Techies, Show Managers Gather for MTO Summit

Exhibiting in more than 200 events a year is no easy task for Bobbie Tracy, The Boeing Company's senior manager for the Air and Trade Shows group, so she decided to seek out technology solutions at MeetingTechOnline's inaugural 2008 MTO Summit, held Nov. 5-6 at the InterContinental Chicago O'Hare.

Tracy was on an “Exhibitions Systems Panel” and told the audience, “I'm really looking to you smart people – you technology innovators – to help me behind the scenes, so I can spend more money on the showfloor and my customers.”

Susan Katz, director of corporate events for the True Value Co., also manages more than 75 events annually, and said that she, too, sought information on how to streamline her processes.

“I'm looking for what is new and available to help us automate some of the things we are manually doing,” Katz added.

Besides show managers, technology companies such as Map Your Show, Traq-It, IndustryConnect and Attendee Interactive, among others, also attended to show off their products.

“We thought it was a great opportunity to get in front of folks one-on-one,” said Phil Louis, president of Map Your Show.

The event kicked off with an opening reception before getting down to business the next morning with a daylong conference. After breakfast, New Zealand Maori warriors got on the stage and livened up the crowd with drum beats and traditional dancing.

Stephen Nold, president of Advon Technologies and the conference organizer, said the dancers were an example of “thinking out of the box,” which, he added, complemented the conference theme of innovation in technology.

David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly,” followed the dancing with a keynote on how show managers could utilize Web 2.0 as a marketing tool.

He encouraged attendees to not only “unlearn what they had learned” about marketing, but also to “think like a publisher and publish interesting things buyers will see” by utilizing social media tools such as YouTube, Twitter and blogs.

Attendees could choose between two educational tracks for the rest of the day, one that focused on exhibition systems, and another that was geared toward social media.

The education didn't stop during the lunch hour either, with a panel that discussed how Hanley Wood Exhibitions redesigned and programmed its shows' Web sites so that attendees and exhibitors could tailor their event experiences to exactly what they needed.

GES Exposition Services and SmartSource were the events' title sponsors, and Jeff Quade, GES executive vice president of sales and marketing, said his company participated because “we want to help clients improve events by using world-class tools.”

Nold said, “Our goal is education and exciting content and innovation. We want people to walk out of here going, 'Wow!'” Three more events already are on tap for 2009 in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., he added.