Welcome to August and this seems like the perfect month to talk Famtastic! Even more so with the article that appeared in M&IT Magazine by the always entertaining deputy editor Paul Harvey, which we have blatantly copied for your information:
Shouting about fam trips – to capitalise or not to capitalise?
Everyone in the industry knows what fam trips are – but not everyone can agree on how the word fam should be spelt. M&IT deputy editor Paul Harvey has a capital idea. I’ve been writing about the world of meetings and events for a while now, during which time I like to think I’ve got to grips with most of the industry’s little idiosyncrasies.
However, there is one thing that I still fail to understand: fam trips. Or more specifically, FAM trips.
As I understand it, the term “fam trip” is simply a shortened version of “familiarisation trip”. Yet almost every email that lands in my inbox that uses the term, capitalises it as “FAM trip”. And this doesn’t make any sense. Whatsoever.
In its capitalised form, “FAM trip” suggests the letters stand for something. Which they don’t, as far as I know. I would love nothing more than to discover FAM stands for “familiarisation and marketing” or something, but I’m fairly sure it doesn’t.
Imagine if we capitalised every word that was a shortened version of a longer one. PHONE! BIKE! RHINO! FLU! The world would be a much shoutier place. So why should “fam” be any different?
I suspect people like to capitalise fam trip in an effort to make it seem more important. I have no time for such pomposity and take great joy in cutting it down to size whenever I can. It would be nice if we could have some consistency across the industry on this – if only for my own sanity. So next time you go on a fam trip – I’m begging you – leave the caps lock key at home.
So, a great article yes, and leads nicely to Famtastic which is continuing to go from strength to strength. Originally intended just as an online listing for industry events, our lunch programmes are going well, and are, pretty Famtastic – and yes, we are using a capital F.
They came about as we gave up our office last year and interacting with suppliers outside of this environment became a bit of a pain as we had to keep popping to our local pub! And as we tend to meet fellow Alliance members or local agents and do joint appointments we came up with a really nice format and its working really well.
Having done an initial one in Nottingham which went great, we then moved to Birmingham which went even better, and so inspired have we become, that we are now planning a whole series of events.
With just 10 agents and 10 suppliers over two hours, you can have a really productive lunch, and engage in great conversation with like-minded #eventprofs in a great environment.
So, head over to Famtastic.Rocks and we hope to see you at a Famtastic Rocks Lunch event soon.
