How to Lose the E-Snooze Apr 3, 2008 By: Bill Cooney

E-meetings may be cost-effective, but let's face it, they're often dull. Here are 8 ways to wake them up

Pharma Spoken Here Apr 3, 2008 By: Marylyn Donahue, Special Projects Editor

A boom is transforming Puerto Rico's meetings and conventions industry. What does it mean for pharma meeting planners?

Being Pharma Fluent Apr 3, 2008 By: Marylyn Donahue, Special Projects Editor

Pharma meetings aren't like other meetings. Executives and staff at KSL properties are trained to find out what makes them different and how to comply.

They Do Things Differently Over There: Meetings Management Without Borders Apr 3, 2008 By: Bruce Morgan

Meetings management programs applied globally can get lost in translation. But Pfizer, Lily, and GlaxoSmithKline are making theirs a success. Here's why.

Meetings are the last area of unmanaged spend. In respose, Pharma is managing more and spending less

Companies are embracing the notion that adventurous incentive travel can be combined with other corporate activities including team building, product launches, and training—with great results. Pictured Above: Helicopter hiking along Grizzly Ridge in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia (BC). Right: Whitewater rafting the Elaho River outside of Whistler, BC.

Riding around in a golf cart and listening to the conversations among hoteliers, convention and visitors' bureau representatives, and meeting planners can give you a good idea of what concerns people bringing together groups of pharma executives and their internal and external audiences.

These seven tips are designed for meetings that could have customers or prescribers present. The key is that you dont want the meeting alone to become an inducement to prescribe or purchase your products. You have to look at the context of the whole meeting. In other words, one of these tips may or may not cause problems on its own, but all these factors have to be looked at in their entirety and there's certainly some here that are more important than others.

Virtual get-togethers, while still a small element of the meeting universe, are growing fast. In 2004, web-based meetings across all industries generated $600 million in revenues. That figure is expected to grow at an annual rate of 30 percent for the near-term, says Bob Maiden, president of The Maxwell Group, a provider of live, direct-to-physician web conferencing services.