We’re sincerely honored and thrilled to have Echelon Design and Tradeshow Insight be nominated for “Best Coporate Blog” in this year’s Eventprofs Blog Awards. The nominations included over 40 event blog submissions and includes seven different categories. The winners will be announced live at EventCamp Twin Cities, on September 9.

While we’d LOVE to have your vote, the nomination alone is truly humbling.We’d like to thank everyone who has participated in our blog over the past year. The conversations that are started here are only as good as those who read, comment and share the information, to keep those conversations growing. This nomination is truly in part to having such an amazing community of individuals willing to share their ideas and opinions for continuing progression in the tradeshow and events industry.

So again,

Thank you!!

Events are entering a new era, and social media is becoming an increasingly important and visible element in the transformation of events.  As events evolve away from fixed, didactic experiences to more collaborative, fluid, and participatory experiences, social media has become increasingly integral to the event experience.

As this white paper demonstrates, particularly through key case studies, evidence is mounting that social media is having a significant impact on a whole range of event functions.  In fact, social media has become central to the success of a growing number of events, and entire events have been developed around social media.

The experts interviewed for this white paper lend credence to the notion that social media is truly transforming events into more dynamic, enduring, and rewarding experiences for attendees, event producers, speakers, and exhibitors alike.  But they also stress the importance of judiciously applying social media in events to achieve the right impact, and caution against frittering away social media applications in events with haphazard implementation and underdeveloped strategies.

This white paper is designed to offer a broader perspective on the role of social media in events, and highlight key strategies for maximizing the impact of social media in events.

Simply fill out this form to download the nine-page report. Your information will not be used or distributed in any way.

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As marketers, we must embrace the task of also being educators to our clients. We must first give our customers what they expect; delivery of services and goods. But much of what ‘sells’ somebody is beyond your baseline of services. What you offer beyond expectations is what garnishes trust and establishment as an industry leader.

The Social Deficiency

It’s been interesting to watch the changing tone of Social Media conversations. “Isn’t this shiny object great?!” has changed to “Hey, this shiny object can help your business!” to now starting to identify ”here’s how you can use the shiny object.” Even still, I shutter to think that the majority of our customers are listening, let alone looking for us. The tone of the conversation is that of throwing darts in the dark.

Our customers and audiences need to be grown and harvested. We understand that attention is needed for this to happen, but have you found the right seeds? Are you laying the soil and preparing the area for these customers to grow? Without giving them a foundation, and understanding of the landscape of which they are to receive your messaging and nourishment, there’s nothing to establish roots.

Heidi Thorne, promotion products marketing expert, accurately points out that by staying “ahead of the curve” and running towards new strategies, we risk leaving our customers behind. What good does it do you to learn a new language that nobody speaks?

The emergence of Social Media has been a bit of a rat race. Much of its utilization from business has been to “stay ahead of the curve.” While there is certainly value in keeping an edge in your industry and establishing a thought leader role, who is aware of it if you’re alienating your customers in the process?

If a Social Media strategy grows in a forest and nobody is there to notice, does it ever make a sound?

Guidance = Maturation

Education goes beyond Social Media. Some customers know what they want and they simply want the fastest, most efficient and most economic way of getting it. But some simply think they know what they want. There are often opportunities of guidance for our customers that go beyond any immediate benefits of “upcharges” or added services. In fact, the quicker you can identify the problem and generate a solution, the faster you can incorporate its resolution into your baseline.

Nobody wants to be oversold on an idea beyond their original expectations. But providing a premium service when expectations are for a standard service is invaluable to your customer, and eventually, you.

You might be an Alienator….

If you incorporate a project strategy to benefit your needs and overshadow your customer needs….you might be an Alienator.

If your primary goals are to exceed competition….you might be an Alienator.

If your objectives differ from your customers…you might be an Alienator.

If your social audience consists of industry professionals, but little of your customers…you might be an Alienator.

If you listen more to the “next big trend” instead of listening to customer needs…you might be an Alienator.

What have you done to keep from alienating customers? What benefits have you seen from being an educator on top of your service to them?

(image by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr Creative Commons license)

So it’s been three plus weeks since my past writing. My Google reader has had nearly 2,000 undread alerts and my volume of tweets and Facebook posts has dropped. Call it a Social Media hiatus. Call it burnout. Call it whatever you wish. The simple fact is, I’m stuck.

Even more frustrating is the fact that I’m just a couple short weeks removed from the single greatest event I’ve ever been a part of in SOBCon 2010. My head was swimming with passion and inspiration but with no identification of the ideas in which they were to drive.

So what do you do when you’re stuck?? I’ve learned rather quickly, and by quicky I mean failed significantly, that the idea that insanity is represented by repeating the same thing over and over expecting different results is quite a truism. So I’m writing thought to keyboard, which is frightening. If you’re reading, I fear mainly for you.

I have also learned, however, that getting stuck is usually the predesessor to step taking. We go through life and our careers climbing an staircase to which there is no end. Each step is filled with uncertainty and often laced with fear. Like breaking through a ceiling, that next step has invisible barriers before you’re truly on top, assessing the new landscape.

Amongst this step taking I’ve been also struggling with understanding a marriage of confidence and caring. It might appear rudimentary, but the success I want needs both. However, I think often times the two are balanced with one give way to the other. The confident, driven individual who lets little get in the way of goals versus the pacifistic, caring individual who sacrifices his/her own ideals for others gain.

So smack me in the face, here comes SOBCon 2010. An event that exemplifies this proper marriage and emulates the very persona of one of its founders, Liz Strauss. I’ve been privy to conversations with Liz that have punched me in the gut with kindness, smacked me in the face with care and cut out my legs while raising me up. My weekend at SOBCon was no different. Surrounded by people who pump ideas and thoughts from a factory that daily changes the environment in which our livelihood and businesses survive, I was overwhelmed by 149 others who emulated this marriage to me. Was I wrong in assuming that ego and insensitivity was the dominant virtue in a model of success? In short – hell yes I was.

It’s all good to have a Kumbaya moment and have a proper ideal for character engrained in my being, but what does this do for my business? How does good feeling beget paying my bills? I understand it isn’t quite as black and white, but B2B, B2C, whatever you have, is always going to be Person2Person and nothing muddies that relationship better than overthinking each detail in a minutia pile of doubt and uncertainty. Now would be a good time to simply quit burying an identity in excuses. Time to quit the drivel. Time to quit defining it and BE IT.

If you lasted this long, you’re likely dizzied from incoherency. I apologize as this is really more for me than it is for you, it’s a needed therapy to get me un-stuck. I’m not going to scrutinize for a half hour over each word. I’m not going to spell check. I’m not even going to add a cute picture. Sometimes insanity needs to be killed with insanity.

This is the final part of a five part series discussing my recent takeaways for the Exhibitor 2010 Conference in Las Vegas, March 14-18, 2010. View Part 4 – Viva la Face to Face.

Recently, I had the chance to be a part of my first tweetup. A group of about ten individuals met after the welcome reception on the Monday evening that opened the Exhibitor 2010 Conference. Not only did I have a chance to meet for the first time a number of individuals that I had a virtual connection with, but I was conveniently sandwiched between another interesting set of people: Competitors.

The term alone conjures up such negativity. For a business using social media, competitors are one of the largest concerns when it comes to content sharing. The very transparency that builds valued relationships is the same channel that draws our opponents close by. At one point, I feared following a competitor on Twitter. Did I want my competitor to think I was ‘watching’ them? Would I act as a liaison for my followers to connect with them?

During the evening, what became refreshing was coming to accept the idea that my ‘competitors’ are no different than me. We’re simply quarterbacks playing for different teams. While we market on the field of business against one another, the fog of animosity is lifted when you can talk freely around the vast similarities in your makeup. We share passions, and I quickly found that we can learn from each other without taking from each other.

When I was able to strip away the minor, singular difference between me and those who surrounded, we were able to share our opinions on the trends in the tradeshow world, discuss our beliefs in strengthening face to face perceptions and refuel passion that comes from sharing time with like minds. Sharing ideas for changing the foundation of our industry can be done without padding up and knocking heads. Business is an ever changing environment and we can’t “proprietize” our solutions for improving it. While you can and should keep your products, services and strategies for day to day business internal, your competitors can be front line allies for furthering business across the industry.

Social media is powerful. And any bit of power can be utilized in multiple ways, good and bad included. Business is business and should be such without involving competitors. But rethink what the term ‘competitor’ means to you, and don’t shutout opportunities to collaborate with others. For us, Twitter acted as a intermediary between unlikely sources. It has allowed us to connect and communicate within guidelines to maintain our competitiveness while defining our similitude.

This is the fourth part of a five part series discussing my recent takeaways for the Exhibitor 2010 Conference in Las Vegas, March 14-18, 2010. View Part 3 – Virtual Dangers.

I like baseball.

If you know me, you’d also understand that’s easily the understatement of the decade. It’s an undefined sickness that forces me to re-channel childhood dreams of playing third base for the Chicago White Sox through summers of 12” softball, filled with pulled hamstrings and the fleeting hope that a MLB scout will witness my undiscovered “talent.”

Baseball is simple, perfect and pure…at least that’s what I believed well up until my adult years. While I don’t cherish baseball any less than I did when I was 12, I have come to understand that the sport is also a business, and unfortunately, the purity of the game is often tainted by the dictation of the dealings and dollars that drive it.

The formula for athletic success is relatively simple: performance = fortune. Mark McGuire was the epitome of baseball success during the 1990s. However, less than 7 years after breaking the single season homerun record, McGuire was strangely mum in 2005 during an infamous session in front of the House Government Reform Committee to discuss steroid usage in baseball. Suspicions were instant and unrelenting. The ‘good ole boy’ and man who brought baseball back from it’s damaging strike in 1994 suddenly undid a sixteen year, Hall of Fame career, without barely speaking a word.

I wasn’t as upset at the dishonestly of McGuire as much as I was disappointed with the revelation that he had lost the passion for purity and virtuousness that all baseball players have growing up. The authenticity of his love for the game was lost. I realized that his mixed messages were muddying up my own perspective on him, and the game of baseball.

Conversely, I have grown to value businesses that are driven by passion and have a genuine interest in their industry beyond their quarterly report. My experience at Exhibitor 2010 was eye-opening on a number of levels. Educationally, it was great. But witnessing like minded individuals, colleagues and friends who spoke with actions in place of words, was a far above encouraging sight for the future of events. As event organizers, how are we to sell our clients on the value of a face to face meeting yet substitute our own forums for communication?

The event landscape is being refined daily. Technology and new ways to communicate are simultaneously enhancing and threatening various face to face traditions. We need leadership. Leaders who will illustrate the right way and the wrong way to embrace new conventions. Leaders who can define the struggles of the common meeting planner and promptly offer solutions. Leaders who will discuss the situations surrounding face to face meetings…in a face to face setting (bizarre, huh?).

Social media has opened opportunities to extend our networks and develop communities that can support and enhance the value of the meeting place. But our trust in technologies needs to be evaluated on a consistent basis. As proponents of events, we need to be careful on what our virtual actions convey to our audiences. Are we enhancing the face to face environment with these tools, or inadvertently displaying methods that speak the opposite?

I was pleased to see relationships that were materialized in a virtual space, enhanced further at an event. We need this continued leadership to keep muddied messages from dictating perceptions. Quite simply, this is ground zero for our new landscape in developing and extending the importance of events.

Continue to Exhibitor 2010 Series: Part 5 – The Twittermediary

(image by Andrew Maycock via Wikipedia Creative Commons License)

I’ve been personally intrigued by the development of foursquare over recent months and it’s increasing potential for usage at events. Back in January, Intel partnered with foursquare during the CES event and offered unique badges for check-ins and special events. This took an effort from both parties to achieve. While it opened the possibilities for the future of foursquare and event marriages, it without little doubt requires the compliance from (and and open wallet) the developers at foursquare to make a campaign of similar correlation possible.

Nevertheless, I was inspired today by an article from Scott Bishop that gives new hope to event planners. There are some reasonable and relatively simple ways to incorporate foursquare and encourage audience participation at your next event.

The Setup

For current and new users, I recommend setting up a new profile that reflects the name and details of your event

Next, you’ll want to set up a venue. However, this “venue” is again going to be setup with event details. Be sure to include proper address, contact information and Twitter handle.

Add your event details and assign it a category. You’ll likely want to use the ‘Home/Work/Other‘ category, with the subcategory of ‘Event Space‘. You can also add tags and adjust the map pin to accurately reflect your event’s location.

The Incentive

While you won’t have the ability to create a custom badge unless you are able to partner with the foursquare folks, you can still offer benefits to your attendees for checking in to various locations or functions at your event. Give your mayor a treat. Offer a private gathering for your users. All of these bonuses can be managed as ‘Tips‘ and can be easily setup. Add these periodically throughout your event and give your users a basis for frequent check-ins and updates. Make your missions fun and tie them back to as many of the other meetings and events that surround.

From your venue, click ‘Add Tip’ and simply add the details.

The Participation

Not only will foursquare users be able to check in and follow the tips surrounding your event, but they now have a community to connect with other users. Furthermore, encourage your event participants to add their own tips. Allow exhibitors to offer their own incentives for a visit to their booth. Give speakers a chance to encourage new audiences.

The Before and After

Much like the Intel example, set up a private landing page weeks in advance of your event and offer a tease towards some of the tips and incentives for their participation. Offer early incentives for ‘friending’ the event profile and develop a community ahead of time to ensure an army of participants during the event.

Once your event concludes, be sure to clean up what you’ve created. While foursquare allows users to add tips and venues freely, removing unnecessary clutter is important to keep these features available to us. Simple delete your tips and ‘Flag your venue as closed‘.

Foursquare and geolocation services are one of the hottest social tools and the development and integration of businesses and events will be exciting to witness. Community and participation will continue to drive face-to-face meetings, so give your next event a shot in the arm for your members.

I’ve just returned from the Exhibitor 2010 show in Las Vegas and was intrigued, mostly positive, by what I witnessed and learned. The result of which I will be putting together in a five part series to share my thoughts.

There is little doubt that the profile of events is changing. Attendees are evolving (link), organizers are tasked with battling attendance and exhibitors are constantly dealing with new hurdles. Additionally, the entire event culture is being revolutionized by technology and social media as opportunities to enhance our face to face traditions continue to grow.

During Monday’s session, Marketing Communications to Social Audience Engagement – The Changing Event Landscape, the topics focused on encouraging companies to explore and leverage social media in to their events and marketing portfolios. Despite many examples of success, many companies and individuals are still on the fringe of social media. The sessions, led by panelists Paul Salinger, Desirée Lehrbaum and Kelly Graham, took a good look at what stands in front of the pioneers looking to improve awareness with social tools.

An important center of discussion was the need for a social code of ethics. Corporate messages need to adhere to traditional regulations and the individuals distributing the content have to understand the boundaries. There are no universal rules for social media ethics for business. Each set needs to be developed around the needs, values and guidelines that are unique only to your marketing process.

The value of social media for business highlighted was not sales, yet developing communities of individuals. Building relationships with groups forms a level of trust and awareness surrounding your company. Pairing this with a strategic personal profile furthers discussions and can be interwoven as a organic marketing strategy.

Coupling my leanings from this session with my experiences browsing the exhibit floor and monitoring the #Exhibitor2010 Twitter stream, I was left feeling that the events industry is still a distance away from developing complete harmony between virtual and physical environments. Social media integration appears, as a whole, an afterthought as a marketing tool.

Though it is effectively utilized as such, social media is being utilized primarily DURING an event. Systematic “visit our booth” tweets, again should not be discarded completely, but need to be integrated with messages that are informative, valuable and generate awareness to and from your audiences. Additionally, messages should be predicated by a strategy that meshes with your traditional awareness campaigns, on AND off-site.

Your event marketing campaign and its adoption of social media can be one of two things: interdependent or cohesive. Many traditions take precedence when it comes to developing a strategy in early event planning, and most times, does not include a social element…until later. This oversight and delayed implementation forces interdependent tactics, which become exposed during execution.

One of the best tweets that I saw was from Mary-Ann Wessan and concisely reflects my thoughts:

So how do you accurately introduce social media to swing towards a more cohesive output?

1. Develop social media before and beyond your event. Focus a campaign around building awareness around your brand and develop communities and interaction with an audience.
2. Discover ways to incorporate your virtual and physical audiences together. When you develop a brand community, varying audiences have a common topic to discuss in physical and virtual platforms: YOU
3. Your social campaign begins when you register for an event….Not when you arrive. Booth size and location may dictate your strategy and developing a virtual buzz may be essential to compliment the physical restrictions and limitations to your traditional campaigns.
4. Unity, unity, unity. Make your social marketing more traditional and transform your traditional marketing to be more social.

Other takeaways from the session:

• How do you address negativity on social media?
• Develop awareness by influencing the influencers
• Most (up to 60%) of marketers don’t see concrete ROI in social media, yet understand and trust its value
• Content is king – distribute and share information to develop transparency
• Have something to offer before jumping in to social media. What are your assets?

Did you attend this session, listen to the audio broadcast or witness any comments from the Twitter stream? What were your takeaways?

Continue to Exhibitor 2010 Series: Part 2 – Guerilla Marketing

(image by sburke2478 via Flickr Creative Commons License)

OK, so today marked my first ever Exhibitor show and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the level of engagement among the other attendees.  Also, I have to applaud our competitors, a few of them at least that exhibited at the show with what I felt was a genuinely original approach to reach the many trade show coordinators, marketing managers and event professionals in attendance.

Eric and I represented Echelon by participating in several of today’s conference sessions.  Below you will find a few notes that I took during the session.  Forgive me because I’ve left my notes largely unedited.  I’d prefer that you experience what I was thinking during the presentation and encourage you to key in the conversation at any and every section that you’d like.

Session: Marketing Communications to Social Audience Engagement – The Changing Event Landscape (On Twitter here, #EX10SM)
Speaker info:
Paul Salinger (@psalinger)
Desiree Lehrbaum (@lumendesiree)
Kelly Graham (@KellyAGraham)

DS: Seek first to understand than to be understood (from 7 habits of highly effective people).

KG: Give clients platform, tools, and education.  Create a certification program.

PS: Create communities of people and facilitate peer-to-peer sharing. Defining success in the social sphere:

• The people that are actively talking about your brand and actively engage them.
• Building advocacy through those relationships.
• Add in to the conversation when it’s appropriate.
• Building r/ps takes dedicated time.
• Small companies that commit to building brand and personal r/ps through social media find most success.
• Social marketing b/c part of your job — requires a cultural shift.

KG: getting over the hurdle — social media is a/b transparency.

KG: starting a program to do list:

• Who is your audience?
• What are they talking a/b?

PS: More on transparency:

• Publish to all channels simultaneously to encourage sharability.

• The idea that social marketing jeapordizes intellectual property is a misnomer, once something is out in the public domain — it’s public.

DL: how do you deal w/negative comments?

PS: negative comments are opportunities to build r/ps. Main thing is that you respond to people.

DL: it’s a/b being heard.

KG: social media is online word of mouth advertising.

DL: tools for measuring social marketing success:

KG: still searching for ROI.

• One way is measuring active conversations (i.e., how many people using the hashtag for an event).
• Pre, during and post event related conversations.
• Length, amount and quality?
• Influence: how far has the conversation gone?

My overall takeaway:

This session wasn’t the most insightful presentation that I’ve seen on social media but can say that I feel the panel was just getting into something more substantial when the time ran out on our session.  Unfortunately, Eric and I had already committed to another session; otherwise, we would’ve stuck around for the second part of the session.  It’s my understanding that the panel was to lead the audience through a team/brainstorming session.  Did any of you happen to catch this session???

You may notice an increasing breed of attendees at your next tradeshow, if not already. Tradeshow Zombies. It’s a frightening epidemic that has been fueled by a mutated ‘Tradeshow 2.0′ virus. What’s equally scary is that these zombies have done a fair job of fitting in. They even look like other attendees, with one major appendage: Smartphones.

Resistance is Futile

Unfortunately, there is little you can do to stop tradeshow zombies. They’re slowly evolving and quickly multiplying. There is one major difference between a regular zombie and a tradeshow zombie. While your traditional zombie feeds from your flesh and brains, the tradeshow zombie’s biggest threat to you is not knowing that you exist.

This new strain of attendees poses a hazard to your tradeshow exhibit. Exposure and saturation is critical to developing new connections and lead generation, but with the considerable increase of smartphone usage, your visibility is threatened. While most attendees come to an event to be social with each other and you, the exhibitor, you are now fighting for their attention from other social networks that exist in their hands.

One of Us…

Despite your cries for help, it’s best to just let this virus infect you and transform in to a tradeshow zombie yourself. Become aware of your attendees’ new agenda and their thought process at your tradeshow. Understanding what networks and why they’re using them at an event will help you adjust your strategy and reach them through the new streams in which they are gathering information.

Twitter has become increasing utilized at tradeshows. Most will set up an official hashtag for the event, creating a filtered stream of dialogue with participants. Additionally, many events will create sub-events for the virtual audiences to connect, like Tweetups. Be a part of these channels and network with these groups of individuals. Many will be tradeshow zombies.

Create a landing page for your event and optimize it for mobile viewing. Develop videos and photos from your event and publish them real time. Using tools to connect with them,  give your zombies a virtual feast and draw them in to your exhibit environment.

Embrace the fact that tradeshows are becoming shaped to fit mobile structure. Apps are being developed for specific events to include floorplans, conference schedules and social integration. Location based and geotagging apps have become flexible and can be formatted for tradeshows. Discover a level to be involved in these technologies, via sponsorship or development and find new ways to fuel your zombies.

Tradeshows and events will continue to evolve and organizers are introducing new layers of virtual environments for audiences to connect with each other, on-site and off. Understand what elements exist at your next event and transfer those ideas to your exhibit marketing strategy. Don’t let a tradeshow zombie feed on your anonymity.