Like many who have taken a fairly circuitous route before landing in the meetings and events business, Oakland, Calif.’s Mike McAllen entered the industry after a previous life as a fireman, with an injury forcing him into a career change.
And now, as leader of Grass Shack Events & Media, his work life is changing once again. After being solely a purveyor of meetings and events production—it’s still his bread and butter—he’s now involved in broadcasting event content via podcasts. According to McAllen, this growing content channel is but one more tool that speaks to the trend getting attendees fully engaged before, during and after an event.
“You have a lot more choices with engagement,” McAllen says of how meetings have evolved since he entered the business 13 years ago, fueled by the ferocious growth curve of technology advancements in the industry. “With a podcast you can have a continuous show, and you can keep the audience engaged in a community, and today everyone has a cell phone in their hands and can download it through an RSS feed.”
Podcasts can be especially relevant to the needs of associations, he offers.
“For an association, they already have an audience, so it can be a weekly or monthly show having to do with their association,” he says. “And you have all this content at the shows, so you can record it and do a TED-style radio hour; you record the session and then you do an interview for beforehand, and then you can run the session. There’s just so many options to create engagement with these podcasts, and it’s also a great sponsorship opportunity.”
To catch an episode of McAllen’s podcasts, visit www.grassshackroad.com/blog.
