We are pleased to announce that MeetMax now includes event website templates designed by San Francisco-based designer, John Shern, Duotone Online (www.duotoneonline.com).  These new templates present a polished, professional image for your events.  Unlike competitive products that allow you to build only a limited event website, with MeetMax you can have up to 10 pages on your site, and with our easy content management tools you don’t need additional resources to keep your site up to date.  Click on the images below to take a peak the new layouts.

Next month we will be releasing the next upgrade of MeetMax CAM - with some unique features that other Roadshows scheduling systems don’t have.  Here’s a quick peek:

• An Event Calendar that can be published to the whole firm.  Let colleagues see the Calendar itself without them having to login to anything - or require an expensive username.
• Request Process for Roadshow Meetings  - again without requiring expensive usernames for salespeople and sales assistants.
• Batch reporting on Accounts – that will process activity reports on a schedule and email them to the correct salespeople or account contacts for a hundred or more accounts.  Automatically.

Greenwich Associates recently released some summary data from its 2010 survey.  For 2010 in the US – Greenwich estimates $6.4 billion in commission payments for research and corporate access and other services provided by sell side firms.  Of this – Greenwich estimates 33% is for Corporate Access, 27% for Research and the rest for Sales and Account Management. For Hedge Funds the share for corporate access is higher still at 40%.

So just over $2.1 billion for Corporate Access.  Greenwich goes even further and  divides this between Conferences ($0.9 billion) and Roadshows ($1.2 billion).  The Wall Street Transcript estimates that there are approximately 200,000 one on one meetings per calendar year at investor conferences. The Greenwich data would therefore suggest that an average value per conference meeting is about $4,500.   This is consistent with our working estimates, so its great to get some supporting data on it.   So, to be clear, on average, a 1×1 meeting is worth $4,500.

Reprising the type of investigation that got Siebel into hot water a few years ago - the WSJ reports on the SEC’s probe of a Mylan analyst/investor day at its premises.

The event was not webcast.   Foolish on Mylan’s part - and foolish on the part of their IR firm - not to webcast a meeting with analysts and investors.   Any shift in stock price, the day of a private meeting, is a prima facie basis for an SEC investigation.   Pointing to a webcast is the best possible response.   Having no webcast to point to suggests either something to hide, or negligence.

We are seeing more clients than ever looking for ways to reduce the paper used at their conferences.

How many times have you gone to a conference or a day-long seminar and carefully collected copies of all of the presentations and handouts, put them in your briefcase or tote bag, brought them home to the office and then?  They sit in a stack on your desk until you decide you need room for some new stack of information.  In paper form, the information embodied in this stack of materials is difficult to access and so its use is limited as a library of useful information.

And yet, as conference organizers we know that speakers want to bring handouts and attendees do want to bring materials home with them.  How can you reduce the amount of paper and still provide the benefit of a take-away materials?

The answer for an increasing number of MeetMax clients is the MeetMax document kiosk.  At the MeetMax document kiosk, the conference attendee selects the speakers/sessions for which he or she wants materials, and downloads the materials on to a flash drive.  The materials are indexed by session and because they are electronic, they are easily searched and easily shared with colleagues.   And, the conference organizer can pre-load sponsor materials onto the library so that all downloads include the sponsor’s information — which is a great way to extend the value of a sponsorship.

MeetMax’s speaker registration process allows presenters to upload materials — documents, powerpoints, videos.  MeetMax client support builds your document library and compiles the Document Kiosk software for you into an easy to install package.

If you happen to attend one of RBC’s conferences this month, or Needham’s or Lazard Capital Markets’, you will have a chance to see for yourself how the meeting planning teams for these conferences are using technology to make their meetings more green.  How are you greening up your conferences?