September 20, 2010

Do the Yelp Dance!

You’re at a tradeshow, it’s time to close up the booth and head out for dinner and drinks. Maybe catch a Tweetup. Or maybe it’s still several weeks to the tradeshow and you want to schedule a Tweetup. How do you find a good place to meet, or to have dinner and drinks?

Try Yelp. They’re quickly building a reputation as an information provider that offers reviews of businesses – from people that have patronized the business. From Yelp’s website: “Yelp allows consumers to share the experiences they’ve had with local businesses and lets business owners share information about their business with their customers. Simply put, it’s word of mouth–amplified.”

Word of mouth – amplified.

This works from two directions: if you have a business that’s near a convention center, you’d better be listed on Yelp. If not, it takes a few moments to set up an account.

If you’re a small business, you’d better be looking at building a customer community program this year. Starting building an email (and SMS) list so you can offer specials and promotions to those customers. If you’re at a tradeshow or convention, Yelp is a great resource: on a recent vacation I used Yelp to track down a number of restaurants that I never would have otherwise found. All were worthwhile – some more than others – but each Yelp review gave insight into other customers’ experiences and thoughts.

Of course, Yelp can be a double-edged sword if you’re a small business. Treat a customer badly and you might create a firestorm of negativity – deserved or not. With new location-based and customer-review services popping up, it’s going to be a harder line for businesses to walk.

Besides Yelp, your business should be visible and listed on Google Maps and Facebook. Consider looking at newer and not-so-well-known platforms such as FireEagle, Loopt, Gowalla, or Rummble or any of another hundred or more LBS-services.

With more and more people going mobile, the niche-oriented businesses such as Foursquare and Yelp will become bigger and bigger players. Not only can you use them to connect with people, find a great restaurant or coffee shop or tire store, as a business you’ll find a competitive advantage by being first to be found by that small but growing number of people using the services.

September 15, 2010

Is Foursquare the Next Killer App for Tradeshow Marketing?

The year: 2016

The scene: a busy tradeshow floor in Chicago

The situation: almost half of the exhibitors at the show are welcoming visitors to the show, who are ‘checking in’ via Foursquare (or some similar app – who’s to know what will survive that long). After then check in at the booth, they’re rewarded with a couple of spiffs. Maybe a free download just for show visitors, a store discount, or a chance to win something cool. Maybe they get a free one-on-one with the CEO. Doesn’t matter, could be anything of value. By checking in, they also automatically are asked if they want to opt-in to receiving special offers via text message or old-fashioned e-mail.

When visitors check the stats in Foursquare they see that hundreds of visitors have also checked in at the booth, as well as many others. There’s a thriving online community of people who are also connecting face-to-face thanks to location-based-marketing apps. It could be Facebook, could be Foursquare or any other of the LBS (location based services) apps that are thriving in the new, increasingly connected world. With the deep personal profiling that has grown in the past few years, it’s easy to connect with people who are interested in the same things, or have certain characteristics in common, such as location, similar job titles, or even off-job interests like golf or skiing. Meetings are arranged either by users or companies who have an interest in bringing these small groups together. Kind of like a Tweetup on steroids.

The scene is not that far from reality. Location based marketing is exploding. Mobile marketing is right behind. Some people are already starting to use the mobile and GPS tools to great effect. Sarah Perez writes on Read Write Web that the key to success for your location-base app is to find a way to reward people for their activities. So what’s your reward?

Indeed. Give something of value to a group of people that are hungry for that item and you’ve started opening the door to a new client-customer relationship.

While Lopez refers to a recent study by Forrester Research that shows ‘only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based apps such as these, and only 1% out of those that use them do so more than once per week’ – just think back to the middle part of the last decade where people were just getting excited about podcasting and blogging, both of which are now well established. Web 2.0 was the new buzz. Since 2005, the incredible growth of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been the focus of countless media spotlights.

The world is going mobile, and GPS-related services and location-based marketing is poised to take off big time. There’s huge potential there for the masses. And even now, as the Forrester research points out, the current small group of users of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown, Brightkite are all very influential. People look to them for opinions and leadership. Friend ask what they’re up to and who’d they buy from.

It may not be the time to jump into location-based marketing quite yet for a tradeshow, but if you did you would not be too far ahead of anyone.

photo credit: abulhussain

July 7, 2010

Can Mobile Marketing Improve Your Tradeshow ROI?

Now that a lot of your audience are carrying around smartphones, are you even able to reach them anymore with email, blogging and your social media outlets?

Probably – at least you should be able much of the time.

But an ideal scenario is literally in your hands: reaching your audience with text messaging.

Here’s why text message (or mobile) marketing is worth considering:

First: approximately 97% of all text messages are opened and read! Yeah: wow, 97%!

Next: your competitors are probably NOT doing it. Yet. But chances are they will look at it soon.

Also: Texting can spur instant action because of the immediacy of the medium.

One comment I often hear when the subject of mobile marketing comes up: “…but who wants to get spam text messages?”

That’s the beauty. It’s not spam. Your audience has opted-in to your messages through your website or advertisement, and they can easily opt-out if they change their mind.

Let’s say you have a booth at a tradeshow, and you’re going to surprise your audience with a special deal, a celebrity guest, or some other reason to get people to head for the booth. By timing your text message, your audience can open the text (remember, it’s immediately sent), see the invitation, and come by the booth.

If you can narrow your market to a select group of show attendees, chances are good that you’ll get many of them to respond.

“Your only restriction with mobile marketing is the numbers of characters, so my best advice is consolidate and pack a punch with your message,” advises Van Allen, a leading business marketer and business author who uses text and SMS (short message service) technology to grow several business.

So the next question on your lips is (at least it was on my lips): how do you do this?

The difficult, and manual, way would be to send each message out individually.

Nope, you can see right away that’s not gonna work. Not with all you have to do to keep the booth running, right?

Sign up for a service such as Boomtext, Message Buzz or Moto Message, log in to your account, set up your message and when you’d like it go out and you’re set.

Some services I’ve seen have the ability to segment your audience. For instance if you put out an advertisement on “organic yogurt” you might have readers opt-in to get message specifically about organic yogurt. Other readers might want messages only about fruit-flavored yogurt. It gives you a chance to send extremely targeted messages based on the desires of your market.

Once you start thinking, the ideas on how to tie mobile marketing into your tradeshow marketing start tumbling over themselves.

Phone coupons, time-sensitive offers, opinion polls, welcome messages, games, video links…what can you think of?

If you have sent out or received text messaging, what’s your experience been?

photo credit: jeffwilcox

June 1, 2010

Goin’ Mobile with Your Tradeshow Apps

Pete Townshend had it right when he penned ‘Goin’ Mobile’ at the turn of the Sixties:

I can pull up by the curb
I can make it on the road
Goin’ mobile
I can stop in any street
Invitin’ people that we meet
Goin’ mobile
Keep me movin’

We’ve been a mobile society for decades. But in the past few years we have started taking our computers on the road.

Smartphones sales jumped almost 50% in the first quarter of 2010, selling about 53.4 million phones in the quarter. Uh-huh. That’s a lotta damn smartphones! In fact, it appears that there will be more smartphones sold in 2010 than personal computers. Which begs the question: are you ready for the smartphone? As a marketer – and specifically, as a tradeshow marketer – are your customers able to find you and interact with you via the smartphone? And what does your website look like on a smartphone?

Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting apps you might use in conjunction with tradeshows.

First, there are apps that are specifically built just for tradeshows, such as iLeads and Follow Me.

You can access the iLeads podcast here and the Follow Me podcast here.

Both have great application on the tradeshow floor and are worth a close look.

In searching for apps that you might use at a tradeshow, event or convention, I came across a few blog posts that covered some very usable apps.

Corbin Ball’s post ‘Meetings and Tradeshows – There’s a Mobile App for That!’ has the most comprehensive list I’ve seen.

Eric Lukazewski of Echelon Design Inc came up with a shortlist of ‘5 iPhone Apps for Your Next Tradeshow’.

I haven’t used a business card reader, so I’ll have to check that out (although the one he linked to had a handful of negative reviews – so I’m going to look further). And the Whiteboard Capture Pro looks quite interesting. Again, I’ll take a look.

One more link: ‘7 iPhone Apps to Make Your Next Trade Show More Profitable’ by Matt Gratt at iPhonecto.com has a nice little list with links direct to the iTunes store. He mentions Tweetdeck, LinkedIn, and a business card reader as well.

The great thing about iPhone apps is that most of them are dirt cheap, so the entry cost, even for a ‘pro’ version is often only a few bucks – maybe the cost of a coffee drink or two.

Gear up your iPhone, Blackberry or Android…and go mobile:

I don’t care about pollution
I’m an air-conditioned gypsy
That’s my solution
Watch the police and the tax man miss me…I’m mobile!

April 28, 2010

Panning for Gold in Your Inbox: 5 Best Inbox Links of the Week

I admit it. I subscribe to waaay too many e-mail newsletters. Most I don’t get a chance to read. So if you’re going to get my attention on a regular basis in my inbox your stuff had better be damn good.

Thankfully, a number of marketing and sales folks manage to do that. I thought I’d put a short list together of the top __ blog post links that arrived in my e-mail the past week or so.

In no particular order:

5 Ways to Love Your Customer! from Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook

Paul consistently grabs my attention with his cool, fun, wacky bull-in-a-china-shop approach to blogging. Check some of the titles to his other blog posts, such as How My Death Taught Me To Live!, 247 Billion Emails – 6 Ways To Rethink Them!, How are you wasting your 2.1 hours today?, and Fire The Gatekeepers!

Yes, he uses a lot of exclamation points. But that’s okay…I think they’re pretty cheap when you get them in bulk.

4 Reasons PR Agencies Are Failing in Social Media from Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent

Valeria digs deep into the marketing, sales and social media aspects of stuff that frankly I hardly ever think of. It’s like of like driving through a car wash with the windows down. Much of Valeria’s stuff is useful, thoughtful and a slap in the face at times.

21 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Fanbase from Michael Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner

The Social Media Examiner blew onto the web out of nowhere last year and is now one of the premier stopping points for useful posts for anyone looking to improve their social media skills. If you’re got a Facebook page, this is a great post.

Prepare for the mobile gold rush with your new mobile site from Joan Stewart, aka The Publicity Hound

Joan celebrated her 500th newsletter with a look ahead. Not surprising. She had a blog post with some useful links to how she set up her mobile website http://publicityhound.mobi/.

If you’ve ever thought of getting your website onto the mobile phone platform, this is a good introduction.

Finally, from Marcia Yudkin “The Marketing Minute” comes some great tips on How to Perk Up Your Bio:

On your “About” page, in conference materials, in media kits or elsewhere, a business bio should not be a cold, dry résumé, with every fact in its appropriate slot.

Nor should it be a chronology of your career.

Instead, in your bio, provide an overview of your achievements and distinctive work approach. Through what you say or how you say it, also impart a sense of you as a person.

To warm up your bio with sparks of life, include one or more of these:

* A quote from you or your personal motto
* A phrase clients or an authority figure use about you (clients call him “the uncoach” because his advice is so laid back and subtle)
* Fanciful or unexpected language (paints the scenes that beckon to her)
* Concrete details (trained his first dog, a Schnauzer, at age 10)
* Vivid extremes or contrasts (has taught everyone from CEOs to imprisoned drug dealers)
* Tantalizing numbers (the third most quoted Canadian chartered accountant)
* A fact that humbles you (Alan Weiss once appeared on Jeopardy, where he lost to a dancing waiter)

Find Marcia’s newsletter and blog here.

To my mind all of these newsletters are worth opening and at least scanning. A quick scan lets me know if I should dig deeper – and more often than not, I do.

What’s in your inbox that’s worth sharing?

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