Hello, My Name is RFID

It wasn't that long ago that the only way to identify people at a big meeting was the cheesy, "Hello my name is—" badge, stuck jauntily on the lapel.    "Hello, my name is Jack. Don't be put off by the childish scrawl on my badge; I'm really an okay guy. If anyone's looking for Jack, send them my way. Say, did I mention that my name was Jack?"

In the information age, the "Hello my name is—" badge is starting to look distinctly low-tech: "Hello, my name is dinosaur."

Badges first sprouted electronic bar codes and then magnetic strips, which could hold much more information about an attendee other than the fact that his name is Jack. But even these technologies don't know Jack.

Now comes the latest and most technologically sophisticated badge of all, embedded with a radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip. The tiny chips, a quarter-inch in diameter, enable badges to respond to radio frequency signals from a nearby antenna.

RFID badges contain far more information than could ever be crammed onto one of the old "Hello my name is—" stickers: specific details about where the attendee went during an event, how long he or she stayed in a particular seminar, and whether he or she attended the banquet.

Like most new technologies, RFID offers both opportunity and peril for the meetings industry. RFID badges can cut long lines at registration and give meeting planners detailed information about what attendees liked and didn't like to help plan future events. But there's peril for anyone who rushes into RFID without thinking it through simply because it's a flashy new technology.

"I think RFID has a huge potential, but it's still pretty early in the game," says meetings industry tech consultant Corbin Ball, of Bellingham, Wash.-based Corbin Ball Associates. "On a 10-step process of adoption, I'd say we're barely at step two with RFID. The meetings industry is all about bringing people together, and there are certainly ways RFID can help you do that better. But there are still a lot of things to work through, especially the cost and privacy issues."

A Common Technology

The basic technology behind RFID isn't new. Radio frequency transponders were used back in World War II to identify incoming planes as "friend" or "foe." RF technology was largely ignored in the decades following the war, but over the past several years, radio frequency technology has been rediscovered in a big way.

The E-Z Pass tags used by millions of drivers to pay highway tolls employ RF technology to communicate with the tollbooth. Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense now require their top suppliers to apply RFID labels to all shipments, rather than bar codes, so that inventory can be tracked in a more detailed fashion. Within the next few years, U.S. passports are likely to feature an RFID chip, providing travelers with another layer of security—and another privacy concern.

RFID chips have even been embedded in the human body. Recently, 160 people in Mexico's attorney general's office had rice-grain-size RFID chips surgically placed in their forearms, just beneath the surface of the skin. The RFID-enabled officers can now approach a security door, hold their arm up to a reader, and gain access to a restricted area.

One Mexican microchip distributor even went on record to say that key military officers, police and even the office of President Vicente Fox could join the chip party.

It's been over the past two years in particular that RFID has gained a foothold in the meetings industry in the form of the electronic badge.

"Last year, I did maybe 20 shows that used RFID, and this year it'll be more like 50 shows," says Vaughn Dietze, CEO of Dietze Enterprises, a Chicago-based company that supplies RFID equipment. "I hate to say it, but some of it is because of the 'wow' factor—people are impressed by the technology. But there's no doubt that RFID for meetings and trade shows is really starting to take off. I'm hiring more people."

An RFID system for a meeting is not inexpensive. RF badges range from about 20 cents to more than $3 each, although the prices are dropping as more large companies adopt RF technology. Then there's the rental cost of the printers that produce the badges, and the RF antennas that read them, which run about $400 to $600 each. A growing number of organizations think RFID is worth the expense, however.

"Meetings folks are all over RFID technology, and so are marketing and education folks," says Tony Melis, vice president of Business Development for Washington, D.C.-based Laser Registration. "RFID can really help associates build a 360-degree view of their members in a way that other technologies can't."

In spite of RFID's sudden buzz—or perhaps because of it—there's widespread confusion over what the technology can and cannot do, and how to address the legitimate privacy concerns of people spooked at the notion of somehow being "tracked."

"There's a lot of misunderstanding about RFID," concedes Bob Lucke, an executive vice president at Conferon Global Services, whose subsidiary, ExpoExchange, supplies RFID technology. "We get exhibitors who think you can use it like a global positioning system to track exactly where people are at any given time, when there's no way that the technology can do that. You can tell from some of the questions we get about RFID that the technology isn't very well understood."

To further complicate matters, RFID badges adhere to several different technical standards. Some badges are short-range, needing to pass within three or four inches of a reader in order to transmit ID information. Longer-range RFID systems can communicate with a badge at a range of up to 15 feet.

"A lot of people are interested in RFID, but they don't know quite what to do with it," says Arnie Roberts, president and CEO of Smart-reg International Inc., an RFID supplier. "There's a big learning curve."

Meetings Applications

To begin with, most RFID badges used in the meetings industry use what's known as passive technology; that is, they have no internal power supply and do not broadcast a signal. Instead, small antennas located throughout the meeting area transmit a radio signal that's reflected back from the tags. The information reflected by a tag reads something like, "Hello my name is #94066." When an RF reader receives this information, it links that unique number to an accompanying database, which contains personal information that the attendee has already surrendered in order to register for the conference.

Thus, RFID makes it possible to determine, say, how many attendees with purchasing power entered a seminar, how long each stayed, and exactly when they left. However, RFID can't "track" the precise location of a particular person at a given time; it can only tell when a badge wearer passes close enough to a reader to transmit identity information. Once a badge wearer leaves the hall, the RF antennas can no longer communicate at all with the badge. Worries about being tracked while going to the bathroom or while paying a late-night visit to a hotel room are unfounded—if profoundly unsettling.

"With RFID, privacy is really the key issue," Ball says. "People today are very sensitive to any notion that they're being tracked, for any reason whatsoever. If you're going to use RFID at a meeting, you need to let people know about it, and you need to give people some added conveniences in return for being tracked."

As soon as someone clips on an RFID badge at a conference, he becomes, essentially, a mobile bar code. The code can be read by readers scattered throughout the event, which identify the badge wearer, and let him access services along the way. As the badge wearer enters the hall, he passes by an RFID reader, and a personalized greeting—"Welcome Joe Shmoe!"—can be made to pop up on a plasma screen. The greeting has become a popular gambit for RFID-enabled meetings, though even this simple electronic hello is not without its complications.

"Some people see their name automatically flash on the screen and they're delighted," Ball says. "And others see that and it freaks them out. They don't like the idea of Big Brother."

Disclosure is Key

Ball and others say that meeting planners using an RFID system need to be completely transparent about its use at an event. Attendees shouldn't have to find out about the system when their name flashes up on a plasma screen—by then, it's too late.

A handout about the RFID system should be included in the packet of materials sent to attendees before the conference. And since many attendees routinely ignore pre-event packets, an explanation of the RFID system should also be displayed at all entrances to the hall. Inside, the antennas gathering information from the badges should be set out prominently in the hall, so it doesn't appear as though attendees are being secretly monitored.

"Our advice is to disclose your RFID strategy up front so that people don't find out about it after the fact," says Conferon's Lucke. "And you should also provide people with an opportunity to opt-out of wearing an RFID badge if they're uncomfortable with it. It's not in anyone's interest to keep your RFID system a secret."

Not everyone has learned the art of full disclosure. At last winter's gathering of the International Association for Exhibition Management, most attendees were unaware that their movements were being tracked by RFID. When some later found out, there were loud complaints. The lack of disclosure made the RFID system seem much more insidious than it actually is.

"Some meetings aren't very good about notifying people about RFID and what it actually does," notes consultant Philippa Gamse, president of Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Total 'Net Value Inc. "I've seen it where there will just be a sign that says, 'Don't take this badge off while you're in the hall.' A lot of people take one look at that and rip the badge right off."

Benefits of RFID

The best RFID set-ups offer attendees something of value in return for being tracked. RF badges can be used to greatly speed the registration process; badges are read instantly as attendees pass through the hall, and long lines are avoided. When attendees want to check their e-mail at a message center in the hall, an RFID tag reader can be set up to recognize them and log them onto a computer.

Another popular use for RFID at meetings is managing Continuing Education Unit credits, which has long been an administrative nightmare at professional conferences. Instead of waiting in a long line in the back of a room to make sure their CEU credits have been logged, attendees can simply walk up to a RFID reader, have their CEU credit logged, and be given a printed receipt. The system can even be set up so that an attendee must stay in the room for a prescribed period of time (say, for more than 90 percent of the seminar) before the CEU credit is officially awarded. The days of walking into a seminar room, signing up for a CEU credit, and then heading for the bar are, alas, drawing to a close.

RFID can also manage traffic flow at conference special events, such as the banquet. As attendees enter the banquet hall, RFID-equipped monitors can greet the guest and display a hall diagram, with arrows pointing to their assigned table. It can turn an otherwise ugly cattle call into an almost civilized gathering.

For meeting planners, RFID provides a wealth of data about what worked and what didn't at a gathering. Planners can tell, for example, how many upper management execs attended a particular seminar, and how long they stayed. They can look more closely at the data and see whether a workshop that initially attracted a large crowd lost half its audience in the first half hour, evidence that the workshop either wasn't effective or didn't attract the right kinds of people.

"It's what you do with the data after the fact that makes all the difference with using RFID," says Laser Registration's Melis. "You can use the information to generate good and useful reports or totally useless ones. Going into it, you really have to have an idea of what kind of data you're trying to collect."

PCMA used an extensive RFID system at its January 2006 annual meeting in Philadelphia (after debuting it at its 2005 annual meeting in Honolulu), and came away with a thick book of statistics about who went to the show, where they visited, and which events were popular among which categories of attendees. Three meeting rooms were enabled with RFID, giving PCMA a complete demographic breakdown of individual meetings, down to details such as an individual's tenure in the industry and tenure in the association and whether the attendee was a supplier or planner.

"The RFID system gave us a ton of information that we can turn into improved programming for next year's planning," says Sian Moynihan, executive vice president of PCMA. "If we know that a particular presentation wasn't that well received, we can take a look at the traffic flow and see whether everybody left in the first quarter, and what types of people were more likely to leave."

Network Programming

The next step for RFID is to use it to help people network. A Boston-based company called nTag offers an RFID badge that's really more like a Personal Digital Assistant that "talks" to other tags at the event. Attendees wear the nTags around their necks; when two users approach, their tags recognize each other through an infrared signal and swap data before anyone's even shaken hands.

The nTags can be used to build on common interests—"Hey, you hate meetings, too!"—or to build bridges between disparate groups, like the sales team and the guys in tech support. The nTags can also be used as icebreakers: Attendees can be assigned a "secret partner" to find with the help of their nTag, while meeting new people along the way. After the event nTag provides attendees with a rundown of all the people they've met, along with contact information.

"People have a more productive time networking with nTag because it lets them find out what they have in common with other people at the event," says Paula Crerar, vice president of marketing for nTag. "And after the event, we can tell exactly who exchanged information."

Such enhanced networking doesn't come cheap. The nTags cost about $100 per badge, although tie-in sponsorships can bring the price down. Organizations renting nTags are responsible for ensuring that all tags are returned in good working order, and are charged a fee for tags that are lost or damaged.

The growing number of RFID options has, in a way, made it harder to choose the right system (or no system at all). RFID probably isn't the right choice for small meetings with few crowd control problems, that have no CEU credits to track, and no burning need to get a detailed picture of attendee behavior. But for more complex events, RFID can be just the electronic ticket

Corbin Ball's advice for planners interested in RFID is to ask a supplier for the names of companies that have used the service, "and then really follow up on them—you'll get different stories depending on how RFID was used and for what purposes. You'll come away with a good idea if it's right for your group."

"Hello, my name is return on investment."

On the Web

Corbin Ball Associates    www.corbinball.com

Dietze Enterprises    www.dietzeenterprisesinc.com

Expo Exchange    www.expoexchange.com

Laser Registration    www.laser-registration.com

nTag Interactive    www.ntag.com

Philippa Gamse    www.cyberspeaker.com

SMART-reg International    www.smart-reg.com