Increasingly the talk with trade show managers and organizers is the use of technology, and in particular internet based technology to “grow the show”.
You will hear buzz words and phrases thrown around such as “Web 2.0″, “Social Media”, “Facebook”, “Twitter” and a host of others but what does all of this new terminology and business/techno slang actually mean for you as a trade show exhibitor or attendee?
The primary feature of social media web sites is to connect; to communicate and to inform the world what you are doing as close to right now as makes no difference. In terms of application to trade shows and the business world, these social forums provide a mechanism to forge new contacts and enhance communication with your viewing public which generally means your circle of contacts be they friends, family, work colleagues and getting to the point, your customers at your trade show display.
We’ll look at some of the tools in greater detail in a future post so you can tell if you’re LinkedIn on Facebook or not, but for our purposes today, social media is simply a term used to describe a family of websites that allow users to interract in ways a “static” web site does not allow. The content is generated in large measure by the users themselves rather than a web site designer putting together a series of web pages full of glossy photographs or fancy graphics and it is easily manipulated by the users themselves – you are reading a good example of Web 2.0 media content right now; blogging and blogs are themselves a product of the Web 2.0 social media age.
Trade show managers have been pushing the use of social media a great deal recently, no doubt attempting to capture the younger generation entering the workforce and who tend to be early adopters of new technology. The phenomenal rate of growth of social media tools and increasing application to the business world cannot be ignored by non-techno savvy business users – your customer and prospect bases are probably already using these tools themselves to learn aout the world around them; if you don’t use social media then you can be sure your competitors will and they are already talking to your customers!