Now don't get all virtual on me!

What we have heard from our Fortune 100 customers and users of virtual fairs including a global University doing virtual job fairs, seems to be getting further validated by the broader market. Reuters are shutting down their bureau in Second Life, and Google Lively is being discontinued.

Here is what we hear from our customers...
- They want uncluttered environments.
- They want a swift retrieval of relevant and up-to-date information,
- neatly and logically arranged
- in a manner that makes sense to their internal users and audiences.
- At the same time it has to be arranged in an engaging manner.
- They do not want to deal with a huge learning curve.
- Their network administrators do not want to deal with software downloads.
- Do not ask our speakers to prepare for a webinar, they say.
- Make sure it works even from our corporate laptops, they say.
- Give us crisp and factual activity reports, they say.
- Remove that moving and gliding stuff, they say.
- Make sure the event is search-capable, they say.
- Can you marry it with our internal systems?, they sometimes ask
- Do not complicate the navigation, they say.
- Use our time wisely, they say.
- Keep it simple, they tell us.

There are some situations where virtual reality environments are loved. An event organizer I was talking to recently, who creates consumer shows with upto 15,000 users would have loved to see Google Lively continue, if only they did not have a limit of 20 users. Her audiences love SecondLife but she wishes it were more cost-effective during a scale-up.

One can not deny the beauty of being able to fly into a convention center and drop into the front row of a live webinar session. However, they come bundled with several challenges from a user's perspective. For now, what we hear the market say is not to get too caught up in the meaning of the word 'virtual'. That takes us back to a previous post where I have argued for a new label for what we do instead of virtual fairs.

What do you think?

SlideShare and Audio SlideShows

I just realized that one of our presentations, uploaded on SlideShare can be embedded in a blog, so here it is for your viewing pleasure.

Immunize Your Trade Show with an iTradeFair

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: virtual tradeshow)

I wonder if there is a way to add a voice to the slides and make them like those slick audio-slideshows that show up often on New York Times. We have such a feature built into our virtual booth. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from SlideShare in how easily it can be shared.

Making Your Trade Show Booth Go Places

How can you get maximum visibility for your trade show booth? By taking it around. Virtually.

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of hosting for dinner the president of a large industrial manufacturing company with an international presence. Great conversation, great food, and I must add that it is always very refreshing to talk to someone who does not keep checking a blackberry in mid-conversation.

Part of our conversation veered towards trade shows (of course). He said that his company is preparing to exhibit at a trade show coming up soon, where they put up an exhibit, meet industry professionals face to face, gather a lot of business cards which get swiped into a CRM system and then.... once the trade show is over, his sales force goes back to the office, analyzes the leads and sends them literature and brochures via snail-mail, along with a thank-you note. He said it was very expensive. He also thought that it is possible that it may be considered to be not a very environmentally friendly way of follow-up. He thought that the 'green' angle was a legitimate one to consider when following up after the trade show.

An alternative that I brought up which he liked, was to

• set up a stand-alone virtual booth
• we can customize it to look just like the real trade show booth your visitors see at the convention center, to help them remember you by association with the real-world experience
• with a few point-click actions, load that virtual booth with relevant rich-media content, literature, slide-shows, videos, and even add ways to provide direct and instant contact with relevant product managers
• in the thank-you emails after the trade shows, include a link to the virtual booth
• iTradeFair.com has the capability to make your virtual booth 'to-go'.

Here are the advantages as he saw in them:

• It is highly cost-effective
• They can send a lot of relevant content neatly organized, along with the thank-you note, without bulky attachments that normally get trapped by firewalls
• It is 'green'

Here is the other advantage that I mentioned to him:

• Your virtual booth can be forwarded to people within the visitor's organization, who could not make it to the trade show in person. Your message and your virtual booth, if engaging enough, assumes a viral quality about it.

If you are a company that needs a virtual vehicle for very targeted information that can be changed on the fly without the need for an IT expert, then the technology is available for your use. If you do not do trade shows but just need an info-vehicle, use it like Perry Lawson & Associates have done - as a virtual office and embedded on any chosen web page (see the embedded virtual booth with live clickable icons, in the first paragraph of this blog post).

Your virtual booth can literally go places!

Think Out of the Crate! Now's the Time for Hybrid Trade Shows!

Even as the air waves are being dominated by news on how the economy is being stress-tested, my phone keeps ringing as always with calls from marketers. My email inbox continues to receive emails from persevering sales folks. When budgets get squeezed, the marketers will continue doing what they do with less, by simply getting more resourceful about it.

The interest in virtual venues for marketing and other specialized purposes such as virtual job fairs, continues unabated. Medium-sized and small businesses are willing to use virtual trade show technology to find a way to differentiate themselves from competition.

We see large corporations that once resisted the move to virtual trade shows for reasons that range from political, to cultural or plain inertia, willing to talk to us and to call our customers for references.

We see new initiatives being launched using online venues. We are also seeing new uses being tested for subsets of our technology. All of these initiatives are designed to save money.

Should budgets get squeezed for marketers, the virtual venues are rightly positioned to help. 72% of show organizers polled last week by Expo Magazine say that the economy is affecting their booth sales. Even if that were not the case, given that there is widespread discontent among exhibitors about the way the trade show industry is (dis)organized it might be time for new forms of trade shows. It just might be time for some kind of new hybrid variety of trade shows to be born.

I am thinking out of the crate here, when I say that perhaps new event organizers will come up with a mechanism that uses virtual venues for pre-event research, planning and scheduling meetings. After that, the participants who pre-screen one another will travel to meet at some resort, carrying only relevant papers for conclusive face-to-face encounters, fun and socializing. No crates, no booths, just information, entertainment and connections. If there are any takers out there, we are willing to collaborate in such a social-business experiment.

The Invisible Exhibitor, The Invisible Attendee

It was delightful to see two research papers published by Maya (the videos are on auto-play so please be patient if they all start playing simultaneously) titled the 'Invisible Exhibitor' and the 'Invisible Attendee'. The papers are insightful. If you have ever been involved with an in-person trade show or conference, you will find yourself nodding in agreement as you go through the paper or watch the videos.

I had the pleasure of talking to one of the designers of the research Paul Gould at Maya this morning. Congratulations are also due to the Expo Group for supporting this research. It goes to show that the trade show industry is willing to recognize that change is needed.

In the papers and research you and the face-to-face trade show industry will hear the voice of the customer. I know the Convention Industry Council's APEX initiative was on a mission to streamline the processes. I do not know where that stands.

It seems to me that throwing an excess of processes, technology and bureaucracy is not making life any easier (see the RFID example in the paper). It seems that the trade show industry has de-humanized the experience.

The virtual trade show folks have lessons to learn from these papers. The most important one I think is to 'not take away the human element!'

Life-Support for a Dying Trade Show?

When a trade show is canceled, or "postponed" as the PR might phrase it, what happens to the participants who have marked the event on their calendars to go meet industry peers and learn what is going on with competitors? Or was the event 'postponed' because the intended audiences never showed enough interest? Perhaps they get the knowledge and competitive information constantly via the web, and did not care enough about the block party?

One user-conference was canceled because its main sponsor pulled out, followed by a lot of finger-pointing and the threat of law-suits. I suspect that the cancellation of a trade show brings along a lot of heart-break for the creators, loss through refunds, write-offs, loss of goodwill and loss of jobs and contracts. If that is the case, does the brand have a chance for revival?

In mid-September 2001, when a major IT security conference in Europe was hurting because conference attendees were not eager to board planes, they turned to us for a virtual trade show as an interim measure for that year, and later bounced right back into their regular schedule.

Recently Digital Life Expo announced a cancellation of their fall event citing current economic climate. Does it mean that the brand will be shelved for some time or for ever?

Is it possible that when trade show brands change hands some of the original flavor and passion of the creators is lost? Comdex is no longer around in its original form, although the domain name comdex.com was owned by CMP Media when I checked. Today's news item that Supercomm is coming back, reborn out of NXTcomm shows that some brands might survive, and even come back with a bang.

I would hazard a guess that it is likely that we might see a Comdex again, unless a whole new generation of users are now in the market who have no clue what Comdex was! Bringing back a brand from the dead in that case could prove to be very expensive and not worth the time, money and effort - or as one might say, throwing good money after bad.

If that is the case, let us consider an alternative scenario. Would it be worthwhile to test the waters for a dormant trade show by first trying a virtual trade show under its brand name and check for any signs of life? Can virtual trade shows serve as the life-support mechanism for dying trade show brands? Why not!

Getting Surgical on Conventions and Definitions

Learning about the convention business sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. I recently picked up a fascinating book by Dr. Atul Gawande. It is titled 'Complications'. The book helps the reader get inside the head of an emergency room (ER) surgeon, and has lessons that are transferrable to any crisis management scenario. It is a collection of essays. Therefore it was amusing to turn a page and unexpectedly find an entire chapter devoted to a conference and trade show for surgeons. For those interested, you can actually read the chapter in its entirety online in a Google Books excerpt, and the chapter is titled Nine Thousand Surgeons .

Dr. Gawande quotes anthropologist Lawrence Cohen in his description of conventions and conferences, where he labels them carnivals with the following characteristics:

• Colossal events
• Professional politics
• Ritual enactments of disciplinary boundaries
• Sexual liminality
• Tourism and trade
• Personal and national rivalries
• The care and feeding of professional kinship
• Sheer enormity of discourse
• Academic proceedings

If one takes an honest look at the virtual trade shows that are being held today, they meet probably just a couple of the criteria listed above. There is a strong case for virtual trade show makers to reposition their offerings or better yet, simply rename them.

The virtual fairs that we do, essentially serve as online venues to simultaneously gather information, information-providers and information-seekers. The venues specifically address a certain business need, or improve a process. We do have some features that are designed to make it fun and entertaining. Users do find them fun and interesting. However, they do not come close to a carnival in description. We have seen some virtual trade shows with the capability of listening to background noise that reminds us of a real convention, until it gets annoying. The closest and most practical event-related website that I have seen anyone try, which has a high level of sensory stimulus still relates to a live face-to-face event. They found mention on TechCruch recently and go by the name of Sonecast, perhaps derived from Social Network Broadcast.

How then, does one make a virtual fair, beyond being just a problem-solver, into something as exhilirating, fun and full of sensory stimuli as in a carnival. Here's a thought (I do not know if anyone has tried it, but it would be worth a serious try)...

If every participant in a virtual fair is an exhibitor in the virtual fair, and every click of the mouse is laden with rich-media content about the participants, so that every online footprint of every participant is so deep and well-rounded that it is richer than handing out a business card at a convention, the virtual fair can become extremely engaging. Let us not confuse the term 'engaging' with visually beautiful 3D-type experiences being offered by some virtual trade show technology providers. They make for awesome demos and a good first impression, but do not really create a lasting wow. The energy of the participants, the depth of information and the richness of information that they share or exchange, are things that can bring the virtual fair close to a carnival-like atmosphere. The online event should also be very short in duration. 4 hours. Or 2 days of 4 hours each. It should have a variety of interactive capabilities woven together. We have that technical capability. The only reason it has not been done as effectively, I believe, is a matter of semantics. When a virtual fair occurs with no in-person counterpart, there is a push for deeper, richer personal profiles to be included in the fair. It can come quite close to a carnival-like atmosphere. However, the descriptor of a virtual trade show raises expectations that can't be met. That seems to be its undoing.

My conviction for this thought I think is based on what I see happening with a recent initiative by marketing guru Seth Godin. It is an example of something extremely compelling in content and ideas without the glitz, or without trying to fake a simulated real-world environment, and without over-dependence on any fancy technology. I recently got (rather bought) the opportunity to be a part of Seth Godin's triiibes. The individuals in this tribe are unbelievably rich in thought, expression and action. There is constant activity. It has over 3,000 members from various countries. There is boundless energy. If online events were periodically held in conjunction with Seth Godin's Triiibes, I would hazard a guess that it would be as close to a carnival in atmosphere, as can get online. Even a casual visit to Triiibes makes it seem like a carnival. A virtual trade show is a misnomer. A new name is needed. Just like wiki or blog or tweet. A new definition is needed. A new set of expectations need to be set. Perhaps, we should not call it even a virtual show or a virtual fair. Instead, simply calling it the Faiiir might do the trick!

A Successful Virtual Fair

One of the questions that we at iTradeFair.com ask our prospects and customers is "What would you consider to be a successful outcome for your virtual fair?"

This week we heard that one of our customers was waxing lyrical about the virtual trade fair we had done for them. I phoned them yesterday for details. An order worth over half-a-million dollars will be the direct outcome of two companies meeting in that particular virtual fair - obviously a huge success considering the relatively small amount of time, energy and resources that were invested in the virtual fair.

Success stories like these make our day. In work, as in life, we are judged by what we create. To be able to create value in this manner makes our success sweeter. The virtual trade fair would not only result in a purchase order, but would also mean gainful employment for several people, which in turn means more families fed, clothed, schooled and cared for.

The success of a virtual fair has been defined in several ways, some of which are listed below.

1. Giving members better access to vendors: Some not-for-profit organizations use a virtual fair to showcase their vendors to their membership. In such instances the virtual trade fair might become an extension of any in-person conferences. This is not to be confused with a virtual vendor directory. Virtual fairs are fresh and shut down at their peak. Directories tend to lose momentum but stay on regardless.
2. Giving advertisers more avenues for visibility: Publishers consider a virtual fair successful if it can be bundled into other offerings and adds another dimension of visibility to their advertisers who typically become sponsors or exhibitors in the virtual fairs.
3. Bridging distances without travel: Corporate virtual trade shows typically consider their events a success if they are able to bring together more of their employees, distributors, partners, prospects and customers together online in structured forums, without travel.
4. Making new connections: There are some virtual fairs whose success is entirely hinged on the number of new connections made or leads generated. These virtual fairs navigate uncharted waters. It takes a strong brand to be able to consistently bring in new groups of users into such fairs to make them successful. If I have met someone in a virtual booth in Year 2008, then seeing them again virtually in Year 2009 will not be as exciting for either party if the sole expectation of that virtual fair is lead-generation. Now if that exhibitor has a new product on display, that would sustain the interest and traffic of even the repeat-visitors.
5. Placing purchase orders: We did a virtual trade show in which Eastman Kodak Company publicly announced that 25 of their purchase managers will be in attendance with purchase requisitions totaling several millions of dollars. When a virtual fair happens with such depth in commitment, the bar is set very high for what they would consider a successful outcome of the virtual trade show. The expectation is to be able to meet with companies that are worthy of the orders.
6. Doing something novel: The success criteria in this approach to virtual fairs is determined by how pretty the virtual fair looks, and the buzz that they generate. The goal of such virtual fairs is to generate a large number of visitors, media attention and visibility for the organizer or products.
7. Making it convenient: Some virtual fairs are held because that is the only way to get people and companies together when they have conflicting schedules and time-zones.
8. Measuring activity: Many times, virtual fairs are considered successful if the activity in them can be measured. Knowing how many people visited a virtual booth and downloaded a particular piece of information is very valuable information to marketers of the information.

Like any successful commercial initiative, the true measure of success for virtual fairs from the perspective of the producers, organizers, users and providers would be if participants perceive enough value in the fairs to be willing and happy to pay for the service.

Only when virtual fairs become a budget line-item, only when they enter the lexicon of accountants, CPAs, CFOs, marketers and CEOs can we be certain that virtual fairs in general will be a huge success!

No Goodie Bags? No Problem! Why Virtual Trade Shows are PhRMA-friendly

The article in Tradeshow Week Magazine titled "What’s Next for Health Care Show Exhibiting?" prompted this post.

The new code from PhRMA (The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) for marketing by the pharmaceutical industry is expected to result in readjustments to their trade show tactics. The goal of these changes and some more upcoming changes that are on the anvil is to ensure that the information reaching medical practitioners is from independent sources. While I would not be surprised if Google Health positions itself for a dominant role in this new scenario, one can be sure that virtual trade shows will be considered very seriously by health care marketing professionals.

On the one hand, virtual trade shows allow for compliance by the health care marketing professional (and for independent 3rd-party audit). On the other, they track activity and reports in such depth that establishing an ROI is just a click away.

There are some closed-corporate virtual trade shows that we at iTradeFair.com do in which the event organizer's policies mandate that exhibitors do not offer any giveaways or lucky draws. With a virtual trade show, not only is it easy to comply with these requirements, but also very easy for governance and reporting, while ensuring the effectiveness of the content placed in every virtual booth.

Goodie Bags and Lucky Draws are capabilities that are offered in virtual booths in many virtual trade shows. A virtual trade show producer ought to enjoy the ability to switch off select features to stay within the rules of the game for their particular industry. When a pharma company's virtual booth is in a general virtual trade show, such as one held by a Chamber of Commerce for a particular region, that specific booth must be capable of turning off its non-PhRMA-compliant features without impacting the other booths in the virtual trade show.

When we work with any event organizer these are capabilities that we like to highlight. Through simple procedures in our event engine we can entirely disable (show-wide) the Goodies feature or the Lucky Draw feature, or both. The reporting system enables the event organizer to assess the success of an event while staying within the customized parameters of the virtual fair. If for some reason the features are made available in a virtual fair, individual exhibitors have the power to decline using select features should they need to be in compliance with industry-specific laws.

That is why I believe that virtual fairs are PhRMA-friendly!

Are There Any Limits to the Size of a Virtual Fair?

We get this question often: "Are there any limits to how big we can make our virtual fair?". Let us look at this from a few angles.

1. Like trees, they need trimming to stay healthy: If your virtual fair grows in a wild unstructured and lopsided manner, then the trunk will not be able to hold some of the branches together, resulting in some branches falling off. This is seen happening even in real-world trade shows. When a trade show grows too popular and too big, some of the bigger sponsors start creating little breakaway events, hospitality suites or simply just stop participating. Just like a tree, a virtual fair needs to be periodically trimmed to ensure the quality of the experience, depth of interaction and quality of users.
2. Every part needs care and feed: A visitor to a virtual booth needs to be engaged instantly and answers offered instantly. Virtual attendees whose requests for live interaction go unanswered (and I have seen this happen in many of the virtual trade shows that are out there - unstaffed booths) tend to drift away. Given this reality, the effectiveness of a virtual booth is limited by the number of booth staffers that are available live online during the virtual fair, and by the number of simultaneous virtual attendees that each booth-staffer can engage one-on-one. In our experience that number is 3.
3. They need to prepare for growing pains: In estimating the turnout at a virtual fair the organizers and providers have to make intelligent estimates, but the more popular a virtual fair gets, the chances are higher that the traffic estimates may not be very accurate. Outages have not been unheard of even in the who's who of websites, whether it is Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, or - yes - Google. It goes to show that when a provider boasts of the most robust system there is, it just means that they have done everything humanly possible to ensure a smooth virtual fair, and that they have in place mechanisms to monitor and nip problems in the bud.

Virtual fairs can grow with no limits so long as they learn how to sustain nutrition to every corner of the virtual fair, whether the virtual event organizer plans to add a blog to it, or a career corner to it, or a social network to it. You will see this happen even with social networks that are huge. Beyond a certain point, the users tend to seek more depth in their interactions and start looking for groups to form clusters.

In a perfect world, if one assumes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited server capacity and software code written so well that the system scales and soars like poetry, the only limits on the growth of virtual fairs are driven by the limits of human behavior and needs.