcast faster.

I still want to do the tech comparison, and will try to this week.  First, though, I want to take a moment to talk about sponsorship.

The Reality

I feel a very strong need to defend the sponsors.  Sonic Foundry, Martin Bastian, BeEvents, BizBash, eventMobi, Active Network, Heroic Productions, and others.  None of these companies had anything to do with the content or organization of the event, yet already I’m seeing some of their names associated with the negatives of the event.  A pit forms in my stomach when I think that by sponsoring this event, my, my company’s, or my fellow sponsor’s names might be tarnished in any way.  It makes me feel physically ill.

Sonic Foundry’s feed was rock-fracking-solid as usual.  I recommend and use Medisite on our own events for our own clients.  BeEvents brought beauty and functionality to the in room experience, and I say that knowing full well that we are at least peripheral competitors.  Martin Bastian, another competitor in some arenas, produced two very nice, very high quality videos for the game.   As for metroConnections, my employer, we provided the name badges and staff, the white lounge furniture and chairs, and lended production support in the forms of myself and one other guy, who wound up running audio in the Johnson Room due to cost concerns.  In that production role, I brought in Heroic Productions, my most trusted AV provider and the one of the best damn crews in town.  They sponsored what we thought was going to be overkill in the equipment department, and we still pushed both the gear and the crew well past the red line on this one.

I’m pretty sure Pink’s fabric structures didn’t have anything to do with the “problem with the pods”.  All of these sponsors that I worked directly with executed their portions with near perfection in all the areas that they controlled.

Aye, there’s the rub…

“The areas that we controlled.”  And so my friends, I get to lesson #1 learned from ECTC11, and one you might not have been expecting from me: Do Not Lend Your Name to That Which You Do Not Control.

The Risk

Problem is, that’s an unrealistic lesson.  There is, and always will be, an inherent risk in sponsoring an event.  If you could control everything, it would be your event, not someone else’s. What happens when the NASCAR car you’re sponsoring breaks down?  You can only hope that in the long run there’s enough room for error and enough positive to outweigh the negative.  What happens when the plan for how to handle a 7 way Skype call fails in spectacular fashion?  You write a blog post doing your best to explain it so that others can learn from the mistakes, and hopefully keep the good names of your fellow sponsors out of the mud in the process.

Event Camp is about innovation and experimentation.  The guys tried a lot of things, and an unfortunate amount of them failed.  They took on too much, tried to do too many things at once, and it came off as a jumbled mess in parts.  They could have just as easily gone off without a hitch, and we could all be standing around now going, “By Jove, they’ve got it!”  Maybe Mike McAllen is right- maybe it needs to go back to more of an unconference style.  By making it seem more like a traditional event, has the tolerance for failure gone down?

Perhaps then, the lesson should be:  Do Not Lend Your Name to That Which You Do Not Control, Unless You Are Prepared to Deal with the Consequences, Positive or Negative.

You want to be on the bleeding edge?  Be prepared to fall off sometimes.  And to bleed.  I can only hope that when we do get that “By Jove” moment all the companies and sponsors involved get the credit they deserve.

To That End

I cannot speak for metroConnections or any of the other sponsors, and I don’t.  I speak for me, Brandt Krueger.  And I will say here and now that I will be volunteering my time next year should it be decided to have another Event Camp Twin Cities.

I welcome your criticisms, I welcome your thoughts, I welcome your ideas on how to make it better, and I’ll do whatever I can to try and implement them if it’s within my power to do so.  I wouldn’t be hurt or surprised if metro or Heroic have nothing to do with it or another Event Camp ever again, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit.  But I’m in.  Why?  Because lately I’m obsessed with trying to figure this hybrid event thing out.  Sam and Ray tried something new on the Pods.  It failed on many levels and for a variety of “perfect storm” reasons which I will go into soon.  I learned at least three things I didn’t know last week about how to do it and five on how not to do it.  The Event Camp Europe crew is going to try something different.  I’m going to learn from that too.

I believe in a cheap, scalable method for bringing in remote audiences for a near in room experience.  I believe we’re very close to that.  But how do you know if you can’t test it full scale?  And if you’re going to test it full scale, you better be ready to fail and fail spectacularly.  As for me, I’m going to keep attaching myself to these things.  I’m going to keep striving for perfection within the confines of experimentation.  Either I’m going to figure this thing out, or I’m going to be close to the person that does.  And I want my company to be on the inside track of how it should be done when we figure it out.  Do you?

As I said, I was supposed to be working on my presentation for Event Camp Europe last night.  In a weird sort of way, I think I have been…

Lifehacker article on burning Lion to DVD

Couldn’t wait for the $69 USB key and tried to do a clean install of Mac OSX Lion yourself?

Did you wait with bated breath for your new Liony Goodness to reboot, only to be hit with:

“There was a problem installing Mac OS X. Try reinstalling”.

AIGH! Even reformatting and repartioning does nothing to stop it, and an infinite loop of pain begins.

Have no fear, “austingaijin” on the Apple Support Forums was kind enough answer his own question!

Correct Answer by austingaijin on Jul 24, 2011 7:13 PM

Here's the crucial bit. I got myself into this boat. After wiping my entire drive,
I wondered "HOW can it possibly be finding any remnants of Lion?" The answer is PRAM.
You need to reset your PRAM.

Follow this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

After doing this, and restarting, I got a different error and a window displaying
a log containing details of the failed installation.
It doesn't matter. Just select a new startup disk, or do the "hold the Option key during boot"
trick to select your USB install image, and when you restart, you'll get the normal "clean installer" options.

Brett

Thanks a million, Brett.  It worked for me, and I didn’t even get the second errors you mentioned. It just fired right up with the install options again!

(found via Google Sparks)

You don’t even want to know what the template looked like

“PowerPoint was unable to display some of the text, images, or objects as slides in the file (name) because they have become corrupt. Affected slides have been replaced by blank slides in the presentation and it is not possible to recover lost information. To ensure that the file can be opened in previous versions of PowerPoint, use the Save As command and save the file with the same name or a new name.”

Naturally, we were a little concerned. When clicking through the error, the presentation opened, but was missing almost all of the graphics and all the colors were wrong. We opened it on the client’s laptop, and it worked fine. We re-copied it onto a flash drive and loaded it again on ours with the same scary error message. We loaded it on to a secondary show laptop, and again, the message.  The presentation loaded fine on the client’s laptop, and on another personal (non-company) laptop.

I did a little research, and discovered that the day before Microsoft had pushed a PowerPoint “security update”, and reports were starting to trickle in of the mysterious error.  The update is called “Microsoft Windows Security Update for Powerpoint (KB2464588)”, and the problem can be reversed by uninstalling the update.

There is also a Hotfix that supposedly fixes the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543241

**IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do as the warning message says and “Save As”, the new file will be permanently missing the “corrupt” images.  If you do not save, the original PPT will load just fine once the update has been removed/repaired.

Perhaps some inside knowledge of the upcoming apocalypse?