Born Again Tradeshows

If you want the latest news on technology product launches, you no longer have to wait for the next Comdex or Supercomm. Events that lead to a buzz about products and services are taking different forms, whether it is a post on GigaOm, TechCrunch, Gizmodo or others, a passing mention on social media, or news of an investigation into a lost prototype of a yet-to-be launched product found in a bar. Depending on which industry you belong to, there could be new ways in which to learn about developments in your specific industry, without having to wait for the next big event in your industry.

So what would be a good approach to reinvent a trade show, revive it or and prevent it from extinction? Here are a few of my thoughts on 'Born Again' Trade Shows. I am using the name of Supercomm to focus my thoughts, but it could be any trade show brand that has been canceled or hurting.

• Start building a by-invitation-only online community under the Supercomm brand - believe it or not, even a simple list-serv will do the trick. Do this a year before you plan on serious revenue-generation.
• Help members identify the year and location in which they were at Supercomm last - thus recognizing veterans in the industry, and enabling kind of an online reunion by year of participation.
• Regain the trust of the past attendees and exhibitors with special offers of visibility, recognition, held online.
• Legitimize the grapevine by becoming the most trusted source in your industry that gives information to the members about who has joined what company, and who received a promotion, who retired etc. - stuff that one normally learns from conversations on the trade show floor.
• Aggregate all relevant news feeds for your members, and deliver it to them in whatever format they prefer - online, mobile, email, printer-friendly or printed mailers - give them the choice.
• Needless to say, every piece of communication that goes out, carries with it the potential of targeted ad revenues - just make sure they do not get annoying or dominant. Let your members know that the sponsors are making it possible for you to bring them relevant and verified information.
• Create a qualification process for new members to join your exclusive 'club'.
• About 6 or 9 months into the process of building the online community, get a feel for whether members of your club are itching for in-person contact - if yes, then introduce small local networking events - let your community members choose to do it themselves -simply facilitate the use of meetup.com or other (pardon the buzzword) geo-locational technologies available, in conjunction with your Supercomm brand. Let them meet in local restaurants of their choice, a local country-club - wherever they like. Do not meddle with the community's local preferences. Instead, support them with co-sponsorships.
• Immediately preceding these local meetups, create an itradefair or a virtual trade show - so that those who are meeting have a chance to pre-screen one another's business or offerings in a structured manner, and schedule a time to meet with one another on any of the nearest meetups being organized. This would be a grassroots revival of the Supercomm brand.
• Based on how the meetups start growing, get a sense for whether there would be interest in an sponsored meetup in a few regional centers so that members can drive for an hour or two and meet with other Supercommers. If yes, then have a few big regional parties - simultaneously - music, food, fun, no work. Let them mingle. Let the friendships bloom.
• Once the regional parties gain momentum, have a national party. Same thing - music, food, fun, no work. Keep them short and close them just as the momentum is building. Leave them wanting more. Leave out the trade shows, the heavy lifting, the educational sessions, the product pitches. Leave those to the online environment. When your members meet in person let it be for socializing and (pardon the buzzword) connecting. People like to do business with people they like. Create super Supercomm memories. Watch your brand come back to life.

You think it is far-fetched? See how Seth Godin is doing it.

Checklist - How to Create Sponsorship Packages in a Virtual Trade Show

This checklist will help organizers of Online Exhibitions to mix and match various elements of a virtual trade show to create Sponsorship spots.

Before we begin, a word of caution. One must not forget that the key to successful sponsorship packages is to stop short of becoming an annoyance or becoming obnoxious - try stopping way before that point. Over-exposure can hurt. If you design your Virtual Exhibition in such a way that every click of the mouse forces a visitor to watch a sponsor's message, you are hurting the sponsor rather than helping them.

Given below are 17 examples of sponsorship spots in the virtual space, for an event organizer to use in building sponsorship packages.

• Sponsored message in each invitation email
• Sponsored message in each system-generated notification such as password retrieval, and registration confirmation
• Banners in the Virtual Lobby
• Specially designed Sponsor’s Gallery
• Parade of logos on the main Virtual Trade Show page
• Sponsored messages at the start of kick-off conference sessions, be it webinars, webcasts, tele-presence calls or the good old telephone conferences.
• Commercial sponsored messages in featured Virtual Exhibits
• Use of a Sponsor’s Booth in Demos – live or on-demand archived demos
• Use of a Sponsor’s Booth in Instructional Videos
• Featuring Sponsored Virtual Exhibitors in stories in your event newsletter and event blogs
• Specially recorded Sponsored video messages in the Video Theater at the Virtual Exhibition
• Priority for Sponsored Virtual Exhibitors with reserved Buyer-Meeting slots when you run a virtual or face-to-face match-maker in conjunction with your itradefair
• Sponsored messages through your social media alerts
• Sponsored messages in Virtual Exhibition Reports page
• Branding and naming an entire Virtual Exhibit Hall or a Virtual Pavilion for a Sponsor
• Branding and naming the Conference Center or the Video Theater at the Virtual Event
• Branding and naming the entire Virtual Exhibition for the Sponsor.

There may be more - especially if you are able to tie your virtual exhibition along with tactile experiences - because virtually, one can do only so much.

Simplicity and subtlety is the key to delivering sponsor messages effectively, in the virtual trade show. In-your-face sponsorship can backfire. After all, you want your audience to leave feeling grateful to the sponsors for bringing them the virtual event, not detesting them.

Checklist - How to Get Started with a Virtual Trade Show

This checklist is the outcome of two separate phone conversations that I had this week, one with a print-media professional in Africa and the other with a trade show professional here in the United States - both of them knew they wanted to do a virtual trade show. They just did not know how or where to get started.

This checklist is hopefully, the first in a series of checklists I will create and post on this blog. The goal is to demystify virtual trade shows.

In the words of a happy customer in a call earlier this week, "people say they are impressed when they hear about us doing a virtual trade show, but I tell them it is really no big deal because it is not hard to do at all. It is really easy to do a virtual trade show."

Thanks are due to Dr. Atul Gawande for reminding us through his book 'The Checklist Manifesto', that life is a lot easier with checklists. So are virtual trade shows and virtual 'any' shows. So here's the checklist.

• Select the media-property, if you have one, or vertical in which to do the virtual fair
• Select a technology provider for your fair.
• Select a Liaison at your end – could be a part-timer for starters.
• Decide on the technology for Keynotes and kick-off – even a conference call works!
• Poll your audience on what they would like to see or do at the virtual fair.
• Determine the frequency and the timing of the itradefair.
• Reach out to Keynote Speakers - only if you are adding a Conference.
• Identify an upcoming face-to-face meeting to link with the itradefair.
• Pick images and branding - consistent with face-to-face (f2f) event, if you own both.
• Understand what your virtual fair technology provider can do and can't do for you.
• Create sales packages – keep them as simple as possible.
• Create messaging for different audiences – one size may not fit all.
• Get your itradefair site ready for pre-registrations.
• Consider writing a newsletter to keep your target audience updated with stories.
• Consider social media to post teasers about what to expect at the itradefair.
• Sell sponsorships – try to recoup all or most of your early costs.
• Sell virtual booth spaces – exhibitors build booths by themselves, so it’s easy.
• Sell attendee seats – worthy content can command greater fee than f2f.
• Plan an outreach campaign – no more than 4 email-reminders.
• Launch your itradefair – but keep it short in duration; repeat it each quarter.

If you need help with any of these, please email the good folks at iTradeFair.com at info@itradefair.com and someone will be happy to help you out.

"What's the best story you have heard?"

Over the weekend, a couple of items on the web caught my attention because they provide a valuable lesson for the virtual event as it tries to legitimize itself as the new marketing medium required to give traditional marketing the required boost.

One was the story that the sandwich-board job hunter found a job by going to a trade show where he met his new boss. The trade show industry perhaps is not highlighting this benefit as they try to justify the power of their current business models because they do not want their exhibit halls swarming with the near-homeless and the jobless, instead of power-buyers with open purchase orders in their hands.

The other was an interesting video presentation by Scott Berkun, author of "Confessions of a Public Speaker". He closes his presentation by telling the conference participants to go to a booth and instead of listening passively to the exhibitor's prepared statements, ask them "so what's the best story you have heard?"

Now let us ask ourselves the same question. In any of the virtual events that you may have seen, are you able to go and ask the exhibitors or the virtual event organizers..."so what's the best story you have heard?"

The last time I saw a public virtual event, the public chat room, or networking lounge, as some vendors call it (add social to it if you prefer - social networking lounge) was overflowing with sales people and PR people trying really hard to keep the attention of the online visitors. They were trying hard to draw the visitors to their respective virtual booths. At the virtual booth itself, it was just more of the same - more salespeople, more sales brochures, pitches after pitches.

Virtual events need story-tellers.

Of course, there are constraints. Sometimes the best stories have to remain untold. For example, when we at iTradeFair.com do a closed corporate trade show, and a company gets a trial order for half a million dollars through a purely virtual interaction, we can't talk about it. Both the event organizer, which in this case is the corporation, and the vendor that was awarded the contract do not want to publicize ther success story because they consider it a part of their competitive strategy. A non-disclosure agreement prevents us from telling the story.

Similarly, when we do virtual job fairs, our proudest moments are when we see job candidates from far and wide - many from the U.S. Military signed in from places such as Bahrain, Germany, Guam, Japan, Korea, from the Pacific Ocean on-board USS Bonhomme Richard, Quebec, Seoul and even Siberia, logging in to meet with recruiters before their return to civilian life. We can't tell these stories because we have to protect the privacy of the client and the users.

However, here are some things that a virtual exhibitor can do:

• Staff their booth-chats as well as the networking lounges with people from their technical teams - individuals who actually designed, manufactured or programmed a product. Their stories will be more interesting to visitors than prepared sales pitches and PR-speak. It helps keep your company genuine.
• If possible, staff booth-chats with some of their best customers who can evagelize their product for them
• If customers will oblige, obtain videos of testimonials, and make them available at the virtual booth.
• Request customers to spare 30 minutes online using powerful yet simple tools like Proclaim.
• Request customers to post their testimonials on the bulletin board at the virtual booth.

Without good stories to tell, virtual events will not realize their immense potential. Without good stories to share there will be no rapport already established amongst the online exhibitors and attendees when they eventually meet in person. A virtual event when conducted without a story-telling element, is a big opportunity lost.

Don’ts and Don’ts of a Virtual Event

This post is based on the first-hand experience at a virtual event (essentially a webcast) to which I was invited. I attended this event wearing the hat of a qualified corporate buyer, and here are my observations.

1. Don’t bore the daylights out of me. Webcasts that are an hour-long lose audiences or their attention. Take a tip from TED conferences. 18 minutes long. Try allowing the presenters to talk for no more than 20 minutes, open it up for 10 minutes for Q&A, but let the audience members stretch it to an hour if there are a lot of questions. A lot of questions means a very interested audience. Ask the moderator to inform the online audience that all questions will be announced anonymously.
2. Don’t allow me to drift off aimlessly. Throwing a bunch of icons and tabs, and a lot of human-like figures gliding aimlessly on a screen just wastes my time. Give me a roadmap but let me have the flexibility to jump from point to point. By the way, back to my earlier point – long webcasts do contribute to people drifting off to other places including the networking lounge or worse yet, to a browser window outside of the virtual event.
3. Don’t make me feel like I am intruding – especially intruding on a conversation in the Networking Lounge. Have an usher welcome me. Have a few people from technical support in the networking lounge.
4. Don’t let booth chat conversations be publicly visible. It can hurt your event’s brand, your sponsor’s image, and certainly does harm the exhibitor’s image. I am not interested in reading the conversation between your sponsor and a booth staffer asking how the traffic was and how you had 2,000 registrants. That should be a private conversation.
5. Don’t call your networking lounge a ‘social networking lounge’. It is a dead giveaway that you are trying too hard to fit in. Most audience members can see through the gimmick.
6. Don’t make the public chat room a generic one. Give it a purpose. If you expect large traffic, consider opening a few (chat rooms) and give each one a purpose. That will help channel conversations more effectively. Most audience members do not participate in the chat lounge. I guess like me, they are afraid to appear rude and interrupt any ongoing dialog between the few participants who like to dominate the scene. One would not typically barge in the middle of a f2f conversation among two or three participants, so the same holds true in the virtual event.
7. Don’t drool in public. To the exhibitors and sponsors of the virtual event, if you have your clients in the chat lounge and they are lavishing praises on your product, a polite thank you is good enough. Besides, the conversation looks staged, so it can be counter-productive. I suggest that you ask this overly complimentary customer to leave a note in a testimonial on your booth in the message board on your virtual booth. If you do not have a message board, ask your provider to include it.
8. Don’t let every click in your virtual event respond with a ‘loading’ pause. Lucky you had only 5 virtual booths on display in your exhibit hall. Imagine a virtual trade show with 120 booths. With 10 items in each booth to click on, we are talking of 1,200 ‘loading’ pauses in the virtual event, which means I have wasted an hour simply loading stuff on my high-speed internet connection. Choose some combination of technologies to improve my navigation. Keep it simple where possible.
9. Don’t show me expired webcasts in your list. I spent a lot of time trying to see which one was going on at the time I signed in. The time zone it showed was PST where I am not. Online, audiences have fleeting attention. Don’t lose them for this.
10. Don’t let sponsors dictate your registration form. They did not leave me with an option of ‘not interested’ in their product. I was there to see if an exhibitor from whom we were considering purchasing a product had any updates on their product lines.

The role of the telephone in a virtual trade show

Virtual exhibitors often ask us to review their virtual booths and give them recommendations about the content they have displayed on their virtual booths.

What we have observed is that in the clamor to ‘go virtual’, marketing professionals who are responsible for displaying messages on their virtual booth tend to forget the main goal of the virtual booth. Let me reiterate it here: The raison d'être for your virtual booth is to get a buyer to contact you in the manner most convenient to such buyer. Even if that means a telephone call. (Feel free to replace 'buyer' with 'prospect', 'lead', 'job candidate' or whichever specialized category to which your audience belongs.)

It boggles my mind as to why a company would go to great lengths to try to hide the phone number as a way to contact them on their website. That same approach seems to be common in planning content on the virtual booth. While your company’s logo and the cool tag-lines may be great to display on your virtual booth, if you are serious about making connections through your virtual booth, do not for even a moment think that it is old fashioned to expect online visitors to make a phone call.

Instant messaging, text messaging, SMS, skype calls, a twitter message – all of these are fine. However, there is absolutely no harm in displaying a specially set up phone number – a hotline, for your online visitors to call decision makers at your company.

During your virtual trade show, try giving your prospective buyers a refreshingly new experience. Allow visitors to cut through the corporate red-tape by setting up a hotline with your company CEO or a VP of Marketing or Sales. Display the phone number prominently on your virtual booth. You might even use some variation of the phrase common in infomercials … “Our operators are standing by to take your call! Call now!” That is because, in a virtual trade show, you have the power to attend to your online visitors no matter where you or they are located. It’s a promise you can make and keep. All you need is a phone that works.

Now, one can get fancy with technology relating to phones as well, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.

Virtual what?

Virtual trade show service providers have a serious problem - not knowing what to name their baby. Virtual Tradeshow, Online Event, Online Tradeshow, Virtual Expo, Virtual Environment, Virtual Show. Lately, event-management companies have joined the party, so we also have Virtual Experiential Services launched through Virtual Experience platforms.

Earlier at least we used to know the top player for robust webcasts, but now even they have started doing virtual shows, thus hurting their unique positioning built over the years. I was talking to a veteran publisher from the industry last week, and my worst fears were confirmed. The market of trade show organizers is confused with all this new terminology. To all that add the word 'social' to taste, and now you will have the perfect recipe for a virtual experiential social networking environment and lead generation event solution.

When we at iTradeFair.com first began calling our offering a virtual trade show, we created visuals of trade show booths and used the trade show metaphor in our messaging to help the market make the connection and leap over the learning curve. What has however, been happening lately, is that virtual trade show providers have taken that metaphor quite literally - straining to recreate the visual effects of a real convention center. These virtual experiences, as they are being labeled are mind-bogglingly slow to load on the screen and painfully two-dimensional to navigate with ease. Special efforts to un-level the playing field by offering 'real estate' at the portal entrance to the highest bidders is an example of the tactile-event mindset limiting the immense growth-potential of the virtual trade show (for want of a better name). Wayfinding in such environments is a nightmare; prompting trade show veterans to go ballistic every time the phrase 'virtual trade show' is mentioned to describe these venues. Organizers of such venues gushing about the virtual lounges and the chat functionality may hurt their own credibility - it's a text chatroom, for crying out loud. Alright, throw in a video-chat. It's still a chatroom. Why not keep it simple? I am sure that such environments please the branding agencies, but what about the attendee?

Did anyone look at the abandon-rates of these experiential environments? It is not simply who visited your online venue that matters - it is also how many would have liked to visit that is of consequence here.

In the ultimate analysis your typical virtual trade show site is just an engaging yet structured way of presenting information while collecting audience data for follow-up. If only we figure out how to keep it simple, we will see acceptance rates increase in the millions as against the present mere thousands that put aside their work to take part in these online events. Unfortunately, the way these sites are structured today are quite unwelcoming - designed to discourage the bulk of the potential traffic. We at iTradeFair.com are guilty of the same issue even though we are constantly trying to simplify the navigation. We do get very positive comments about the simplicity and elegance of our itradefairs, but we have a lot more work to do in that direction. Hopefully, we will also establish a simple name by which to refer to our virtual trade shows, a name that does not confuse the potential users. Or like some of our customers prefer, we might simply resign ourselves to calling it an itradefair.