I have been talking about the convention season like it is a time to get a license and hunt for prospects (enter Bugs Bunny skit or scene here using the “Wabbit Season/Duck Season”).  The fall is generally that time of year for me.  “Back To School” campaigns are also all the rage on advertisements for all the retailers.  All of this means that we will be inundated with the time that many of us will spend in an expo hall shaking hands, meeting people and getting to be exposed to a large number of people.  I believe that the the latter is what we need to learn to survive.  This is where we all start to get that cold and flu bug that seems to hit us and attack us as we get over exposed.  Here are my tips to being healthy during the convention season:

Wash Your Hands

This is one of the things that we all get to hear on a regular basis.  Our mothers stand over us and tell us we need to wash those hands and this is probably the best advice.  If you are at a location where there are a lack of facilities to wash, pick up some hand sanitizer and use it often and regular.

Drink Plenty of Water

This is not something that many of us do on a regular basis.  If you drink more water you are generally more healthy.  Staying hydrated is critical to fighting off bad health.  In fact, this can also help you with washing your hands as we all know what drinking lots of water does and the result, which of course we all wash our hands after doing.

Get  Exercise

If you are healthy you will have a better chance of fighting off any bugs.  We all tend to stay up late and get up early in the convention season.  It is the nature of the beast.  What we need to do is get up early and go for a run, or use the gym at the hotel where we are staying.  Get the heart pumping, get some air in those lungs and again drink lots of water while doing it and you will see the difference in how you can face not only the challenges of that busy convention schedule.

Three easy steps to take to give you that added little extra during convention season.  If you have your own tips feel free to share them.  We all need to be healthy for convention season.  I need to get out and run and pick up some bottled water so I can head into my convention season.  See you at your booth!

What is co-location of conferences?  We know that co-location is defined as:  “to locate together; especially : to place (two or more units) close together so as to share common facilities.”  This is provided by Merriam-Webster, but what does it actually mean to us in the conference world?  To me it has a few messages.

Spreading out costs: I think one of the main points in today’s economy is that it allows a conference to partner with another conference to share in the costs of the facility or other costs.  If you have two companies that might have somewhat differing agendas but might share the same attendees, they can both share in the cost of the rental of the facility or the other costs that might be associated with putting on the event.  This also means of course that you would have to also share in the revenue of the attendees tickets and perhaps some of the sponsors but that is to be expected when dealing with partners.

Markets Join Forces: Many companies join together for a common purpose.  This is not much different from conferences joining together for a common purpose.  It may be that a single conference does not have the amount of content to support a full conference but if they joined with another conference that might also be too small to support a full conference, together they could make a full conference agenda of speakers and exhibitors for a better conference experience.

Management is Distributed: In some cases the companies that are putting on the events are too small but if they joined forces they could spread out the amount of work necessary.  perhaps Company A wil be in charge of the front facing marketing promotion and sales, while company B is responsible to the back end management of registrations, exhibit booth set up, housing and speakers.  With two companies each taking on all of the responsibilities necessary it spreads out the work load making it easier to accomplish all that needs done.

These are just a few of the simple ideas behind why conferences are co-located.  I know that we are beginning to see more and more of this as economic factors make it necessary to join forces and allow for more people to participate in attending conferences as well as managing them.  Are you a co-located conference manager?  Why are you co-locating?  What are some of the downfalls of co-locating conferences?  Would love to hear your thoughts.

I have been thinking for a while about convention and trade show leaders.  The people that lead us up the hill in this time of economic troubles.  The ones that make us feel good about where we are in the industry.  Those that are our though leaders and those that have companies that they are keeping on the path to success.

I have been thinking about what makes a good leader and what do the conferences, conventions or trade shows that are successful have in common?  I think the answer is simple and obvious, they have good leadership.  Last night on Twitter this conversation came about about companies that work well and what they have in common.  It also talked about the traits of the leaders of those companies that were successful.  Some of the traits of the leaders were:

• Passion
• Vision
• Fearlessness
• Determination

Those may sound like things we all have but in some leaders that exude these traits.  The funny thing is that if you ask each of us about what we think of when we think of a good leader and what traits we find important, each of us would have a different answer.  It does seem that we all wont to follow those that inspire us to be followers.  Some leaders have a confidence that we want to follow. It makes me think of what are the traits I want to see in a leader.  I have talked about events that fail and have been talking about events that are struggling but those that are winning the struggle and the battles are those with good leadership.  What are the things you look for in your event leadership?

Photo via Hamed Saber

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the idea behind a trade show manager that would wait up until the show date to cancel it and take the money and escape out the back way.  That sounds a little dramatic and perhaps it is just the movie of the week that is playing in my head when I imagine that actually happening but it could happen.  In fact in 1995 I remember a man organizing trade shows in Houston, Texas while sitting in his prison cell.  He would set up the event sell exhibit booth space and then cancel at the last minute and not give anyone their money back.  He would tell vendors and others that there was not adequate parking.  As I said, it should be the movie of the week.

Today, 15 years after the fact, the economy is struggling and people are having difficulty getting new businesses to work and flourish.  This is part of the other problem with trade shows, events and conferences that are failing and not getting off the ground.  There are not enough sponsors willing to fork over money for the events that are starting and the organizers have no financing to get a year under their belt and lastly, attendees cannot afford to attend.  It seems to be a vicious cycle and in among this craziness is people wanting to take advantage of others.

How do you protect yourself in a situation with new show organizers that have the opportunity to be a good event but must either cancel the event or have it be a failure when you show up and present your trade show best to very few attendees?  There must be ways for you to protect yourself from this.  I want to explore this more and would ask that anyone that has experience with this leave us a comment.  I would love to talk to some wily veterans that might have this knowledge and might know how to combat the problem.  If you have had this happen either as an organizer or an attendee or an exhibitor I would love to hear from you.  Let us in on what happened and how.  I am going to do some further research on this and run a series of information on Trade Show and Convention Fraud.  I might even throw in some of my own experience.  I think this is something that is very unfortunate and something we should all be aware of in this tight economy.

One of the things I do quite a bit is speak at conferences around the country.  I use speaking as a way to help promote my business because I am seen as an expert or a thought leader by presenting on topics within my industry. I try to help promote my speaking at events by sending out a number of messages on Twitter and letting my community on Facebook know where I will be speaking, and I generally try to get people to know where I will be and where they can find me.  It is good business to promote yourself through speaking.

What I don’t see often enough is speakers that promote the shows that they are asked to speak at on a large scale.  It is a win win situation when asked to speak at a conference.  You get the chance to be seen as the expert and the conference gets your content to provide to their attendees.  The latter part of that statement is the most important, the attendees to the event.  You can help the conference by getting people in the seats.  Many would argue that is is a responsibility to help the show organizer to get people to come to the show if you will be there speaking.  If you are not selling yourself and the conference you are not promoting well.

If you have a website advertise the upcoming show on space that tells your community about the conference.  When commenting on blogs about your topic, tell people where they can go to register for the event. Have a Slideshare account?  Make sure you upload your power point presentation.  All of this can help your presentation and help the event where you are speaking.  Bottom line is if you are asked to speak, do your part to help promote the conference to make it a success.  If the show is seen as a success and you helped make it work, you will be asked back for future conferences to be seen as the expert in your field.  It is good business.

Photo via Daveness_98

I have seen it a thousand times and experience it nearly everyday in my kids, video garners attention.  What I mean by that is when I tell my kids to do something they always say, “just one more second, I want to see this!”  It is that last minute piece of video or cartoon or what ever the case.  I see it at the local bar, with video in the background everyone gravitates to the movement and the sound or the flashy images going on the screen.  It can be a commercial for some obscure soap, the latest television show or the scores of the day and the weather channel.  It doesn’t matter what the images are, we always seem to gravitate to the television screen or video screen.

Your exhibit booth can be the same way and garner the attention of trade show attendees by using the same content.  If you have a short 3-5 minute video that can be looped about your product or service, make sure you put it in a place that is seen by the attendees as they pass by an then take note.  I would be willing to bet they like my kids or like that restaurant customer have to just watch that last bit before moving on to the next thing. The example in the photo here is an exhibit display offered by Skyline Exhibits showing a video in a display wall.  Many exhibit booth dealers can provide you with systems for video to be integrated into your display.  This will give you every opportunity to capture the attention of attendees.   It gives you every opportunity to strike up a conversation that might not otherwise have happened without a little video in their world.

Photo via Skyline Exhibits

I recently attended a “hybrid convention” and I will talk more about that when I recap my attendance at the latest TS2 show in Boston.  The show as a great success and I want to absorb all that went on there but I wanted to quickly get the information out here on location based software.  Location based software or what is used in “geo-location” is all the rage in the mobile community and the geo-location community.  What is geo-location based software?  This is software that pinpoints your location using cell sites or global positioning sites.  I can locate where I am using my mobile phone.  This has lead to the software like what is being used now by the early adopters and the technology world.  What are the applications that are being used?  The two main applications are Gowalla and the one I am using called Foursquare.

Foursquare was recently mentioned at the TS2 show by Jim Rooney the head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, someone that we have featured here before as a forward thinking leader in our industry.  Jim is responsible for helping run, along with his great staff of people, the Boston Convention Center.  He mentioned that he is looking into the location based applications as a new technology they are interested in implementing at the MCCA.  This can only mean that many of the leaders in the space are also looking to use the new software and its applications.  If you want to look into this as a way for you to make your convention or trade show better, we can help.

The catch to the title of this post is ironic.  I am attending some interviews of some key figures and players in the industry at the TS2 conference but I am not actually in Boston.  I am in the comfort of my own office from Colorado.  I did the same thing yesterday as the crew in the Boston Convention Center put together an online stream of the convention floor called #InZone.  That is the hashtag that is being used on Twitter and across the online world.  You can follow along with what is happening on Twitter and online if you choose.  The link for that may change and be inoperable but if you see it today you may still have time.

The online presence is being sponsored by the folks over at The Expo Group and my friend Dana Freker Doody is helping put that on.  It is how I heard of its existence.  She reached out to her community and told all of us that it existed. The other sponsors to the event include the MCCA, 3DMedia, Emilie Barta, CORT, IEP, and Digitell.  All of them put this together to make it a great experience.  I will talk about this more and perhaps even get an interview after the show is over with Dana Doody about the post show recap.

I was reading through an article by Rachel Wimberly over at TSNN.com about a Denver convention of teachers and their use of Wifi.  The event I am speaking of is at the Colorado Convention Center in my part of the world.  The convention is the International Society for Technology In Education or ISTE.  The article references Smart City a company that we have featured on here before and a company that is well known in the Wifi space for conventions and trade shows. I think that what we see in a convention like ITSE is going to be the wave of the future for conferences.  What TSNN writes is:

Of the 18,000 attendees who showed up for the event, 16,500 of them were online at any given time. Donella Evoniuk, ISTE’s senior director of conference services, said the event has offered free Wi-Fi since 2001, and they have worked with Smart City for several years to ensure the attendees’ demand to be online is met.

I am in the world of social media so it may be that the events that I mostly attend and the ones I am invited to speak at may be more technically minded and may involve more attendees online, but I do think this is a trend that will continue in all conferences and trade shows.  The article goes on to state:

Smart City has worked with ISTE on several shows, but Evoniuk said when a preshow survey indicated more than 80 percent of attendees intended to bring their laptops to the show, as well as 50 percent planned to bring both a cell phone and a laptop to the event, they knew demand was going to be unusually high. On top of that, ISTE promoted active back channel communications through live Twitter feeds and the ISTE 2010 Blog Roll, she added.

This is only going to be more of the norm.  I am constantly wondering what the “connectivity” is going to be like when I attend events.  With the new social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook having the success that they are and the participation we are seeing in the realm of those social sites, we can assume that everyone wants to be connected.  There are plenty of new technologies that are being developed for conference and convention attendees in mind that are integrating connectivity in the wifi space that we will see become more prevalent at conventions as well.  The article seems to make it sound as if this is a new idea, but in reality, this is slowly becoming the norm.

I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day about using email marketing as a way to get the word out and help get information to a customer.  I am still a child of email myself and I check that usually before I get my coffee in the morning.  A recent study reported by Mashable indicates that the next generation may be checking Facebook before they have their coffee, but I for one stick with the basics and go through email.

I continue to receive email updates from conferences and trade shows I have attended but for the most part, they smaller shows only send out a few updates a year and those are usually centered around events such as a call for speakers, or a sale of early bird tickets or other bigger announcements.  I think that is a poor use of email and newsletters.  Email is a great way to get up to speed year round and keep things fresh in the minds of your attendees, exhibitors and sponsors.  It is a great tool for helping you garner more sponsors in fact if they think you will be promoting them all year.

There are many email services out there and none of them are head and shoulders about their competitors.  I like to see a company that provides good analytics and one that allows you to customize your emails easily.  I know that some of the companies out there even have the ability to integrate with your blog and other social networks which is a nice touch.  Are you using email as a way to market your event?  How many emails is too many versus how many are too little.  I like to think that once a month I should be seeing your event show up on my radar and as we get close to your event you should get out as many as one per week.  What has worked for you in the past?