Q2, 2010 of The Advisor - Now Available!

It has taken a village, but the Q2, 2010 edition of The Advisor is now available!

You can view it on the OASIS Marketing site.

As always, thank you for your readership and interest.

OASIS Tip & Trick: Demographics Report

This quarter's issue has an OASIS tip that helps you with determining the geographical distribution of control records by activity type as they are created or submitted within OASIS. This is especially helpful for an open-call submission of abstracts, as this report offers a snap shot of where submissions are coming from as a submission deadline grows closer.

Follow these simple steps to generate this report:

1.Within the OASIS Admin site, select the Demographics menu option located within the Submission menu. Please note that this option can also be accessed through the Reports menu.

Note: If you are using the original OASIS Admin menus, this menu option will be located within the Reports menu.

2.On the Demographics page, select control status options and a display option to apply to your report. The “Complete” and “Displaying non-Zero Locations” options are selected by default. Although a control status option is not required to run your demographics report, a display option is required.

3.Once you have determined the options that you would like applied to your report, select the “Show Report” button.

The grid located below the control status options is the demographics report. Within this report, the control record distribution may change depending on which status option(s) and display option was selected. Please note that this report displays the control record distribution by both country and by U.S. state.

This Just In - You Can Now Find Us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

It's here! You can now keep in touch with OASIS through our LinkedIn group and Facebook fan page! Check us out:


Our Facebook Fan Page



Our LinkedIn group


As big believers in the importance of social media, we are excited to announce that the OASIS Facebook fan page and LinkedIn group are now live and well! We will be using these accounts to distribute OASIS news about major product releases in real-time (yes, as they happen!). We will also be sharing nuggets of knowledge about abstracts management and the association industry.

We hope you will become active users of both the fan page and the group, as we are very interested in what you have to say! Feel free to share your knowledge, ask questions, share your OASIS experience, etc. - we want to start active conversations with you! Our mission is to keep you informed with OASIS happenings, and of course we hope to learn as much as we can from you.

Become a group member, become a fan or better yet, BOTH! Once you connect to us, you will receive all of our group updates through an RSS feed (yes, everything will come straight to your email - it's easy!).

We hope to hear from you soon on Facebook or on LinkedIn!

Ekatius: Extending the Reach of Your Meeting Content!

Preserving meeting content has never been more important than now. Medical research is dying a quick death post-meeting when it could assist with ground-breaking research and ongoing education long after the meeting. Previously, there has been no unified database or resource available to access legacy event knowledge, making presentations, papers and abstracts difficult and time-consuming to locate for association members and impossible for end-users. The only way an end-user could find archived material would be either through their membership with an association that digitally captures and archives its personal meeting presentations, or by stumbling upon it. Considering that the average four day conference contains nearly ten times that time-frame’s presentation material, a serious amount of education risks being lost. This poses a serious distribution and discoverability problem for associations looking to expand the exposure of their science.

Ultimately, the indexing of event knowledge in appropriate search engines is a decision left to the owners of the content, namely the sponsoring association. But when done, it enables the scientific, medical and technical (STM) communities to access previously unknown information from multiple associations where and when they need it. In 2005, the American Heart Association (AHA) needed a tool that would, among other things, make their Scientific Session event available on the Internet. By utilizing the components of the Content Discovery Suite (primarily, Ekatius™), the scientific content from their event was placed in a permanent, searchable repository with other STM content and as a result exists and is readily accessible today. Within their first year, this meeting’s content yielded hundreds of page views, and thousands of page views have been tracked since. Even though that meeting was five years ago, the content lives on today.

Ekatius™ is an event knowledge dissemination platform that aggregates and disseminates event knowledge elements such as abstracts, posters, and rich media presentations. It provides a permanent content library giving science presented at meetings a longer, potentially indefinite shelf life. The Ekatius™ platform has advanced search functionalities that allow users to search for event knowledge elements either within a specific event or across several events, thus yielding a cross-disciplinary view of the latest knowledge on a given topic. Social networking capabilities, such as social bookmarking, are also available with Ekatius™, which allow users to bookmark and share their bookmarks with others on popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us, increasing collaboration and knowledge sharing within and outside the association. These components give associations the ability to maximize the exposure and impact of their meeting content to an audience beyond the physical confines of a given meeting.

A bridge can be created from meeting content in its syndicated form on Ekatius™ to the per-access or subscription-based Archive site, allowing content to reach a wider audience. This provides an opportunity to collect non-dues revenue and drive membership on otherwise dated content, ultimately increasing an association’s bottom line. By capturing and disseminating their event knowledge, associations get far more mileage out of their conference programming—and subtly promote those conferences by giving web browsers a taste of what they have missed. Content today translates into new profit and members tomorrow.

Ekatius™ can help to increase your meeting’s exposure by disseminating your association’s event knowledge to a global audience. By integrating with the OASIS Content Discovery Suite – Archive, Capture, and To-Go – Ekatius™ can create a path for future customers, members, and partners to find their way directly to your meeting content, and indirectly to you as the sponsoring association. Meeting content remains accessible and relevant long into the future allowing your association to extend its meeting content’s reach further than ever, creating the best opportunities for science.

Oh! The Places Your Content Will Go!

“Even as webcasts and virtual meetings become more user friendly, your members
are never going to stop wanting to get together in person to learn, network,
and
build relationships. As I always say, there's no such thing as a virtual
beer.”

- Corbin Ball

It is true that meetings, and attending them in person, are here to stay. Corbin Ball may have said it best with the simple reference to a beer. You simply can't share a beer on the web, no matter how real it might look on the screen or the latest iPhone app.

Nonetheless, there are ample reasons for ensuring that your content is poised and ready to exist and be widely distributed long after your meeting. Or perhaps even during your meeting.

Captured content has merits for all attendees, not just the ones who couldn't afford to or make time for travel. It is physically impossible to attend all sessions at any meeting with concurrent sessions, thus attendees aren’t exposed to all the content of a meeting regardless of whether they are there in person or not. A recent medical meeting which was held over the course of four days had a total duration, for the oral presentations presented at the meeting, of over 816 hours, or 34 days, worth of content.

An extremely important difference between a live meeting and an archived one is that the live meeting is a place of dynamic learning among peers, while the virtual meeting or archive is a place of static learning for an individual. This means that it is imperative your captured content is created in a format which can flow into the widest array of devices and playback methods possible. You simply have to cater to the personal preferences and needs of the individual when you are trying to foster static learning with a successful outcome. People want to use the tool, device, and media format that they are the most comfortable with.

Consumer devices range from computers to iPads to smart phones. Some devices, especially those by Apple, are limited to very specific video and media types that will function correctly for playback. Simply getting content into formats that will work well on these devices is a job by itself, let alone capturing it in the first place. If you want to scare yourself with technical considerations for a device, check out this page for example.

With Capture by OASIS, you can be assured that your content will be natively captured in a format that is ready for conversion to all of the specific devices and formats that you'd like to offer to your attendees. With OASIS Digital Media, eBooks may be created that will look and behave correctly whether your attendees' eReaders are Kindles or Nooks. It's not a simple piece of technology by any stretch, but OASIS is committed to offering your content on the widest array of consumer devices possible. Put simply, OASIS believes that this is necessary for self-learning and remote content usage.

Well archived content holds almost infinite value. Archiving allows international members that can not attend an event to still be exposed to, and benefit from, all the knowledge presented at a given meeting.

Providing year-round, global access to event knowledge represents a powerful means of experience marketing for an association, which helps create or increase brand awareness and loyalty.

By capturing and disseminating their event knowledge, associations get far more mileage out of their conference programming—and subtly promote those conferences by giving web viewers a taste of what they might have missed. It is not a stretch to say that your association's own "legacy" content can even serve as a recruiting vehicle for new membership if delivered correctly. When your content works this hard for you, it is easy to see why OASIS remains committed to allowing content to be discovered by as wide and vast of an audience as possible.

EBooks + the Association Industry

Last month, we hosted a free webinar titled "e-Books for the Association Industry." Led by our CEO, it focused on the advancement of e-Book technology and provided real-life examples of associations using e-books to deliver content to their meeting participants and association members. This webinar also offered strategies for associations on how to integrate e-books into their next meeting.

You can click the following link to watch a clip of the webinar:



If you'd like to view the full version, complete our sign-up form and we will send it to you shortly: http://cttoasis.wufoo.com/forms/webinar-signup-form/

This webinar is the first in our OASIS Technology Leadership Series. We'll be posting information about our upcoming free webinar on Wednesday, June 23rd, so stay tuned!

Pages Without Pages

It's a funny thing when you stop and realize how much something has changed that you took for granted. Recently I was at the ACC 59th Annual Scientific Sessions event in Atlanta. As I walked through the amazingly large conference halls, I kept noticing bins upon bins of printed program books, abstract books, and all kinds of handouts. Keep in mind that it was the last day of the conference, towards the end of the session events, and most of the bins I saw were very full. I picked up one of each book to see the quality of the production--ACC did a wonderful job of putting together a format that reads well and is very professionally done. Yet surplus in the bulky-print-book department must certainly be costing the organization some undue expense.

ACC is an association clever enough to consider alternatives to physical, printed media. In fact, they partnered with us this year for the 59th annual event to offer their program and abstract book in Kindle, iPhone, Nook, Reader, and other digital formats (http://cttoasis.wufoo.com/forms/acc10-i210/). The uptake of these formats, especially the iPhone version of their content, signifies a real shift in preference for how attendees want to access content. It's impossible to know (without quantitative testing) whether it is the cost/environmental concern or the simple convenience and portability of this type of content that is the primary motivator for "trying it", but it's clear that digital content consumption is on the rise for good reason. Fortunately, we're going to survey all willing participants in the digital content download group to see how to better cater to this progressive segment in the future! Data rules, and we want to hear the voice of our customer and their attendees loud and clear!

At OASIS, we've experienced a surge in demand for digital content offerings. PCMA's Convene approached us to do an article about our partnership with AHA and SfN with regard to e-Book creation. You can read it here http://bit.ly/bUAJI1 in the great article "Pages Without Pages". (Contrary to the one contextual error in the article, we're sure you know by now that OASIS is one of the original abstract management solutions with a history of over 15-years. Our Content Discovery Suite e-Book offering is what is new--the article references e-Books and OASIS interchangeably). We are optimistic that many associations realize the benefits of this important trend. It is a part of our core offering and we'll keep pushing ahead to create more opportunities in the digital content space.