The world of events and trade shows is getting wired, as marketers combine the power of online with fully interactive onsite footprints. Virtual events, social media and micro sites are being layered against zone designed footprints powered by interactive technology. The combination is reinventing the human connection.
“Technology is allowing us to connect with our attendees long before the event or exhibit even happens and then continue that momentum through the live experience,” says GES executive vice president strategy and marketing David Saef. “Today’s wired footprint generates engagement, participation, reach and analytics”.
Top 10 Technology Trends
1. Digital collateral.
The biggest trend on the event circuit is the move toward digital collateral, retiring past efforts of shipping crates of printed order forms and sales materials. Marketers are pushing catalogues and project information to a web site or an attendee’s PDA. Sales reps are taking orders online. It’s all electronic, which makes for greener events and less sore arms from lugging all that paperwork around.
2. Digital Signage.
Say goodbye to poster board and hello to digital signage. Just as trade show and meeting content has gone digital, so have way-finding signs and general information and sponsor banners via digital delivery systems and projection systems. Digital signage is easier to edit, more convenient to update and is greener than printing on paper. People printing fewer signs that need to be discarded post-event.
3. Social media.
It’s not a trend; it’s a reality. Every event, conference and trade show is leveraging Twitter, Twitter walls, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks to engage and inform attendees. Social media is a great way to keep in touch before, during and after the event. It can be a great platform for content delivery, on-site interactives and remains the hub of true digital+live experiences.
4. Real-time interaction.
A direct result of social media, this trend leverages feedback from Twitter and Facebook followers and fans in-booth in real time. Product specialists, tablets in hand, can show attendees in real time what people like about a product, discuss their posts and address problems. The immediacy is energizing and lends credibility to the in-booth experience.
5. Smarter lead retrieval.
Lead retrieval systems are playing a bigger role in managing the experience for the attendee in the trade show booth. In the old days, attendees would scan their badge and the exhibitor would know their basic information. Now, smart lead retrieval systems reveal much more than that. They can tell if attendees are already customers and if so, how important they are, their buying history and who their sales rep is. If the attendee is a prospect, pre-show research tells the exhibitor why this attendee is a prospect, pre-show research tells the exhibitor why this attendee was targeted and who might be competing for his business. It’s all pre-loaded onto the attendee’s badge, ready for the booth personnel to interact with on screen. The end result is a more worthwhile experience for exhibitor and attendees.
6. Proximity to RFID.
The wireless technology recognizes and tracks attendees without having to physically scan their badges. An electronic chip embedded within the badge stores information that can be read from several yards away. Sound futuristic? It’s happening now. Say you’ve just landed at an airport on your way to a trade show or conference. You may be able to walk up to a plasma screen that “reads” your badge, welcomes you and, based on your pre-show registration, delivers a personal message in your language.
7. Social media as attendee driver.
Facebook and Twitter are getting a huge upgrade in terms of how event marketers use them. Social media is being used to connect with target audiences before an event and then convert those connections into live attendees. Translation: Social media is now becoming a feeder for live event attendance.
8. Real-time.
In a high-tech world, it all happens in real time. Events, trade shows, corporate meetings are embracing the concept of “real-time” as they stream sessions and allow virtual viewers to ask live keynoters questions, taking the art and science of audience interaction to new heights.
9. Leveraging Video.
It’s the trend of the decade, and bandwidth is driving exponential growth. Video is becoming the default format for online marketing, social media sharing, trade show social media activation and virtual events. The growth of tablets is also allowing booth and event personnel to generate more one-to-one video-based conversations.
10. Hub and spoke hybrids.
Technology is reinventing the “hybrid” online-offline event model, allowing marketers to combine virtual events and large “hub” events and localized “spoke” meetings that feed off both. The goal is to reach more people and unite them, and hub and spoke models allow marketers to give attendees the choice to attend digitally or via large or small.
Excerpt from the GES white paper, “Trend Tracker: The annual listof the top 50 trends impacting trade show and events this year. For full report click here.
In theory, mobile charging stations are a fantastic idea at events. Attendees are desperate for power sources, and wall outlets have plenty of disadvantages — principally, that many attendees aren’t toting their chargers around, and there are never enough electrical outlets to go around anyway. Charging stations promise convenience, the possibility of shorter powering-up times and, with some units, even an excellent opportunity for sponsorship.
In practice, however, things may not go so smoothly. I’ve yet to use a station at a conference that actually worked for me. At a recent industry gathering, I tried powering up my nearly dead iPod touch, to no avail. The charger wasn’t compatible with the unit, despite the fact that the plug fit correctly — because my iPod was last year’s model, perhaps? Tough to say, but it’s fair to conclude that technological compatibility is one of the biggest challenges these stations face. There are a whole lot of different mobile devices out there, and not all of them were purchased in the last couple of months.
Beyond the technology, though, there’s a whole mess of considerations. And a mess was pretty much what that recent scene was, with the charging station sitting in a high-traffic hallway. The station was packed with attendees desperate to juice up their phones, with nowhere for them to go — thereby creating a real bottleneck between sessions. (A number of fellow energy-seekers told me the machine didn’t seem to be working for them either, but other attendees appeared to be accomplishing their goal.)
Overall, though, no one seemed too terribly upset. Fortunately for meeting organizers, charging stations are still a bit of a novelty. Just the fact they’re present leaves many attendees feeling cared for. So now’s really the time to experiment, and to develop best practices. I was mulling this over Friday morning when I saw a post on the MeCo forums from a meeting coordinator (Stacey Deak) seeking advice and best practices on this subject. The only advice she’d received thus far was sent directly by Beth Cooper-Zobott, director of conference services for Equity Residential. She and the original poster were kind enough to share these tips. They apply to a collection of electrical outlets rather than a dedicated charging machine — thereby avoiding the compatibility hassle — but many of the considerations are the same:
1. Make sure that you have security (one of your meeting’s team members or another person) monitoring the area. They cannot step away for a break or to help someone else, in case attendees are not keeping a close eye on their devices.
2. The best place for charging stations is in your general session space, because people don’t want to be too far away from their phones.
3. Have some way of identifying each phone when the person uses the station: Think about having slips of paper (similar to those used by the airlines for luggage) that the person can slip around their phone cord to identify it easily, because lots of phones look alike.
4. Have a reminder poster/notice to turn off the phone’s ringer so that it doesn’t interrupt a presentation (if in a session) or ring nonstop if the owner steps away.
5. Consider providing spare cords/chargers for common phones, in case attendees don’t have theirs.
I think the general session tip is a particularly good one, and I would add that stations should be available anywhere people are working and/or socializing: a networking lounge, the press room, speaker lounge and staff office for starters. I understand Concur set up a lounge area around a charging station at a recent conference, which I think is a great idea. Give people room to wait and socialize while they’re charging up. Feel free to leave more tips here in the comments section.
written by Michael J. Shapiro of Meetings-Conventions.com
Below find five rules to help you leverage technology to add to your trade show success.
1. Online is not an add-on.
The virtual component must be integral to every step of your trade-show planning. Select the best online communities to reach your customers. And maintain your brand voice and image in every message.
2. Accessibility is key.
Make sure your trade-show web page is optimized for all the browsers, including those on smart phones. The design that looked great on Internet Explorer may be unreadable on a Droid.
3. Make your message move and speak.
Use web video, still images, and podcasting as well as text. Multimedia approaches engage more of the user’s attention. Live feeds from your booth can extend your trade show message to customers around the world, and YouTube videos can make it accessible months or years after the event is over.
4. Update often.
Keep your customers coming back to check for more. Good content may be news and links, helpful tips, community-building, or just the sense of a warm, engaging person as the face of the company.
5. Listen as well as talk.
Twitter, Facebook, and blogs offer almost instantaneous feedback on what’s working and what’s not. If a member of your booth staff was rude to a customer, you can be sure the news will be all over Twitter in five minutes. Monitor the Internet and the Twitterverse with automatic searches, and respond instantly to any problems.
- by Susan Friedmann, The Tradeshow Coach
Americans covetously scarf up the newest, trendiest, techno baubles and quickly discard them the moment something newer, faster, tinier, or techier becomes available. From iPads to smart phones, we instantaneously adopt any technology we can get our hands on and behave a little like tech-addicted teenagers with ADD.
But as consumers rapidly adopt and discard various technologies, exhibit and event professionals are left desperately trying to keep up. Since most exhibits are designed and built over a span of several months, what’s considered “in” today is likely to be history by the time it actually makes its appearance on the trade show floor. And because most techno tools come with relatively hefty price tags, marketers have to be careful when selecting which high-tech, high-ticket items to put on their wish lists.
To learn how exhibit- and event-related technologies are impacting face-to-face marketers, EXHIBITOR issued the 2010 Marketing Technology Survey. The research, sponsored by Lynch Exhibits Inc. and Alliance Tech, sheds light on which technologies are being adopted by exhibit and event marketers, what corporate objectives they’re helping users to achieve, and which tools offer the most face-to-face marketing potential.
According to the survey, 82 percent of respondents currently incorporate technology into their marketing efforts,
with 72 percent using various technologies to specifically enhance their exhibit-marketing programs (compared to just 49 percent who report incorporating technology into their companies’ corporate events).
The most popular technologies used to enhance exhibit-marketing efforts range from social media and show-specific microsites to touchscreens and interactive kiosks. But a fair percentage of respondents are also exploring radio-frequency identification (RFID), mobile apps, 2-D barcodes (aka jag tags), interactive projection, and personal URLs (aka PURLs).
Just under a third of exhibit managers who are using these technologies proactively establish measurable objectives to gauge their effectiveness, but 77 percent of those that do report the technologies they used met or exceeded their initial expectations. Furthermore, respondents who have used various technologies to enhance their marketing efforts indicate that those technologies have led to increases in brand awareness, sales leads, booth traffic, and event attendance, as well as improved relationships with clients and prospects.
Those who are not currently harnessing the power of high-tech apps and elements report that a lack of internal resources (both in terms of manpower and budget), a lack of knowledge on available technologies, and a lack of time to explore those technologies is holding them back.
Still, despite the reluctance of some, respondents almost uniformly understand the efficacy of high-tech trappings. When asked how they personally view technology in the context of exhibit and event marketing, a whopping 98 percent indicated that technology has “limitless” or “moderate” potential. Furthermore, 79 percent expect the importance of technology as a marketing tool to increase “strongly” or “somewhat” in the coming year, and 54 percent anticipate spending more on marketing-related technologies in 2011 than they did in 2010.
By Travis Stanton of Exhibitor Magazine
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