Convention Insider (Conventions.net)

It is one of the new catch phrases of the year, “How Do I Make My Business Hyper-Local?”  It is often asked and rarely understood.  Businesses everywhere are going global with their reach as they branch out to areas only now offered as a result of the Internet and Social Media.  They are finding new ways to reach the masses and finding ways to cats a wider net to garner more customers.  This is a great new phenomena that is taking hold and will be a new way of doing business for years to come.  Is this a good thing?  I think it is a great thing, but not at the cost of dealing with the customers in your own backyard.  Are you losing the customers in your backyard?

So many times we are seeing that conventions are growing at leaps and bounds as a result of their newly found reach using tactics that allow them to market to a whole new audience.  They love to talk about getting attendees now from other places in the world and from across the globe, but what they are failing to understand is that they are also forgetting the people right there in their own backyard.  The Internet not only allows you to have a greater reach, it also allows you to drill down within the local communities to find those attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and others right in your own backyard.  Take some time to research not only that customer on the other side of the world that you can now communicate with, but find that customer right on your own street that has been there the whole time.  You will increase your reach even farther just but seeing what is right in front of you.

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!

I talked about it becoming convention season in the last post and that means it is back to setting up and tearing down your exhibit booth space.  If you are a small business it means probably getting the most bang for your buck in the area of a display that is easy to set up can be done with only one person and can be checked in as luggage when you travel.  I have been looking around recently at some of the display companies because I too will be needing to get a display booth that is for people on the move.

I spend about one week a month in the first six month of the season going to a couple of large shows and then a few small events and then a final large one before going in to work mode.  I am always looking for ease of use.  There are many companies out there that offer a portable display that is easy to set up and can make your company look professional and certainly won’t break the bank.  In today’s economy, the latter part of that equation is a must.  You can’t spend a whole bank account of your marketing budget only to not be able to recover that cost on the road.  I am actually in the market for a portable display that will fit nicely and look professional in the 10 x 10 booth space or in the corner of a small event.  Portable displays are a great asset and if you find a company that provide this service let me know I would love to speak to them.

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

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 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.

It seems that everywhere I go online and where I read most o my news about the trade show industry, all I can see is the worst of times.  The business and industry of trade shows and conventions is filled with gloom and doom.  Attendance at shows or events is down, and sponsors are difficult to get, and exhibitors are tough to get commitments for the events.  This seems to be the flavor of the month for the last few months until I read recently of a study completed by UFI The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry and their Global Exhibition Barometer.

It appears that across the world in most regions profits are on the ride from this time last year and in most case by more than 10%.  This is good news compared to the losses of years past.  It appears that most of the respondents in the study indicate that in the Americas and in the Asia/Pacific regions that we are on the doorstep of economic recovery being it will take place in the second half of 2010.  Those surveyed in other parts of the world believe that the economic recovery will not yet be seen until 2011.  Either is good news being that the economic slide may be over.

This survey was conducted in December of 2009 by 176 companies in 54 different countries and provides an overall look at the exhibitions industry.  If you want to get a look at the survey and its conclusions you can read the report at the UFI site.  How about in your industry, are you seeing the economic turnaround we all are now hearing about or is it still time to knuckle under and tighten the belts for a long hot summer or a long cold winter?  I am beginning to see the writing on the wall that we may have hit bottom. Now if we can only head upward I would be thankful.

Editor:  The following is a post that I received as an email from one of our employees at Conventions.net.  I had to post it because it is a classic example of what cool stuff happens between companies and their employees.

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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 have been traveling around the state of Colorado for the past week and most of the time has been spent in the high country of places like Vail, Aspen, and Steamboat Springs.  These are normally known here in Colorado as Ski Country USA.  At this time of year however there is no skiing going on when the heat reaches temperatures in the summer of more than 80 degrees.  That may not sound hot but when Denver and Grand Junction on either side of the mountains is in the 100 degree area, the mountains are normally 20 degrees cooler.  This can help you beat the heat when you want to plan an outside event or an event where you can enjoy the out doors.

Vail, Colorado is a relatively new town having only been conceived in 1966 after the ski area opened in 1962.  My grandparents purchased 65 acres f land on the North side of the highway that ran through the valley in the 60′s and I had an opportunity to see the Vail Valley grow into what it has become today, an oasis in the rocky mountains where celebrities come to be seen, where skiers come to learn their craft and where events occur year round for corporate retreats, meetings over every kind and even a trade show or two.

If you are planning a conference in the summer and want to find a way to beat the heat and everyday look and feel of a conference in the big city, try thinking about having your show in the mountains of Colorado.  Vail has everything the big city has, airport access, restaurants, conference centers, and also something the city might not have in the summer, cooler temperatures!

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]