Exhibiting Apathy

Online networking for exhibit managers is on its way, but do they care?

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 3/19/2007

As corporate exhibit and event managers gather at Exhibitor, March 26–28 at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, their thoughts turn to their other community, people outside the industries their businesses serve who alone can appreciate the challenges and rewards that come with the life of tradeshow sales and marketing.

The question Dee Silfies, Exhibitor Group's chief learning strategist, will be asking herself is: Can that sense of community be kept alive beyond the show, year-round, online?

Online social networking — exemplified by the popularity of MySpace and YouTube — has become more than a trendy pastime for teens and 20-somethings, as professional communities catch on to applications more practical than sharing video of exploding Mentos and monologues about mean parents.

Within the meetings and exhibitions industry, obvious examples of this practical application are the meetings community's Google group MeCo (for "meetings community") and MIMlist, a listserv for what was originally the Meetings Industry Mall.

Their popularity is evidence that even the busiest of industry professionals can find time to connect with her peers online if it means saving time and money. The five MeCo questions posted the Sunday before Tradehsow Week went to press asked others' opinions of specific hotels, recommendations for sites in certain cities and referrals to vendors for needed services. On any given day, dozens of answers to such questions pour in, igniting further conversation about the topics in question.

The success of MeCo and MIM, like the success of MySpace, stems from their organic quality, members' natural drive to connect.

Do exhibitors have that natural drive to connect?

Silfies of Exhibitor Group, which produces Exhibitor show as well as Exhibitor and Corporate Event magazines, hopes so. The 19-year Exhibitor veteran is in large part responsible for the show's highly rated educational content, as well as the company's CTSM (certified trade show marketer) program. Now, she plans to parlay that success into an online community to keep exhibitors connected year-round.

Exhibitor has been moving in this direction for a while. About five years ago, the company added to its Web site the Water Cooler, an online chat room for sharing advice and concerns. It also took the Exhibitor show on the road, first with a series of regional ExhibitorFastTrak conferences bringing CTSM classes to exhibit managers where they live, then, more recently, with the Gravity Free summit on exhibit design.

The face-to-face efforts continue, but Exhibitor had to do away with the Water Cooler after a couple years. "We didn't realize that, instead of it being peer-to-peer, suppliers were using it as a place to get to potential customers," Silfies said. "Suppliers were answering all the questions, so it kind of ruined the concept. Corporate event managers didn't to go there because they became prey."

It was a good concept, though, she added, and probably ahead of its time. If Exhibitor had known then what everybody knows today about password protection and selective sharing, the Water Cooler could have been a success.

Silfies believes this based on first-hand experience. Recently added community features of Exhibitor — such as Dinner With Strangers and a lounge where people can locate themselves and each other on maps of the world — demonstrate that exhibit and event managers crave connections, she added.

Although she couldn't give details at press time, Silfies said Exhibitor is working on its online community now and could roll it out this year. "The concept is, we're trying to support online what happens when people come together at the show," she said.

It will start with the CTSM community, already adept at getting together both physically and virtually. As part of the certification process, graduates mentor candidates, and candidates get together to form study groups and cheer each other on.

"They access it online and form groups that share information and have regional meetings," Silfies said. "When we come out with (a formal community) online, it will first be for people in the certification program. With us not being an association, that's what we're known for."

From there, she hopes, it will extend to the entire exhibit and event manager community.

Some believe getting exhibitors to talk to each other is an uphill battle.

Shawn White, vice president of sales for Life Is Good, said in the first few years of participating in tradeshows, his young company was so focused on getting there and making sales that it never stopped to think about the job as a discrete occupation.

"The one thing that probably best describes one vendor to the next in relation to tradeshows, period, is that there is little to no interaction," White said. Asked why he thought that was, he said, "In some respects, because they're competitors. ... If I had a better solution for my booth, I don't know that I would necessarily share that information with someone I consider a competitor."

There are other challenges as well. Erika Brunke, executive director of CEMA, the association for technology event marketers, said she hopes to launch a year-round extension of CEMA Connect, tested at the group's annual meeting last year. Although she said she believes the concept and program, designed by Leverage Software, are both excellent, she also said she fears that her constituents spend so much time working on their computers that they won't go online for social or professional networking too.

CEMA Connect allowed annual meeting attendees to fill out profiles and locate themselves on a virtual map in relation to others whose needs and interests matched their own. Vendors, speakers and event managers were color-coded, and communication controlled, so users could avoid contact with anyone they didn't want to meet.

"The concept was great," said Brunke, and "the technology was incredible. It was so easy to get it launched, I was shocked."

Still, "it was a little underutilized in my opinion," she added.

"The next step for us would be to have something like this all year round," said Brunke. At press time, she was planning to meet with Leverage Software to discuss the possibility. The problem, she noted, was that CEMA would be limited to working with an in-kind partner.

"It's not something we can pay for as a nonprofit. That's the difficult part," she said.

Similarly, Steven Schuldenfrei, president of the Trade Show Exhibitors Assn., said that he thought an interactive online community for members would be "great," but that creating one was "not too high on the pecking order at the moment."

In his experience, TSEA members do a lot more networking by telephone and in person than electronically. "Many exhibitors aren't in their offices a whole heck of a lot," Schuldenfrei said. "So, unless they have a Blackberry — and even then there are challenges — they don't spend a lot of time on the Internet."

Finally, there's the ever-more-pervasive problem of time deficit. Tradeshow Week Director of Research and Associate Publisher Michael Hughes wrote last year: "Today's corporate marketers are required to do more — more of everything, and usually with the same budget as last year."

Life Is Good's White substantiated this observation. As the company matured, executives realized its face-to-face marketing program needed a dedicated leader. They hired someone this winter, and made them trade marketing manager "so that we could put a broader scope on the position" than just tradeshow manager, White said. The new hire is responsible for "anything that involves the marketing of the brand to the trade."

White believes the new manager, who has extensive experience in tradeshow exhibit management, would be more amendable to the offerings of Exhibitor and TSEA than would he and other executives, who don't identify themselves as tradeshow people.

"She has a budget. She has specific instructions. She takes that challenge well and does a good job," he said. "I think she'd like to talk to someone who might help her become even better."