By searching for the hashtags (unique ID words related to the event, usually starting with # sign) on the event the week before it starts, I am able to see who the real leaders are.

I follow many of the attendees and all of the speakers (Twitter links are on speaker bio pages and/or their blogs). Often I meet several of the speakers before the event starts, and make appointment to meet up with attendees that are active in the community. I also check to see if the is a “Tweet Up” (meeting of those who have connected on Twitter) and add that to my schedule.

I’ve found that the best opportunities at most shows happen in this network. Once these tweeps (Twitter users) decide to RT (”ReTweet: A Twitter post that gets repeated) I know that a large active group will be aware of whatever I’m promoting.

Two more tips to get traffic to your booth:

1) Give aways for Twitter users. I often tweet “I’ve got a copy of Twitter Revolution for the next person who finds me.”  It works for @The RealShaq with NBA tickets and it will work for you.

2) Get your staff tweeting. This is not a media to advertise on.. this is a way to network. Get everyone involved. Your customers expect INDIVIDUALS to be availalbe

Read the full article and respond: Twitter is a Must for Trade Shows

Hashtags really are a great idea for research before a show and for promoting your activities at an event.  They basically tag your postings so that people can find them more easily.  For example if you tweeted “Headed to the keynote address #abcexpo”  then someone searching for the tag #abcexpo would find your posting.  You can read details on setting up hashtag here.

But tweets?  tweeting? tweeted?  doesn’t sound like something your industry is going to do anytime soon?  Well, remember when only the super-wealthy had cell phones and only email was only for recent college grads?  It’s important to be skeptical of new technology but also look at ways that it might actually be useful.  One thing to be wary of…while encouraging your staff to tweet might be a good thing, but it could also distract some staff (particularly younger ones) from actual human interaction.  Make that a goal of tweeting to temper folks burried in their cell phones and laptops.

Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.

• Are they coming to a show?
• Are they thinking about purchasing at the show?
• Did they like last year’s show? How far did they travel?
• What do they look for in a booth?

So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.

Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for:

Pretty much any good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send your constituents a link to answer the survey online. But some offer more sophisticated functionality that can be very handy when you’re planning anything more than the simplest survey. What types of features might be useful?

• Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than for your organization can be off-putting to your constituents and decrease response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, and font, and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
• Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic allows you to define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
• Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in New York City, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in New York City” – filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
• Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
• Website integration. While many of these packages create surveys in their own web page, some allow you to embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
• Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive brethren is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for futher analysis. More advanced packages allow you to cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or to do complex statistical analysis.

Keep in mind that no software package can do the design work to ensure your survey will collect effective, high quality data. While it’s easy to slap together a set of questions, designing a survey that will capture the data you need in a rigorous way is complicated, and you’ll likely benefit from consulting someone who has experience with survey design.

The article goes on to give an overview of some of todays more popular free and cheap survey sites.  You can (and should) read it here: Link

For tradeshows, it would be good to survey before and after a show with the before coming far enough ahead that you can still plan toward the results.  While this kind of survey may not give you a totally clear picture, it can be effective in making decisions about booth design, position and even which tradeshows to attend.

Life Science Leader recently ran an article on Franklin & Seidelmann‘s work with The Rogers Company to design an effective booth for its tradeshows — the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) show in particular. The article focuses on the F&S need to create a space to build relationships. Since the company’s main business is teleradiology, it doesn’t have the chance for face to face branding or even to build relationships with its own physicians. The article outlines how the need to build relationships was built into the design.

As more and more companies, once traditional, move to online services, it’s possible that the need for face-to-face relationship building will become more important. In the past, meeting the people you already know at a tradeshow was a secondary goal. It may become or may already be a primary goal if it’s the only chance to connect a human being to your brand.

You can read the article here: Link

You can view more videos at our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/tradeshowfeed

About 5 years ago a colleague sent me an invitation to join LinkedIn.  It seemed like an OK idea kind of based on the 6 Degrees of Seperation concept.  My account kind of sat there for a long time based on the idea that only a few people I knew were actually on the site.  Over time, however, it’s grown into something very big.  It can be a good way to stay in touch with colleagues past and present but it can also be a very good way to build business.

1.) Recognize It’s Not Just About You

Many people describe LinkedIn as a kind of professional version of Facebook.  In other words, it’s focused on the individual and career development and not on what you did over the weekend.  That’s true to a certain extent, but the site offers some important tools that can help create the connections that help build your business.  If you can coordinate with other colleagues to form a cohesive strategy focused on your products and services it will further help make those connections in a broader way.

2.) Join Group or Form Groups

Groups create associations between people that otherwise do not know each other.  There may already be a group formed around your industry and its best to check this out before you form your own group.  If you don’t see a group that you think should be there, create one and invite people you know to join.  Just keep in mind that you have to find the right balance in creating a group.  If you focus on too narrow of a topic, no one will find it (People In My House).  If you create a group that’s too broad (People Who Drive Cars) you won’t get useful information.  Creating a group for a tradeshow can be a good way to meet other exhibitors and attendees and exchange information or ideas, for example.

3.) Answer Questions

There is a function that allows you to search questions posed by other LinkedIn members based on key words.  You can answer these questions and even get selected as ‘the best’ answer by the person who posed it in the first place.  This is a great way to meet new connections and also to market your expertise.

4.) Ask Questions

Asking a question can supply you with information and also create a discussion.  It can also be a good way to create a buzz around a topic that you think isn’t being discussed.  Also, it’s a good way to genuinely get free advice from experts.

5.) Create a Discussion

Within groups, it’s possible to create a discussion or become involved in a discussion.  This is a good way to link to external articles, meet new connections, and demonstrate your expertise in a certain field.

6.) Create a Poll

Like creating a discussion, polling your LinkedIn connections can help create awareness for you and your company and can also give you important data that can be used on your website or within LinkedIn.  Also, you can broaden the scope of polling by paying LinkedIn a feed.

7.)  Get Social (For Real)

While LinkedIn is a great online tool, use it to create or firm up offline connections.  Tradeshows are a great way of doing this since people you know are likely to attend the same professional events that you do.  Use LinkedIn to send messages and schedule meetings with folks on the show floor.

You can visit our LinkedIn page here

And you can visit Jeff Blackwell’s page here

Or Sukki Jahnke’s page here

Your next booth staff addition may save you on hotel and airfare and never have to take a lunch break.  She may also be a flat, electronic representation of a human being…but no one’s perfect, right?  Avatars are being used to greet booth visitors, give presentations, and recite detailed information specific products and even about the person they are talking to.

We interviewed an avatar, Sarah, created by a company called LogicJunction on what she does at tradeshows, the benefits of avatars, and what the future holds for her and LogicJunction.  From their website:

LogicJunction supplies products on a variety of platforms ranging from individual kiosks to complete online deployments. Our patented software engine incorporates digital characters, artificial intelligence, media players, advanced logic control and a flexible plug-in system to interface with third party software and hardware.

Virtual Employees (or vPloyees), the name given to our digital characters, use emotion, animation, speech, and intelligence to help personalize and direct the experience for each client, and provide a high impact interface to many of our implementations. For customers wishing to extend our products or create their own, LogicJunction offers an SDK.

Clients use LogicJunction software to assist with sales, conduct surveys, drive booth attendance, reduce personnel costs, and help users navigate complex processes. Please look around and see what LogicJunction might do for you.

We’ve all heard about Twitter and there’s been a lot of head scratching as to how it will be used in business.  At searchenginewatch.com they are covering The Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York 2009 Conference and Expo. They’re top story is about Twitter and it gives some clues as to how this will be useful at live events like tradeshows:

The opening keynote was by Guy Kawasaki, a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, who spoke about “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media.”

You can read the full post here: Link

They describe this opening day as starting a “Tweet Storm”.  We checked Twitter (TSF Twitter) and, indeed, there are many, many, many entries on Guy Kawasaki and his keynote on Twitter. (Search Results Here)

So you have someone speaking at a tradeshow about Twitter and then that talk is defined on Twitter itself.  You have to look past a few layers of weirdness here to get to an essential truth which is: Twitter (or something like it) will define almost every live, public interaction we have in business in the near future.  In some businesses, this is already happening.

Guy Kawasaki is essentially being defined by these individual perspectives on his talk.  Yes, he’s a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, but that public profile has been further enhanced by all of these tweets.  For the folks tweeting, their public profile has been enhanced or at least clarified by the fact that they were at this talk and have told their readers about it.

Confused?  Think about it this way: a few years ago, just adding tradeshow dates and booth numbers to a companies website was a big deal.  Now you have the means to update information from you and your entire tradeshow team and what they’re doing at a show in real time.  Who cares, right?  Well, you should when you consider how all of this adds to your overall online profile.

Case in point: Search for  Guy Kawasaki on Google and you’ll get a pretty good idea of who the guy (ha-ha) is.  But  search Twitter, particularly during a tradeshow, and you get an idea of what he is doing at this moment and who is watching him and what they think — and you can join the conversation.  That’s very powerful.

This all goes to show that Twitter can be a very valuable tool in enhancing live, one-to-one contact that you get at a tradeshow.  Of course, this tradeshow is a self-selecting group.  It’s going to be a while before we see this kind of interaction at more industrial shows — but it won’t be long.

Sukki Jahnke of the Rogers Company speaks at Event Expo in Cleveland on exhibit design and how Rogers helps its clients build business. There are a whole slew of videos from the event hosted on New Image Media’s website.

The Rogers e-book, Tech Trends and Tradeshows: Knowing the Right Technology Mean Knowing the Right Trends, points out that LEDs also have an environmental angle:

“Lighting is also undergoing a revolution with LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes. These small and efficient light sources are increasingly being used for consumer and industrial purposes. They save energy, are very durable and will last for years of use. While electrical consumption isn’t typically a large concern for most booths, LED lighting does reduce heat and while having an overall smaller carbon footprint – an important consideration for a growing number of companies. “

You can download the entire e-book here: (Link)

Watch the video by clicking on the picture above in the post.