Alicia Yao, General Manager of IME Consulting, kicked off the Association Day forums with “Association Meetings in China: The Role of a PCO in Winning Business for China”, together with her fellow speakers, Jennifer Salsbury, Senior Director of China National Convention Center and Huang Bo, Vice-Chairman, of Department of Immunology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. According to Yao, this plenary session addressed the importance of local Chinese PCOs in helping Chinese associations collaborate with their international counterparts to bring meetings to China. She said, “The emergence of more professional PCOs strengthens China’s position as a MICE destination. There are invaluable benefits that come with being a host destination of an association meeting. China is still a relatively new player in this industry. Collaborations with professional PCOs not only help to strengthen China’s position as a MICE destination, but also enable it to be on par with other experienced destinations vying for the same business.”
Li Xia Jun, Sales Manager of Zhuhai International Convention & Exhibition Center, who attended all the educational sessions said, “We were presented with relevant case studies and the speakers clearly articulated how associations should go about negotiating business in the domestic market. I learnt immensely from the experiences of more established peers. The Association Day is a great initiative that will go towards elevating the standards of China’s association industry.”
Chinese associations who wanted to learn how to organise large-scale association meetings outside of the country benefitted from Richard Wu’s session on “Learning from Success: Large-scale Association Meetings.” As the chairman of the IDA Executive Committee, Wu had successfully concluded the International Dragon Award Annual Conference last year. “This session touched on the successful case-study based on the 2013 International Dragon Award Annual Conference. Since 1996, we have held our congress in 15 different cities and each year we faced different challenges. Delegates learnt how they can obtain strong support from the local government, how to adapt to the different cultures from all over the world, and how they can attract officials to attend their congress,” says Wu.
“The speaker provided plenty of useful information, and I managed to seize the opportunity to know more about IDA which we consider to establish closer relationships in the near future,” said Ken Wang, Marketing Specialist of Institute of Digital Printing.
Facilitator of “Social Media: A New Paradigm for Association Meetings?” Zhang Nan, Project Manager of MPI shared the motivation behind the significance of her session. “The Chinese are leading the new trend of consumption which means social media is fast becoming an important source of information for the brand and product decisions. Besides the benefits of social media, delegates have learnt how to develop a social media marketing strategy, build a social infrastructure for their events and integrate social media with online registration.”
Rounding up the day’s programme was the debut of the Association Presentations where Association Executives received the latest updates from destination CVBs and NTOs. Commenting on the value of this speaking platform, Singapore Tourism Board’s Executive Director, Conventions, Meetings & Incentive Travel’s Jeannie Lim said, “The association sector is very important for Singapore, and the Association Meetings presentation platform introduced this year at IT&CM China, presents a timely opportunity for us to work with the country’s association market and to reach out to its industry executives. ”
For more information on IT&CM China, visit www.itcmchina.com
No comments:
Post a Comment