As the trade show industry heads into the future, it is constantly being challenged by the emerging technologies that naturally come with a new set of opportunities and drawbacks. The technologies most promising for the industry are social networking services. These services are nothing new for experienced internet users as demonstrated by the popularity of such sites as MySpace.com and Match.com, but the utilization of these new tools specific to the meetings industries is the current challenge facing many event organizers.
Chris Brown, Executive Vice President of Conventions and Business Operations for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which organizes one of the largest conventions in the country, agrees that adopting social networking for the meetings industry is difficult. “The biggest, most important challenge for us over the last three or four years has been our online matching system. It’s a combination of both attendee and exhibitor services. It is essentially a combination of Google, Amazon.com, and Match.com, whereby attendees can go into our database, look up exhibitors, companies, products, keywords, and narrow their search based on specific interests. This system works by taking whole sets of variables, basically a profile of the attendee, down to a fairly detailed level and matches that up with a fairly detailed level of preferences of data on the exhibitor and product side.”
The main attraction of these services is the data they collect. As Mr. Brown iterates, “From a show organizer’s standpoint, the best feature is what all of the collective data represents. That is, essentially, the interests and behaviors that occur in and around your show. Not only do we see what interests our attendees and exhibitors have, but we also see what actual behaviors manifest.” This data allows show organizers to change the show from year to year to meet the trends they see emerging throughout their industry.
One challenge in implementing these services is acquiring the participation of both the exhibitors and the attendees. Exhibitors participate to promote their organizations both before and after an event. Attendees participate to better plan their event experience and to focus on the organizations best suited to their needs. If attendees do not participate, then there is no incentive for the exhibitors to participate, and vice versa. These services require a reciprocal relationship between all parties involved.
Online networking solutions provide exhibitors with better visibility for their organization. Attendees conducting a pre-event search on these services will only find the organizations that advertise online. The services also provide exhibitors with invaluable data collected from the user profiles in the system. Pre-event, exhibitors can see how many people fit their buyer profile. Post-event, they can see what percentage of those people they actually contacted, telling them how well they did in reaching their potential audience at the show. This data allows exhibitors to analyze their message and adjust for the next event.
These services allow attendees to make more efficient use of their time at the event. First, attendees can search for specific product needs pre-event. At the show, they can skip visits to companies that do not match their interests. Further, social networking tools allow attendees in similar fields or interests to contact each other. They might want to share industry information or simply meet; either way, these services help evoke a greater sense of community. These services also allow attendees to receive personalized communications. For example, an attendee whose profile states that they are in the market for a certain camera might get a notification that a particular exhibitor is offering a better camera at a more reasonable price. Such notifications serve to enhance exhibitor marketing efforts.
One potential problem for the attendee is privacy. Before the implementation of these services, attendees had a certain level of anonymity which gave them an amount of control, both online and at the physical event. Attendees could move from booth to booth or site to site without being tracked, giving them the freedom to move and act without hindrance. Now, their every visit is potentially traceable, and exhibitors use this information in their marketing decisions to help target potential customers. A balancing act is created between what attendees lose against what they gain. They lose an amount of freedom in being susceptible to marketing campaigns, but they gain customized service tailored to their profile, potentially resulting in a better event experience. However, many social networking programs allow attendees to remain anonymous.
Overall, these online networking and matching services prove to be more beneficial than not, as evidenced by their ever increasing use. Mr. Brown states, “The most direct application of these tools are as an online version of the community that your show serves or represents.” As for the future, NAB is in the midst of rolling out a year-round version of their networking and matching service. The goal, as he says, “is to create a true year-round online marketplace, which would then be open, theoretically, to all of our community members who cannot actually come to the physical event. This opens up the event experience to a much broader audience, and it certainly opens it up globally as people all over the world can access the information and the resources that we have available through the show and through the show community. It’s a super-charged virtual trade show approach.”