What Are They Saying About Your Convention?
My mother always told me not to gossip. She would cite some reference in Proverbs I think it was and tell me I was not being a good boy when I gossiped about a friend or that spooky neighbor that was like Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. Many people don’t have my mother to tell them that it is bad to talk behind someone’s back so I guess we need to resort to other methods to find out what is being said. Not because we are going to send my mother over to scold them for doing it, but because there is great intelligence that can be gathered as a result of our own listening in on other people’s conversations.
What is being said about your convention? Are you listening? There are many ways now of finding out what is being said about a particular company or about a speaker, or a session or other information that takes place in your show, but how do we find out? You can certainly do things like Google alerts, and RSS search feeds and other intelligence gathering methods, but perhaps it is time for your convention or trade show to get professional help. I mean some of the listening software out there, like Techrigy, Radian 6 or Trakur or other types of software. There are a number of them, I just happened to know the people behind these and they were off the top of my head. If you have no idea what the examples are that I gave before the names of these companies, I definitely advise you to seek their help.
Why is it important? I think you already know the answer to that. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall after your event? Now you can be that and have the intelligence to make your show better than your competition. I should also add that not only can you see what they are saying about you, but how about what they are saying about your competition also? That might be good to know as well. How am I sure that you will get wind of what is being said? Let’s just see if the people at these companies come by and see what is being said about their listening software shall we? I promise not to tip them off. My bet is they at least say hello. We can also see if their competition is listening and if they want to let us know about their monitoring software too.
Photo via eHow
Tags: listening, tracking software, Techrigy, Radian 6, Trakur, Social Media Tracking
Many thanks for recommending Trackur to your readers!
Greetings! You were right, we were listening.
Thank you for spreading the word about the power of listening and the Radian6 shout out. Much appreciated.
Cheers,
Lauren
@VargasL
Radian6
Glad to hear you guys are up and running at normal speed again! Anyway, in response to tracking “trade show word of mouth,” I agree that it’s very important. In terms of online tracking, even Twitter offers tools, such as TweetBeep, that automatically notifies you when users post certain keywords. On the flipside, I think getting feedback during the trade show (on the spot) is extremely important as well. For example, I recently read about a new hand-held gadget for trade shows that will enable trade show reps to better track and improve their booths while getting immediate feeback from attendees. The product is called Spotme and features tools such as a personalized agenda, audience response, Q&A sessions, messaging, attendance tracking, lead retrieval attendance tracking, electronic feedback forms, and more. One of my company’s blogs will be writing a post about it tomorrow (Friday). If anyone is interested, you can read that post here: http://trade-show-promotion.blogspot.com/
Thanks Kye and we will be reading. We are not quite up and running yet as we still have some back end technical difficulties but we are working on them.
Lauren and Andy I knew you would both probably be here! Lauren I hear confgrats are in order for your new job at Radian 6. Yes, I listen too!
Great article, you bring up some great points here. Listening to feedback and learning from mistakes is important to remember when it comes to conventions and trade shows. You can never improve if you aren’t willing to listen to and change due to feedback.