Social Media: Extending a Show's Reach

At this week's MTO Summit 2008, on tap Nov. 5-6 at the InterContinental Chicago O'Hare Hotel, attendees who have been trying to figure out how social media might benefit their company's tradeshow marketing strategy will hear from someone who knows of what he speaks.

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, seminar leader and author of the best-selling “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly.”

According to MTO officials, Scott's keynote at MeetingTechOnline's one-day conference will include a “step-by-step action plan for harnessing the new rules of marketing and PR ... showing how to identify audiences, create compelling messages, get those messages to the most consumers possible and lead those consumers directly into the buying process.”

Scott spoke with Tradeshow Week Senior Editor Rachel Wimberly about how social media is changing the way tradeshows are marketed.

Question: What is your marketing background?

Answer: I was vice president of marketing for several different publicly traded technology companies in the 1990s and early into the year 2000. Prior to that, I was director of marketing at Knight Ridder in Asia, based in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Q: How would you define traditional marketing?

A: Before we had the Web as a way to market, marketing was all offline and, in an offline world, there are really only two broad ways to reach people. One broad way is to buy access somewhere, and the other broad way is to work with mainstream media to have them write about you.

So, as a marketer in my career and in the careers of other people I know ... (with) the tools and techniques that we had, you could do magazine advertising, television advertising, radio, newspaper, Yellow Pages, billboards or buy space at a tradeshow booth.

Q: How has the Web changed all that?

A: For the first time really, we can essentially become publishers of information ourselves. We can create all kinds of different pieces of info that help people to find out who we are and post them on the Web.

They can take the form of a YouTube video or an audio podcast or photographs, graphs, charts, a blog or a great content-rich, information-rich Web site. All of those are sorts of information we can create ourselves. As a result, marketers now have a third way of reaching people.

I am not suggesting it becomes an either-or proposition … that you either do offline marketing or you do online marketing. I'm suggesting that, because the Web allows us to reach people directly, that really smart organizations are combining their offline marketing, their face-to-face, event and tradeshow marketing efforts with online marketing efforts. The combination is incredibly powerful.

Q: How important to marketing are social media tools?

A: Social media as a catch phrase is a little bit misunderstood. Social media differs from so-called mainstream media in that social media is something that anybody can create but also typically involves things that people can add to.

It's transforming – the idea that you or anyone else can create content; … it's a new and kind of revolutionary concept. It is truly transforming marketing and what a marketer does.

Q: How can marketers in the tradeshow industry use it?

A: First of all, the skills that should be brought to bear by any organization either in the tradeshow business putting on tradeshows or those who are exhibiting at other people's events, … the skills that should be deployed as an online marketer are quite different than the skills that we have had in the past as offline marketers.

People who have done marketing in an offline world have been skilled at things like copywriting, advertising, public relations, communications. What works the best to create a social media online marketing effort around a tradeshow is thinking like a publisher, thinking like a journalist, as opposed to thinking like a marketer, because the best social media-enabled, face-to-face marketing are the ones where the organizers, or even exhibitors, are publishing valuable information to be used by those people who are at that physical event.

In a sense, a physical event potentially starts its life months before that short time that people come together and potentially can live on for months after people have left the physical venue.

Q: What exactly is a blog, and how does a blog enhance the tradeshow experience?

A: A blog is just a Web site that is written by somebody who's passionate about a particular topic. From the tradeshow perspective, there's several different ways that blogs can be used. The way that I see it most effectively used is to find out if there are any bloggers that are planning on attending anyway and make sure they have the facilities available for them to be able to blog well.

Secondly, see if there are any bloggers that are covering your industry who you can invite and give a free press pass to and come to the event and cover it as a blogger. The reason why that's important … is a blogger is likely to provide a different perspective to what's going on.

Q: How much does it cost to adopt social media?

A: It's free. It's free to have a YouTube account. It's free to start a blog. It's free to start a Twitter page.

Basically, what I recommend people do is become comfortable with some of the tools well before they stage an event and then be thinking about how the various tools can be used both to promote and encourage people to interact prior to the event and … afterwards as well.

Q: What are the drawbacks? Is there the danger of too much, too soon – people getting too overwhelmed?

A: I make my living doing keynotes. I have probably done 50 to 60 this year so far, and audiences always surprise me. There are more social media-savvy people in the audience than I normally think there is.

I often will go to a conference absolutely not about social media and not about marketing and there will still be people doing it. I was at an event for the Giant Screen Cinema Assn. in September, and there were people blogging live at the event, and these are not marketers. These are not people who are doing the social media thing. These are people who run IMAX theaters.

I do think it's the organizations that adopt these kind of ideas first that will be the ones that are seen as the forward thinkers and they will be able to harness the ideas sooner.