If you’re attending the Natural Products Expo West 2011 at the Anaheim Convention Center March 10 – 13, try and catch up with me! I’ll be roaming the aisles, meeting exhibitors, looking for Tweetups and monitoring my Twitter feed, Facebook and blog for any connection opportunities.
Our company, Interpretive Exhibits, also will be well represented with eight custom-designed and fabricated exhibits. Come see our work – check out the following booths:
Hyland’s: 1320
Mountain Rose Herbs: 2820
Bob’s Red Mill: 2660
Nancy’s Yogurt: 2481
gDiapers: 3276
Natracare: 3316
Bi-O-Kleen: 3856
Earth Mama Angel Baby: 4120
Here are a few suggestions for you IF you happen to be at the show:
Tweet your booth number (if you’re exhibiting) to @tradeshowguy and include the #expowest hashtag. I’ll come by and say hi!
Download a PDF with the booth listings and my contact information here.
If you hear of a great tweetup, send out a tweet with the time/locale and be sure to include #tweetup #expowest hashtags.
Download the ExpoWest app from iTunes to check schedules, look up exhibitors, plan your event, get local info and more
If catch me wearing my QR Code t-shirt, fire up your QR Code smartphone app, scan it and see what goodies you get!
When your company is trying to launch and establish its brand, it’s crucial to take advantage of both online and offline brand building methods for maximum brand exposure, visibility, and effectiveness. There are benefits to each vehicle of brand building, but maintaining the popularity of your brand at the forefront is an essential daily task, especially online.
Fundamental Online Benefits
With a Plesk hosting platform incorporated into your brand building marketing strategy, you can utilize the expansive and substantive benefits of the entire Internet for a fraction of the cost of traditional hosting systems. One benefit of online brand building is the enormous exposure your brand can attain at a very cost effective outlay. It’s important to also realize that online brand building can be much more personalized than offline building can be because you have the freedom to highly individualize the psychology of your brand by utilizing distinct links, superior textual content, eye catching graphics, and much more interactive social media tools.
Additional Online Benefits
Brand building online is supremely effective especially with a user interface involving colocation hosting. To be able to differentiate the hardware and software of your choice for the most successful integration of brand building resources is especially effective for most every company, whether new or fully established. It allows much more control and consistency in effectively demonstrating the brand’s value, availability, variety, and versatility to an enormous market of potential consumers. This performance consistency is essential for success.
Principle Offline Advantages
Offline brand building can consist of marketing and advertising elements such as TV commercials, radio advertisements, print and even billboard display ads to start for the most obvious and impressive impact possible. But direct mailing is also highly useful, and short of email direct marketing, offline direct mail marketing can be especially useful for a smaller, more localized brand or company just starting out, if the mammoth financial resources are simply not there yet. Offline branding is also beneficial because companies can reach smaller markets at a more reasonable cost with traditional brand building techniques of publicity and promotion.
Associated Offline Advantages
The effectiveness of offline branding can be due to the fact that it’s normally narrower in scope than the universality of online branding. More specific market niches can be reached with the offline approach. Costs can be controlled better. The target market can have its demographics and socioeconomics studied and approached in very hands on manner. There’s the tangibility factor of having sales staffs being able to physically interact with consumers face-to-face as well, and this can substantively help build genuine brand loyalty at a much faster rate than online brand building attempts.
Jean Watson is an advertising writer for Webhostgear.com and can be reached at jean.watson@webhostgear.com. Jean writes about technologies, gadgets and social media.
Doing social media right takes time and expertise, so should you outsource it?
Here are the basic arguments: by outsourcing social media you’re bringing in an expert that knows there way around the social media landscape and can get you up and running quickly. So from that aspect, it’s a good idea.
On the other hand, you should NOT outsource your social media marketing because nobody from outside your company knows the culture of your company like your own employees – and social media is a perfect platform to share your company’s culture with clients and prospects. So it’s worth it to take the time to have your own employees learn social media and do it all internally.
Both are valid viewpoints and both deserve consideration.
My viewpoint: in the short term, by hiring a professional you’re getting a lot of information quickly and putting your company’s brand into the social media marketplace in a short time. Beyond that, you’ll want an internal team to learn the ropes and eventually take over.
So how do you find a social media consultant that knows what they’re doing? Well, it makes sense that they’d have a strong social media presence. Check their blog (is it current? what to do they blog about?); follow them on Twitter and Facebook; see if they’re active on YouTube and have any of their key people listed on LinkedIn. Connect with them on some of these outposts and watch what they do. It won’t be long before you’re going to have a pretty good feel for how well they understand social media and engage their community.
Once you decide to get involved in social media, whether you do it in-house or bring in a pro, there are some basics that you must handle:
Make your company easy to find by including links on your website to your social network outposts
Put links in embedded e-mail signatures
Put links in all marketing materials and collateral
Put links on all press releases
According to Social Media Today, you should look to outsource a number of things and keep other things internal. For instance, a good consultant can assist in writing pre-scheduled content such as blog, Twitter and Facebook posts. She can also find and follow relevant friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. Creating a branded landing page on Facebook and a branded Twitter background would also go to your agency.
But you should plan to schedule a few moments each day to interact with your Twitter and Facebook followers.
A social media consulting team should, if they do their job correctly, become obselete before too long.
Even though you may have an agency working with you to engage in social media, you still must make time to engage yourself. If you rarely visit your social media networks you may miss opportunities that only you would recognize. You might see a question on your Facebook or Twitter page that you are able to answer quickly that no one else in your company is equipped to handle.
You are the expert in your business. No one knows your job quite like you do.
Other considerations: budget, personnel, time. This all comes down to the old ‘time, money and energy’ equation. Every situation is different and only you know best.
What can we learn from 75-year old ski bums? Well, personally, that’s exactly what I’ll be in a couple of decades, so I thought this video was really fun from that angle.
Next? These folks are HAVING FUN! Naturally, since they’re skiing. But given that I’ve been a ski bum since I was about 7 years old (knee-high to a grasshopper), I’ve always tried to incorporate skiing into my daily job. Or vice versa.
What else? They do their best at their skill level. And still take chances, even at 75+. I like that. We should all know our limits and know when to push them.
That’s enough lesson-learning from this. Watch this and have fun! And…it’s only 4 minutes!
Or to expand a bit: social media for the sake of social media is useless. If the only thing you’re doing with social media is tweeting for fun, posting stuff on Facebook just to stuff some things into the cyber-ether, or goofing off with silly videos on YouTube, you’re most likely wasting your time.
However, if you’re doing useful things in social media, such as listening to the talk about your industry and products, responding quickly to comments and questions and reaching out to those who both praise or complain about your company – yes, you should keep doing that. Because you’re using social media in such a way that can actually impact your bottom line.
It’s the same if you’re getting involved in social media at tradeshows, events and conferences just for the sake of ‘being online’…you’re probably not getting much bang for your buck. If on the other hand, you are consciously communicating with clients and potential customers in such a way as to engage them thoughtfully, it can definitely impact your bottom line.
Let’s face it: social media is not free. Oh, sure the tools are generally free. Getting those Twitter and Facebook accounts just take a few moments, and there’s no monthly fee to have those accounts. But you are spending TIME to tweet and post on Facebook. And TIME is MONEY. If your employees are engaging in social media on your company’s behalf and doing it on the clock, yes, it costs money. So they’d damn well better be doing something useful.
Which is where most companies tend to let the negative potential of social media keep them from doing anything. The trouble is, those companies that are operating on fear are going to be so late to the party that they might as well not bother to show up. They might as well go back to using the telephone, fax machine and cold calling as their only methods of sales communication.
It’s all about TRUST. If you don’t trust your employees to engage with your online community in a thoughtful and positive way, chances are they WON’T do it! However, if you’re letting your employees get involved in social media because you feel they know your company better than some highly-paid consultant, and you TRUST them to represent the company in a positive light, good things happen.
They share stories about why they love working there. They help customers and prospects to solve problems and leave them wanting and willing to tell friends and acquaintances about the great experience they had.
In a tradeshow setting, social media can be used to not only bring people to your tradeshow booth, but to wholly engage them while they’re at your booth – and get them to share that great experience with their community, making you look like the stars you are. Shoot videos of them raving about your product, share photos of them on Facebook or your blog, tweet out that ‘so-and-so just stopped by the booth!’
Using social media to show off your customers is a great way to make them feel loved and wanted. If you can do that successfully, you have created a customer that will naturally bring you more customers…without even trying.
I keep hearing how SCVNGR is being used to engage tradeshow attendees with pics, check-ins and other game activities. So let’s take a look at how it’s being done in a tradeshow or event setting.
First, what the heck is SCVNGR?
SCVNGR is a game. Playing is simple: Go places. Have fun and share with your friends. Check-in, snap pics, do the social check-in or try a challenge! Everywhere you go, you’ll earn points and start unlocking real-world rewards at over 12,000 locations (think free ice cream!). SCVNGR makes it easy to share where you are and what you’re up to with your friends on SCVNGR, Facebook and Twitter. Start playing SCVNGR by downloading our free iPhone & Android app. SCVNGR is funded by Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Balderton Capital. Visit www.scvngr.com to learn more.
Last summer the New England chapter of Meeting Professionals International looked for a social media activity that met the needs of buyers and suppliers, encouraged networking and interaction, helped give back to the community, and is really fun, too…is such a thing even out there? Turns out it is: SCVNGR.
They set up a 90-minute scavenger hunt for the 150 attendees. Each venue ponied up a sponsorship fee and once the scavenger hunters arrived they were tasked with doing something. “For example, arriving at restaurant Post 390, participants had to find the private function room. There, they had to try some hors d’oeuvres. After submitting a photo to prove they’d completed the task, participants got a text message noting that the restaurant has three private function rooms.”
The International Manufacturing Technology Show used SCVNGR in Chicago last summer, and while the attendee participation was low, the time and energy required to set it up was very low. ‘According to Lee Anne Orange, IMTS exhibitions special project manager, the decision to use SCVNGR is an outgrowth of the show’s existing social media strategy, albeit in a less demanding exercise. “We use a couple other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that require a certain amount of maintenance that we have a hard enough time keeping up with,” she says. “SCVNGR was appealing because it starts and ends here.”‘
Also last summer, member of SCVNGR worked the SIGGRAPH show in Los Angeles. While the article broke the daily ration of using the word ‘awesome’ it is a great endorsement for using SCVNGR at an event.
And finally…ya gotta love bloggers. Unlike a news reporter who feels she might have to stick with convention on describing something, here’s a great example of a blogger who got all enthused about how SCVNGR worked (or might work) for them in a number of situations.
Every year or so I try and get a handle on how big the internet is. The numbers are staggering. So big that it’s hard to fathom some of them. But it’s enlightening, nonetheless, to see all of the facts and figures.
One of the first places I started was at InternetWorldStats. According to their numbers, Facebook had 518 million users as of August 2010, the most recent number on this website.
Checking Google I came across an interactive chart that shows “Internet users as percentage of population” and gives you a list of countries so you’re able to compare them. In this chart, over 75% of the US are on the internet.
I’m also curious to see how much internet traffic is made up email. In 2010, there were 107 TRILLION emails sent. The Royal Pingdom also has a list of other current stats, including the fact that almost 9 of 10 emails were spam. Yikes!
Checking Facebook’s own stats is an interesting learning experience. Among other things, we find that the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month – that’s an average of three a day!
The size of the world wide web is demonstrated in real-time with WorldWideWebSize.com, which tracks the number of web pages indexed by various search engines.
And finally, this Mashable article looks at the number of videos that were uploaded and viewed on YouTube in 2010.
Amazing stuff. The video numbers continue to grow. Whether or not you’re finding a way to work video into your marketing mix at tradeshows or otherwise, you can’t help but admit that your audience is consuming online video in a big way.
…in which our intrepid reporter takes a stroll through a number of blogs and news outlets. And takes a couple of the companies to task for, well, various things…
As an aside, I was disappointed in the Alexis website for one BIG reason: they only list a toll-free number and general e-mail but NO other contact information. Who are these people? Where are they? Why the mystery?
agendas, one-to-one appointments, and personalized agendas
way-finding
and more…
The Tradeshowfeed blog is actually a nice enough blog with useful information and a good look, but seems pretty inactive. However, when you click the ‘Latest” link, the four most recent posts are from Feb 8, 2011, November, 2010; October, 2010 and August of 2010. Uhm, that’s barely enough to fog a mirror, folks.
The Monetate Market Optimization Blog offers a review of their experience using the iPad to demo their marketing software at a recent tradeshow. One thing that they like was the personal interaction that the iPad offers over a larger flat screen.
iPad photo (CC-BY-SA) by Glenn Fleishman from Seattle, Washington
Are you stuck in the office all day long, five days a week? Happens to all of us. Happens to me most of the time. But every once in awhile I get inspired and take my work to the ski resort. Can’t do it every day, because on many occasions I have to meet clients in person. But if that’s not the case, I can often handle a lot of the details of work remotely, via a smartphone or laptop.
So Tuesday of this week I took my work to the slopes at Hoodoo Ski Bowl, my ‘home’ resort. And had a ton of fun while doing it. And answered a few client calls, an email or two and communicated with the office on a critical project as well. Yeah, the first time you might feel a little odd about actually taking a client call on the chairlift, but when you’ve handled the issue, you hang up and smile…
Can you work remotely? Can you find a way to mix pleasure with your job? It doesn’t always mean heading to Cabo or the ski resort. It might mean you’re taking meetings offsite to your favorite coffee shop. Or finding a way to engage with your clients or prospects through social media while you’re enjoying a day off. The lines are blurring and will continue to blur between our “work” hours and our “off” hours as we get deeper and deeper and more familiar with tools such as smartphones and the online platforms that allow us stay in front of other people’s minds much easier than before.
Even at a tradeshow you can easily stay in touch with people in other cities, keeping your business going in several areas while also seeing people face-to-face at the show.
Today’s work world means getting adept at using all of the available tools – and knowing which ones work for you and which ones to leave aside.
Some of the tools I use which help me work remotely include Dropbox and Carbonite. They allow me to access documents from anywhere and either work on them or email them when needed. Checking in with your community by using Facebook is also very useful and not time-consuming at all. By linking several accounts together (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) you can reach people on all of those platforms by interacting with only one.
