There is no doubt that running a tradeshow can be quite a daunting task. With the amount of organization, planning, and communication that needs to happen, an immense amount of employees’ time and energy are focused on bringing all the elements together.  However, if many of the arduous tasks can be automated, event organizers can save vast amounts of money and time. 

 mBLAST, created in 2002, strives to automate many of the time-consuming processes that eat up a bunch of time for event organizers, allowing them to focus their attention elsewhere and run a more productive conference.  mBLAST was developed due to an urgent need by mBLAST CEO Danny Briere for his telecommunications consultancy, TeleChoice.  Briere could not find a solution to effectively manage the relationships that the consultancy had with other “industry influencers” such as trade shows, associations and publishers. Briere determined that other influencers must face the same daunting task each time they launched a new conference, awards program, buyer’s guide, etc. Out of this “need for a better solution,” mBLAST was born.

 mBLAST offers a wide variety of tools for many different industries: publishers, marketers, associations, the media, and awards organizers.  However, Sue O’Keefe, Director of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at mBLAST, says that “mBLAST has three main tools to help event organizers do their jobs better. This often means taking existing processes that they have historically done internally and streamlining them with mBLAST.”  The three main tools are as follows:

·        Awards Management

·        Media Credentialing

·        EventSync

 
Awards Management

mBLAST’s Awards Management Module provides an end-to-end solution that manages the entirety of an organization’s awards process on the web.  The module manages and streamlines everything from awards’ call-for-entries to all communications with entrants and judges, from within the module.  The module supports the following actions:

·        Entry – Allows users to form their specific entry based on the award organizer’s requirements. 

·        Communication – Allows for communication and messages to be tailored to various groups, for example, “All companies who have entries in Draft form,” or the group overall, with messages such as “Deadline Extended.”

·        Judging – Allows judges to easily register, view entries, rate them, suggest re-assignments and disqualifications, etc.

·        Reporting – Gives a robust set of reports measuring various criteria, such as overall scores for entrants, total dollar amount of entrants, total number of entries, etc., that user can slice and dice in many different ways.

·        E-commerce systems – Allows people to make all payments online, with payments going directly to the client’s ecommerce system. 

Instead of a company wasting effort on running this process themselves, usually through Excel spreadsheets, emails, faxes, snail mail, and other documents, mBLAST can take over the entire process online. O’Keefe states, “The fact that we have some of the largest awards programs using us is a pretty good testament to the pain that all awards managers face.”  Users of the Awards Management Module include the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the largest trade show in North America, and Folio: Magazine, managed by Red 7 Media.


Media Credentialing Module

The Media Credentialing Module allows tradeshow organizers to give media credentials to various members of the media via an online, end-to-end process that permits users to enter basic information, as well as upload photos, links, clips from publications, and publisher’s letters. The trade show organizers can monitor this with their own unique Administrator log-in. They’ll have access to the same set of information for each applicant and the organizers can simply check a “yes” or “no” box to approve or disapprove applicants. An e-mail is automatically sent through the communications system notifying the user of the credentialing decision. The Administrator can even personalize individual responses or use default responses. The communications system allows organizers to go back to individuals or groups of individuals and ask for more information, if necessary.  The module also streamlines the process because a single tradeshow could have 400 or so members of the media request credentials, which is typically difficult to organize.  Furthermore, if a member of the media logs in subsequent times, their information will have already been saved, allowing the system to automatically credential or pre-approve that person if requested by the Administrator.

EventSync

The third tool for event organizers is EventSync, a solution which helps anyone who runs a trade show event to manage whereabouts of the event information and how it is distributed.  Traditionally, in order for a trade show organizer to gain exposure for the event, the organizer has had to go to each individual website’s event calendars and enter all of the information regarding the event.  Going through this process with hundreds of websites, each with different processes takes up valuable time and energy.  With mBLAST, the tradeshow organizer enters that information once and that information is sent out to several major event listing sites, as well as publication and association sites power their events calendar through mBLAST.  Though somewhat limited currently, there is a conscious marketing effort in April and May that will seriously increase this distribution.

mBLAST’s goal in all of its tools is to truly streamline processes to save time, money, and energy.  O’Keefe elaborates, “In some cases, our clients are telling us that they are cutting out about 90% of the labor for some of their processes.”  All three of the above tools, as well as several others mBLAST offers, such as a tool for Buyer’s Guides, are built atop the same robust platform; therefore, they have common registration, log-in, and communication processes.  This user interface allows people to use mBLAST for different purposes.  For example, once a user enters information within mBLAST for awards, all of their contact information, company profile and other materials are pre-populated for them to use elsewhere in the system.

According to O’Keefe, “the overarching philosophy of mBLAST is relationship management, specifically the data relationships that these organizers have with their constituents and vice versa.”  Another important thing to note about mBLAST is that if someone purchases an mBLAST subscription, they have access to all modules – awards, directories, credentialing, etc. On the whole, mBLAST strives to enable users to grow revenue, cut costs, and improve relationships.