Last year I updated and converted two of my e-books to sell them on the Kindle platform as an experiment. I was curious to see if they would be well-received in that arena, plus I had never published anything on Kindle and it made sense to give it a try. After all, the two books, “101 Rules of Tradeshow Marketing” and “The QR Code Tradeshow Marketing Guide” had hundreds of downloads over the span of a couple of years.
I wouldn’t say converting them to Kindle was a big success, but I wouldn’t say it was a flop, either. Each ebook has gotten a handful of downloads. It’s a crowded field in Kindle-land these days, with seemingly everyone wanting to publish books there, and Amazon.com more than happy to accommodate.
They got many fewer sales than when I offered them as free downloads on this blog in 2009/2010. I don’t actively market them at this point, so that’s probably one reason. Plus, of course, they’re not free anymore!
But I feel they’re good books, and very helpful for what they are intended.
Still on the track of what the heck Classic Exhibits is up to for Exhibitor 2012 (March 4-8, 2012 at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas), I made another quick visit to their manufacturing facility this week.
The result? A disagreement among the bigwigs, a rescue by a new designer, and the ‘inside scoop’ (perhaps!) from a Russian spy???
I’ve had the pleasure of representing Classic Exhibits, based in Portland, Oregon, for several years. They produce great products and work diligently with customers and end users to give excellent value. They’ve exhibited at Exhibitor in Las Vegas for years, showing off great new exhibits that lead the industry.
This year could be different. When I got wind of their exhibit this year, I just had to investigate. After all, that’s what I do.
This month marks the tenth anniversary of the release of my tradeshow industry colleague’s book “Build a Better Trade Show Image.”Marlys Arnold is marking the anniversary of her book with a promotion that not only should raise the awareness level of the book, but give you a chance to grab some pretty nice goodies.
It’s a week-long gift-fest, starting on February 19th. Several vendors are chiming in with free offerings as a way to promote the book and to enhance networking.
Marlys Arnold is a trade show marketing strategist and has worked with exhibitors and show managers in all kinds of industries, including some of the largest shows in the U.S. Her book is a tradeshow education that any event marketer should have!
Plan on getting in on the party – it’s easy, just sign up for daily emails for the week of February 19-25 that list the various gifts along with some unannounced special offers.
Social media is great for drawing people to your event, whether you’re tweeting from your booth with a contest, posting to your Facebook page or blogging.
But using social media to help people connect while at the event is easy, too. It just takes a little thought and planning, and using the right tools.
I just signed up to attend Chris Gillebeau’s World Domination Summit in Portland this July. During the process of signing up and confirming payment, I had the option of sharing some limited personal and business information so that other like-minded people can find me and perhaps connect before the event. I presume the thinking would be is that it would lead you to want to connect in person at the site. This approach seems perfectly set-up to help keep you engaged in the event a good 175 days before it kick off, and positions you to connect with people before the event. I’m curious to see what else the organizers will do to foster connectivity in the next few months, as the event gets closer.
Another way to create engagement is to offer some sort of game or activity. SCVNGR is a game about doing challenges at places, which makes it perfectly suited for events. By checking into a series of places and doing an activity, you can earn rewards (if it’s set up that way), as well as network with other people playing the same game. By setting up some kind of reward for an activity, you encourage participation.
Involve those back at home or the office. By sharing hashtags, photos and videos – even live video streaming at chosen times – you are opening the conference or show to those who were unable to attend in person. Granted, you won’t get the same kind of engagement as you will with attendees, but it’s like offering a lifeline to ‘what’s new’ and happening’ at the event to those who aren’t attending.
Foursquare is a useful tool to share tips and comments about event speakers, exhibitors and products. It also helps people find other attendees and share tips on the best restaurants of nightclubs. And by monitoring the conversations on Foursquare and Twitter, organizers can quickly step in to address concerns, solve problems or use the comments to guide a better experience with the things that are working particularly well.
Over the past couple of months one of the the things I’ve dedicated a lot of time to is research. One element of that research was a short survey on SurveyMonkey.com, which asked 6 questions related to social media event marketing. The results helped shape the information and tools that you can find at SocialMediaEventMarketingU.com. Here’s a quick look the results.
First, a total of 77 people responded to the survey. These came from a small mailing list I have, a few clients I asked to participate and a handful of folks that clicked through from a Tweet.
Question One: Where would you consider your company’s social media event/tradeshow marketing approach to be?
Beginning: 46.1%
Intermediate: 46.1%
Advanced: 7.9%
Question Two: Who performs your company’s social media engagement?
In-House: 85.5%
Outsourced: 2.6%
Combination: 6.6%
N/A: 5.3%
Question Three: If you could strengthen one element of your social media engagement in regards to your tradeshow and event marketing, what would it be?
Making sure it actually happens at the show: 18.7%
Bringing more people to the booth during the show: 26.7%
Getting more followers and engagement on Facebook during and after shows: 17.3%
Planning and executing social media at shows, period: 24%
Other: 13.3%
Some of the “other” answers:
we don’t do trade shows yet, but I subscribe b/c I like your content!
We are B2B: getting more engagement on Twitter during/after shows
None of the above – we’ve found few customers use it as much as its hyped to be used
Be able to utilize social media without fear of bringing the federal government down on us – we sell tobacco!
Beginning a robust conversation in advance of the Expo, sustaining it through the Expo, and maintaining it in the aftermath.
getting permission to try new concepts for social media
Not having to use Facebook as it is considered to be family and personal as opposed to professional and business oriented amongst our target customers.
Getting my clients to embrace my social media ideas for them and coordinate their social media pages with complimentary technologies like bubble videos
It has been difficult in the past to work the show floor and take photos, update FB, tweet, take videos, etc. But we’re working to designate social networking as 1 person’s role at shows from now on
Getting more engagement on Twitter before, during and after the show
Question Four: In your opinion, what needs to happen at your company in the next couple of months in regards to your social media event/tradeshow marketing?
Getting started and set up: 16.4%
We’ve started, but we need to get up to speed: 16.4%
Learning more about how to more effectively engage: 59.7%
Finding a good company to outsource a lot of the nuts and bolts, strategy and planning: 0%
Creating Facebook landing pages to create more engagement: 7.5%
Other: 9.7%
“Other” responses:
no one who attends tradeshows is willing to commit to social media
Keeping people engaged on the page long-term. We capture FaceBook likes at the booth. We give away all of our promotions for the booth on Facebook. So the early engagement is great, but it is the long term that concerns me. How do we build a community.
Don’t know!
providing our agency more content-blogs-promotions etc.
Incorporating more fun videos into the program over the next year.
We are working on things, some of the shows we attend are not so big on social media yet, so we’re waiting for them to catch up. We still need to work on better integration with other marketing, website, etc.
Question 5: What is your position at the company in regards to social media engagement?
Boss: I tell people what to do: 46.3%
Worker Bee: I get involved regularly with our social media: 34.3%
Department Head: I help direct traffic
Other: 19.4%
“Other” response:
Marketing director
all of the above. we are a very small company.
only one here, so I do it all.
One armed paper hanger! The company is the two partners, two part timers, and an on-call tech.
Also, I’m an influencer and recommender
None, sadly. Too many federal regulations restricting our use of social media (as well as our belief in not marketing to anyone under the age of 21 and how does one restrict that?)
Some things catch my eye from this small survey. First, it appears that most of the respondents are from quite small companies – perhaps fewer than half a dozen people.
Second, it’s obvious that many of the respondents are still trying to figure out what to do with social media, with very few being in the advanced stage.
Third, almost 2/3 (59.4%) are interested in learning about how to use tools and techniques to engage in social media in their event marketing.
Fourth, almost no one actually outsources anything. My hunch is that for these people, it’s either too early in the process to outsource, or it’s too expensive. Or they’re just not interested in it for other reasons.
And fifth, based on a handful of the ‘other’ comments, it appears that many of the businesses and customers that tradeshow marketers are trying to connect with are also struggling with social media, and many are simply not involved. This doesn’t surprise me at all – a recent client of ours really didn’t want anything to so with social media: ‘it’s kid’s stuff’ as they put it, so the marketing directer hired us anyway to do nothing more than social media research – listening to the conversation going on in the blogosphere and Twitter and Facebook. There was a ton of conversation going on there, disproving the notion that it’s just ‘kids’s stuff,’ and we turned up quite a few useful nuggets for him.
As much as I love social media and believe in its effectiveness to reach people and bring them together for a thousand and one purposes, when you’re doing tradeshow marketing, it can’t be your only marketing strategy.
In other words, don’t become too enamored with social media. Use it as another marketing arrow in your quiver.
Continue to use (or enhance your use of) other marketing tactics:
show sponsorships
direct marketing
email marketing
partnerships
public relations
pre-show promotions
contests
personal invitations
in-booth demonstrations
seminars and presentations
effective follow-up
tradeshow staff training
(what else can you add?)
Find ways to tie your social media efforts into these other more traditional tradeshow marketing tools. Blog from your booth. Shoot video at the show and post to YouTube and Facebook. Tweet about your in-booth guests, demos and contests to drive traffic. Social media can be quite effective at your tradeshow – but when used in conjunction with other methods, the combination can be deadly – to your competition.
Here we are getting down to the ‘smaller’ blogs. Yet they pack a punch. I like the blogs operated by a single person or a small company with information and posts from dedicated bloggers. It’s refreshing and illuminating to see what types of posts come out of the smaller blogs.
So, here are my favorite five event-related blogs for the year.
In spite of Classic Exhibits’ support of this blog, that’s not the reason I’m including them. I always find unusual, entertaining and informative blog posts from Mel White and Kevin Carty, the two main bloggers. They’ve been in the industry long enough to know what’s important enough to blog about. You may feel there’s a little too much self-promotion on the blog, but it’s tempered by a lot of posts that are just damn useful
Covering event marketing from Facebook and mobile marketing to creating a YouTube channel for your event, the Event Manager Blog gets a lot of things right. Plus it’s a nicely designed blog, making it easy to spend time there – a big plus in the crowded blogosphere.
I don’t see too many posts on social media event marketing, but the Exhib-It blog from the display company is full of very useful information on many aspects of tradeshow and event marketing.
Joyce has been writing and blogging about tradeshows for years and it shows. Her blog always has new thoughtful and informative posts that are helpful for virtually any exhibitor.
I wish Ken blogged more often – he’s that good. Funny, thought-provoking and informative, Ken’s goal is to make you a better exhibitor – and entertain you at the same time. Also one of the best tradeshow presenters in the biz.
It makes sense to drum up as much interest before an event as possible, even prior to any official promotion launch. In fact, social media is ideally suited for just this task. By putting a blog post or video together, for instance, on what is coming at the event (even though it may be months away), and driving traffic to that blog post or video through social media, you’ve already primed the pump to whet people’s appetites for the event.
Also, by searching for and keeping tabs on Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and discussion boards and Twitter accounts you can slowly expand your reach and build momentum. One key to this effort is to uncover which of the social media platforms your audience hangs out at the most. You should be able to do this through searching for hashtags on Twitter, groups on LinkedIn and association or event pages on Facebook and examining the number of people involved and the level of engagement by those people.
Before the Event
Depending on the size of the event, you should consider building a small event-related blog. WordPress blogs are easy to set up and customize and domains are about $10 a year. If you’re the promoter, this is mandatory so you have a landing spot online for information related to your show. Here’s where you’ll include all pertinent info, including cost, times, dates, contact info, how to purchase a space, etc.
If you’re an exhibitor, it’s still a very useful piece of your pre-show promotion. It’s easy to share blog posts on Twitter, Facebook and relevant LinkedIn groups, and a blog legitimizes your platform more than just a Facebook event listing.
But don’t forget the Facebook listing, either. It’s easy to set up, and easy to invite people. Don’t invite everyone – although Facebook gives you this capability – because it’s a waste of time. People across the country or in another country don’t care and people who can’t relate to your event won’t bother to respond. So pick and choose.
Set up a LinkedIn event page as well. Here you can only invite 50 people once the event listing is created, but this is good in that it forces you to choose carefully who to invite. Focus on those who might actually come and benefit from the event.
During the Event
Not every exhibitor is working hard on social media to engage show visitors, although at times it seems like that. Still, you can make your efforts stand out by offering great value in your booth, such as high-profile guests, demonstrations, high-value giveaways or downloads and other enticements.
Be sure you know what the standard hashtag for the event is. While there is no official repository of hastags (that I know of) since they come and go quickly, a medium to large event should have a hashtag that is getting used by exhibitors and attendees. Once you determine what the hashtag is, use it in every single event-related tweet.
During the event, someone from your staff can be in charge of creating content for either your blog or for other social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook. This might also include videos for YouTube or Facebook, which might include testimonials, demonstrations of products or explanations of services.
If you’re able, set up a Twitter board. It’s easy enough to put up a large flat screen hooked up to a laptop that displays real-time tweets using the show’s hashtag. This does a couple of things: first it shows people that you’re on the cutting edge (although not so much as a year or two ago), and secondly, it gives people a reason to tweet about your booth and your company, just so they can see their tweet show up in real time. Believe me, it happens!
Be sure to shoot a LOT of video. The more you shoot, the more you have to share after the show. As the weeks and months go on, if you can still offer pertinent information via your social media outlets, you’ll continue to stay in your prospects’ minds. Even if you don’t shoot much extra video, use information from the show (comments, insights, etc) to create more blog and Facebook posts.
This is just a start – no doubt you can find more ways to promote your tradeshow, event or conference using social media. If you think of something I didn’t mention, be sure to add it in the comment section below!
Setting up a virtual tradeshow website for your tradeshow appearance is as easy as setting up a new website. Mainly because that’s exactly what it is. While I’ve seen a number of ways to do it, having a blog platform for your virtual tradeshow gives you the most control and flexibility.
There are some platforms that allow you to set up an virtual ‘booth’ which looks graphically much like a booth, replete with branding, graphics, aisles, floor sections and more. The trouble is, it looks like a website from 1998.
With a WordPress blog platform, you can customize it to no end and maintain total control over the process, look and feel and content.
So why set up a blog that’s specific to a single show appearance? Because you can funnel lots of eyeballs there, and once those eyeballs arrive, you can drive them to other useful things, such as opting into email lists, downloading branded white papers, ‘liking’ your Facebook page or more.
A well-built site that’s specific to a show will be packed with content. Some of that content would optimally be posted before the show to prep the world to the site. While this would be very useful for search engines, it is also a prime opportunity to invite your current clients and newsletter subscribers to check it out. Once the show is underway, have a plan to post videos, articles, interviews, photos and more on the site. Make it a place for people to find general information about the show, and specific information about your products and services and company.
Even though you have the virtual tradeshow website, don’t forget about Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Use those outlets to inform the wider population by the use of hashtags (Twitter), keywords (YouTube and Flickr) and ongoing conversation (Facebook). Those social media platforms will help raise awareness and drive traffic to your main site, even though much of the content is the same.
Two recent examples of the use of virtual tradeshow websites come to mind: the site set up for Osram Opto Semiconductor for Lightfair and the site put up by Griffin Technologies for their appearance at CES in 2010. Both were quite successful, and should be used as models for how to set up your own virtual tradeshow website.
So, the short list:
Set up a blog that focuses on one event
Register a domain and create a name for the blog that describes your company and appearance at the show
Create some content before the show, mainly teaser material
Post obsessively during the show: videos, articles, photos, interviews, product reviews, testimonials, booth guest schedules, demo schedules, etc.
Post much of the same material to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, using keywords, show and company hashtags, links back to your site.
After the show, continue to post updated material or video and information from the show for at least a couple of months. It’ll help keep the site high in the search engines. Plus, if you can keep material dripping onto the site for the rest of the year until the next show, it’s a great set-up for the next year.
Your payback for your time and energy will be much more visibility and a unique record of all the materials you took and archived at the show.
