Tradeshow Marketing Expert & Dynamic Public Speaker/Trainer

April 14, 2011

Using Social Media to Reduce Your Tradeshow Carbon Footprint

After getting an email from Ewan MacDougall and his link to an interesting infographic on how tradeshows impact the environment, I got to thinking about how social media might help to mitigate some of those impacts.

Okay, it sounds like a good idea: using social media to reduce your impact on the environment while attending a tradeshow. But can we really make that idea work in a substantial way?

The most obvious ways would be to move most, if not all, of your tradeshow promotions to social media. Tweet it out, post Facebook updates and load videos onto YouTube and Facebook to promote your appearance at the show. It’s much more environmentally friendly than sending postcards or other mailers.

And of course, you can make documents such as brochures and other typical handouts available as a downloadable PDF. By incorporating the use of QR Codes, you can invite attendees to grab the documents easily through their smart phone. Just remember to optimize the landing page so they can actually READ it on their phone!

But what about other methods? Can Twitter be used for more than just a Tweetup or to send out promo messages? Sure, you can actually send out links to your downloadable PDFs and toot your own horn (tweet your horn?). You can also put up a sign inviting people to send out a tweet using an @ symbol and promise to send back a link to the downloadable brochures or documents. You can even set this up as an autoresponder to anyone who sends you a message using the Twitter @ symbol. The caveat here is to make sure that once the show is over to discontinue the autoresponder.

Facebook can also be used to post all of those documents (or at least links to them). Create a “Notes” page under your company profile listing the documents and invite people to “like” you – which then gives them access to the documents. In fact, your autoresponder Twitter reply could be used to invite people to “like” your Facebook page to grab the free brochures and other documents that you’d normally handout at the show.

The downside of using auto-reply tweets is that they’re so common and probably overused and are often ignored. So you’ll have to make sure that your sign promoting the free goodies encourages them to check their Twitter message in box.

There are some aspects of tradeshow marketing that are more difficult to reduce carbon usage. Travel, for instance. Hard to avoid flying if you’re traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to go to a 4-day show. But I know that some airlines allow you to check in via your smart phone. Using other apps, such as Yelp to find a good restaurant, or Skype to talk with people internationally for free, also helps reduce cost and time. Southwest was the first airline to release an iPhone app (in 2009) and many others followed suit.

There are also iPhone apps, such as SAP’s Carbon Tracker, that allow you to track every aspect of your business activities that relate to your carbon footprint. Simply by knowing your carbon impact, you’ll find ways to cut down. And as they say, every little bit helps!

April 6, 2011

Why do a Social Media Audit?

You’re tweeting, posting to Facebook, keep the blog up-to-date…but you have that nagging feeling that something’s missing. Perhaps you should have done a couple of extra blog posts before the last tradeshow. Could be your social media icons and branding on your company’s website aren’t big enough to be noticeable.

Something’s amiss, but you’re just not sure what.

Launch the social media audit!

There are a lot of good reasons to do a thorough social media audit. If you’ve never done one, your initial run-through should be as thorough as you can afford (time and/or money). After that, a yearly audit of the pertinent pieces, at minimum, should be done.

At minimum, your social media audit should include the following:

Strategy: identify visions, goals, desired outcomes. Choose your target market, platforms. listening/monitoring tools. Define internal policies and evaluate your assets.
Implementation: tools/platforms, community growth and development, training, potential partners, monitor and evaluate
Integration: organization website, blog, social media platforms, offline support (print, business cards, etc.)
Support: executive, funding for personnel, staff involvement

So yes – there’s a lot involved, so how do you accomplish all of this? Do you make it happen internally, or do you hire an outside expert to come in? Either way, it’ll take some time to accomplish a thorough and useful social media audit.

The process should start with interviews with the principals involved: the tweeters, bloggers and creators of video and other social media content. They’ll be able to give you a good sense of the overall reach and current shortfalls.

Surveys also work well. They offer all participants a chance to answer the same questions with the same methodology.
Event analysis: there’s a good chance that each participant in an organization’s social media initiatives have anecdotes about how something worked or didn’t work. Analyzying these events helps to see how communication works in real-life situations.
Communication flow: how is information exchanged between all parties? By taking a close look at how a company’s communication network works, it’s possible to reveal where blockages happen and show opportunities for untapped paths.
Observation: as part of the social media audit, you should spend time actually observing how each person interacts with the company’s community.

If you’ve been involved in social media for some time but still are trying to get a handle on what exactly you’re doing and how it’s affecting your marketing efforts, a social media audit is a solid place to start.

March 30, 2011

Creating a Social Media Editorial Calendar

In my communications with companies that spend a good amount of time ‘doing’ social media, it’s easy to see that most of the engagement is random, catch-as-catch-can; sporadic. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.

And I’m not entirely sure there should be. Social media, after all, IS random! You think of something to share and BANG it’s tweeted out! You see something, you react and retweet. Personal schedules change enough on a daily basis that finding a regular time to check in is a challenge for a lot of folks.

So the idea of a Social Media Editorial Calendar may seem counter-intuitive to creating active unscheduled engagement with your crowd on Twitter and Facebook.

However…

If you know that you’ll be at seven tradeshows this year, you can build a series of promotions around those appearances. If you know there are milestones or holidays on the calendar that your company can naturally tie into, it makes sense to set up a social media schedule in advance.

To me, the best way to do this is create a Social Media Editorial Calendar which outlines how the next year will look:

January 1: New Year’s Day (giveaways!)
January 8: Elvis’ birthday! (old-time rock and roll CDs up for grabs)
January 10 – 13: CES (promotions)
February 14: Valentine’s Day (more promotions)
February 29: Company product release (press releases, tweets, FB postings)

Etc…you get the idea. Build a few social media promotions around dates on the calendar, have your team members put together the various bits and pieces (giveaways, video shoots, product release notes) and build your social media schedule for cool posts and tweets.

Not only does this put you ahead of most of your competition, but you’ll breathe a sigh of relief after the schedule is set and assignments are made. At this point you KNOW what you’re committed to for the year. You KNOW what your company is doing on social media and you KNOW who’s going to do it.

Put your new year’s schedule together in the last quarter of the current year and you’ll be miles ahead when the new year kicks in.

photo credit: koadmunkee

March 25, 2011

Spatial Awareness at Exhibitions

Guest post by Abishag Wilson

When you are considering your new exhibition stand design team, be aware of the space that your stand will be used in and the space that is available for the rest of your product demonstration, and yourself.

Most importantly, you need to be aware of how you want your onlookers to interact with your stand. This will formulate the basis of your design.

Nonetheless, an exhibition stand has to be fairly flexible with space if you intend to use it for more than one event. Not all centers and pitches will have the same height in the ceiling, or necessarily be on a nice ‘straight’ when people walk by. Prepare for corner pitches just in case. Perhaps you may even have a 360 degree free-standing stall?

Think about all the pitch and plan accordingly.

Your bespoke stand should be able to cater for many events. For these reasons your stand should be portable – being made of many lightweight sections. Try visualizing individual items as being put in situ together, like Lego blocks, rather than comprising a fully formed stand.

Once you have thought about the pitch, consider the physical boundaries of the stand. Will it have walls and a ceiling, or will that make people feel claustrophobic? It can be intimidating if you ‘box in’ visitors to your stall.

If your stand is to have a roof, then you should consider introducing spotlighting insider or making it transparent so that naturally available light can fill your stand. No one is going to want to walk into a dark stand, it will look unprofessional, and look like camping gazebo.

Ask yourself if your viewers easily walk around your stand and/or in between the items and POS on show?

Free standing Point of Sales allow the visitor to walk around freely and should be tall enough that they do not block sight within your pitch, but not short enough to fall over either!

Chairs in a stall can have a similar effect. If your guests require a lengthy demonstration, then seating may be necessary – but do not let it look cluttered and clumsy.

Think about disabled users who may want to get around the stall also, the gaps between stands should be accessible enough to get a wheelchair through.

Avoid exposed cabling at all costs, it is not only a trip hazard but it is not visually pleasing to see. It could also be of risk to any younger visitors tempted to give the lead a pull and find out where it is attached to. Space will be reduced if you run cabling anywhere but a corner, if it is to be on show.

If you have an over-head display, it is prudent to think about whether it is targeting those on the ground around the stall or those further away who may be looking for your stand. Keep it at a sensible height that does not encroach on your customers by hanging ominously overhead.

Abishag Wilson is a freelance author who has vast knowledge on exhibition stand design . For more information she suggests you visit http://www.clipdisplay.com.

March 23, 2011

Using Social Media to Support Your Overall Tradeshow Marketing Goals

Are you using social media to drive traffic to your tradeshow booth? That’s great – it be an effective tool for creating buzz at the show. Even though social media activity is effective at communicating with your community, using social media is often not integrated very strongly with a company’s overall marketing goals. Let’s see if we can help change that for you.

Let’s say you’re working with an ad agency. They’re tasked with getting fifteen media mentions out of your tradeshow appearance. Meanwhile, your marketing department is tasked with getting X number of brand impressions. And your sales staff is tasked with generating X number of leads and closing a certain percentage of those leads. All of these entities are working to support the company’s overall marketing goals of creating more sales.

So how can you use social media to directly support all of those entities on conjunction with your tradeshow marketing, instead of just being a stand-alone operation that interacts with your community and not much else?

Start with the end in mind by breaking down your marketing goals: for example, based on past experience the sales department will need X number of leads to create X number of sales. For instance you may know that for every 100 leads generated at a tradeshow, the sales department can close 62% within three months.

Add to that your goals in press and blog mentions, and overall branding impressions and you have your end goals in mind. How can social media support those goals?

Start by choosing your key social media marketing metrics that relate to your tradeshow appearances. It’s easier to take each individual show and look at them separately, although at the end of a year it’s useful to compare and tally all of those numbers to see how the overall efforts at all shows combined performed.

Traffic: are you using social media to drive your customers to your tradeshow booth? Keeping track of traffic at a tradeshow is difficult without outside help, but by adding this component to your metric measurement, you get a better handle on how effective your tweets and Facebook postings can be. Beyond that, you can promote giveaways or contests via social media which specifically brings people to your booth for that contest or event.
Leads: when you track tradeshow leads, have a check box or area where you can indicate whether the visitor found you via social media. Did they reach you via a tweet? Was it a Facebook posting? A YouTube video? A company blog post? All of these social media outlets should support your efforts and by tracking the results you can determine which is most useful.
Buzz or Mentions: often an ad agency that’s working to bring you media mentions will have their own set of industry press contacts, and they can effectively exploit those relationships. Those efforts can be supported through social media: Twitter in particular is becoming known as a place where press relationships are started and developed. Not only that, once you meet a blogger or reporter on Twitter, the connection is direct with no gatekeeper.
Customer Support: your community of customers, clients, hangers-on and competitors (yes, they’re there too!) are all talking about you. Whether you want them to or not, they’ll say what they want when they want. By being proactive in listening to and responding to that conversation when appropriate, you are helping to improve the company’s overall performance. It may not show up as a direct impact on the bottom line, but the impact is there: fewer customer support tickets; less need for customer service support personnel; quicker response to nip problems in the bud before they become giant negatives that have to be dealt with. Your customer support team can be invaluable in your social media monitoring because they often are the front line in dealing with customer problems and know what’s happening before anyone else in the company.

Now that you’re tracking metrics, add those to your actual goal numbers previously set. Build a spreadsheet that takes into account the number of booth visitors you achieved through social media and where they came from. Add in your confirmed impressions via industry press and blogs (often a harder number to pin down: you should be able to determine a magazine’s circulation numbers, for instance, but knowing how many blog readers a specific blog has is probably harder – I’d suggest looking at Alexa rankings along with Compete.com and Quantcast.com although the caveat is that the data is very approximate).

Finally, add in actual leads and confirmed sales. When you track the numbers from show to show, and continue to implement social media to draw people to your booth, a clearer picture will emerge of which social media tools are the most effective and which are not. Having that information will help guide you to determine where to put your focus from show to show.

(graphic author: Gautheron – Creative Commons)

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All posts by: Tim Patterson

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