Convention Insider (Conventions.net)

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.

Does your convention have a security plan?  If not you might want to think about what occurred today in San Diego at ComicCon.  I have written about ComicCon before and it is one of the conferences I would most want to attend.  It is unfortunate that today it had an issue with attendee violence.

It has been reported that in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center where ComicCon was taking place that an attendee of a session was attacked by another attendee and allegedly stabbed in the eye with a pen over a dispute involving a seat.  The attendees of ComicCon are very loyal fans and apparently issues caused the escalation of the incident.  I read about the incident on Twitter and Facebook, which seems to be the breaking news rooms of today.  I am not sure what all the facts are at this time but it made me think about convention security.

I will ask the question again.  Does your convention have a security plan?  I am sure in this particular instance the San Diego Convention Center had all the bases covered and it seems that the incident did not get further out of hand.  As I understand it they had police there quickly and had the matter under control.  I will discuss more about security in conventions or trade shows, but for now let’s see how the story of this unfolds.

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.

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.

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.

Canceling an event that never seems to get off the ground can be a difficult decision.  There are many things that go into making that decision, be it sponsorships that are on the fence, and attendees coming on board or speakers that will make or break both of the foregoing.  I was watching around the Internet this weekend and noticed that a recent tech event in Italy was canceled by organizers here in the United States.  It was not a great story to read as I too have been part of a failed conference and it was a difficult time for all.  There are sponsors to answer to and their are attendees to work out issues with and finally making things right for speakers that are making commitments can be a hassle.  All-in-all, I don’t wish a failed event on anyone.

When is it time to call it quits or when is the time for that pass fail grade for your event?  For many it seems to revolve around money.  If an event does not get the number of attendees for their needs to pay hotels and facilities, the answer is simple.  You cancel the event by necessity since the money is no t in the bank to support the event.  Some sponsors want certain criteria to be met before they will provide the check for the vent and if that does not happen, that too is a trigger to call it quits.  In this particular instance it seems that a combination of money and logistics caused the event to fail.  They had to cancel the location of the event as the hotel required a deposit that was not paid and they themselves pulled the rug out for organizers. This is very unfortunate as there are tales now of attendees showing up for an event and not having the event take place.

I am also disturbed by organizers that are putting together events and have no intention of having the event take place.  I have heard of some fraud going on in our industry and that is very disturbing.  Making exhibitors pay for booths and sponsors to pay for sponsorship of events and when the time comes for the convention or conference to take place the organizers are no place to be found.  This is a practice that seems to give us all a black eye.  When is the best time to cancel an event?  My hope is never.