There’s a new buzz in Nashville, and it’s not just a new country band. More than 100,000 bees now make themselves at home on top of the four-acre green roof of the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The bees’ four hives are expected to produce approximately 360 pounds of honey annually, of which half will be used by the center’s culinary team. The other half will be jarred for promotional use.

“We’ve made it a top priority to use local products in the kitchen, and this is as local as it gets,” said Chef Max Knoepfel, executive chef of the Music City Center. “We can literally walk out the back door and get honey for anything we need. The bees should produce more than enough needed for the kitchen, and we can give what’s leftover to clients and visitors.”

Not only are the hives a source of food, they’re also a positive contributor to the environment.

“Honey bees play a key role in our ecosystem, and the widespread use of insecticides is killing off the honey bees at an alarming rate,” said Jamie Meredith, the Music City Center’s beekeeper. “Bees fertilize about 85 percent of plants, so it’s incredibly important that we create a safe home for them.”

The first harvest is expected by spring 2016.

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Women of Influence Awards presented by Venues Today, who are all IAVM members.

Kerry Painter, CFE, CMP, CEM
Assistant General Manager
Cox Business Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Carol Pollock
Hoyt Sherman Place/VenuWorks (Posthumous)
2015 WOI and first Hall of Famer

Leslee Stewart 
General Manager
Paramount Theatre, Oakland, California

Karen Totaro, CFE
General Manager
Atlantic City Convention Center,
Incoming Chair for IAVM

Venues Today will be present the awards during its reception at VenueConnect in Baltimore, Maryland, Sunday, August 2, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Our latest recipient spotlight of the IAVM Foundation’s inaugural class of 30|UNDER|30 is Michael Owens, director of booking at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“To be successful in this competitive industry, you’ve got to find ways to set yourself apart,” Owens said when asked what it takes to be successful in his field. “I know for young professionals like myself, it’s often challenging to get out from behind the cover of email and the digital interface that we all live behind and make personal connections. After all, this business is about relationships.”

Please watch the video above to learn more about Owens, and thank you to SearchWide and Ungerboeck Software International for their generous support of the IAVM Foundation’s 30|UNDER|30 program.

Those emoticons you see above may just be the difference between a happy or angry customer.

According to research from Penn State University, people who text chatted with customer service personnel gave higher scores to those who used emoticons in their responses than those who didn’t.

“The emoticon is even more powerful than the picture, though classic research would say that the richer the modality — for instance, pictures and videos — the higher the social presence,” said S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University, who worked with Eun Kyung Park, a researcher at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. “But the fact that the emoticon came within the message and that this person is conveying some type of emotion to customers makes customers feel like the agent has an emotional presence.”

In fact, patrons prefer customer service representatives who can demonstrate empathy in guest services.

“Emoticons can be effective vehicles for expression of empathy in customer relations, especially in the mobile e-commerce context,” Park said.

Also, the researchers found that customer service agents who responded more quickly to customers during a text chat were rated more positively than those who did not.

“When people are instant messaging, for example, and the messages are flying back and forth, so that one person sends a message and the other person immediately responds, it feels like they are in the same place,” Sundar said. “That can create the feeling of social presence.”

And this is especially important when dealing with complaints.

“Feelings of co-presence, constructed by the agent’s promptness, might lead customers to be loyal to the company by creating a favorable service experience,” Park said.

The researchers conclude that emoticons make customers feel emotionally connected to an agent, and the quick conversations give customers a feeling of being together in a physical sense.

“To have a meaningful conversation we often need to be in the same place at the same time, however, in a mediated environment, when you’re distant and not in the same place as the person you are communicating with, it’s hard to create that feeling of togetherness,” Sundar said. “What this shows is that if a conversation can’t happen in the same place, at least it can happen at the same time, which leads to positive evaluations.”

(Story source: Penn State University/Matt Swayne)

(Image: James Young/Creative Commons)