This week on the Guidebook blog has been quite the experience! As meetings and events develop deeper and deeper into the realm of experience, it becomes important for us - as event professionals - to understand the makings of experience. We need to know how to capture people's attention, involve them in something personal and meaningful, and attach our business objectives to those experiences in order to increase ROI and audience retention.

The Experience Toolbox

On Tuesday, we talked to Kristi Casey Sanders of Plan Your Meetings about how she transformed a stodgy, old behemoth of an expo into a svelte, innovative experiential meeting where her partners and attendees are making connections that count with 'sponsor speed dating.' It's a great case study in how a little outside-the-box thinking can start transforming your events and meetings immediately. Let's be flexible and make our events better than they were the last time! On Wednesday, we took a look at the increasingly popular event marketing world and asked - where are the conversions!? If you're able to start thinking of your events as another type of content marketing, it will be easier for you to create an event that is seamlessly tying in with your product, reaching each one of your guests, keeping the line of communication open between marketing and sales, and always evolving and getting better. On Thursday, we laid out several strategies for creating an event War Room. If you're able to create a safe space at your next event where organizers can monitor and nimbly change the event on the fly - you're well on your way to providing hyper-personal experiences for your attendees. Event plasticity takes practice - and a secret room where you can freak out - but your ROI and the future of your event hinges on it!

The Ultimate Experience

Everyone knows that if you want the most personal, most detailed live experience you have to go to Disneyland to get it. So we promised to send one of our lucky subscribers there to do a little research! Congratulations to Katie Hoffman, Director of Experiences at Building Champions! We chose you, as one of our amazing subscribers, to win two tickets. You're going to Disneyland!