Face-to-Face Meetings Are Good for Health

Since the first white paper that we published 9 years ago, we have been advocating virtual fairs to be run alternatingly with face-to-face events. It may be an organized face-to-face event, or simply a face-to-face meeting by the virtual participants specially arranged amongst themselves. The goal is to be able to take the trade show to the statistical 67% of the invitees who never make it in person to the face-to-face event. This message has not been an easy sell because trade show organizers worry about cannibalizing their trade shows. It is a baseless concern. The virtual and the face-to-face have no meeting ground. They merely complement each other making up for the inefficiencies of one another.

Face-to-face events are inefficient because

• exhibitors expect attendees to carry specially created marketing literature back with them
• participants are expected to remember everyone and everything they saw in the short time on the show floor
• attendees are expected to cover an entire show floor of 600 exhibitors in a matter of 4 hours.

Virtual exhibit halls that complement a face-t0-face exhibit hall plug those inefficiences by

• allowing attendees to obtain all marketing collateral online either before or after the face-to-face encounter on the show floor, allowing for the meeting to be more fruitful, easier for memory-retention, and easier to get more people involved than were actually there on the show floor.
• allowing attendees to research the entire show floor before or after the face-to-face event, leaving no exhibitor unmet.
• allowing the producers to entice the 67% absentees to get a peek into what they missed to the extent possible, knowing that the rapport built with a face-to-face meeting is tough to replicate through a virtual encounter.

Let us see where Virtual Fairs fall short.

• Virtual exhibit halls on the other hand, while great for pre-screening and post-meeting follow-up by the participants, may still need a warm handshake, the look in the eye and a face-to-face meeting to start moving towards a level of trust.
• It is a fallacy to assume that people will spend hours on the internet in one virtual trade show after another. It can get tiring after the first hour. That is why a really good search engine is important in a virtual trade show.

Picking up on that last point, a recent story on a research paper by Dr. Arig Sigman caught my attention on BBC. Dr. Sigman's paper, titled 'Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’ says that face-to-face meetings are healthy for humans. It is an interesting paper.

Face-to-face meetings will spring back even if there seems to be a rush towards virtual meetings at present. What I hope is happening, is that this new surge in virtual meetings is a reflection of (a) event brands attracting newer participants who never made it to face-to-face events, (b) the creation of new meeting brands that were not there in the face-to-face world, and (c) traditional media companies embracing new technologies to make their face-to-face events a multi-dimensional experience rather than an escape from the cubicle.