Last week at the consumer electronics show (aka CES and aka “the week you do not want to be trying to catch a cab in vegas”) I made a tweet about the lack of social signage around major booths and after a few days of wandering looking for good examples to tweet about, it’s pretty startling how far event groups are from their social media counterparts… and a good enough reason to pop back on and restart my blog after a long time away.
Now I’m not talking about sophisticated integration, touchscreen kiosks or integrated promos, just simple signs pointing out the facebook, youtube, foursquare and / or twitter profiles for any given booth… the basics.
This is an example of marketing in a silo a silly miss to have after all the expense that goes into building a booth for a show like CES. After all, a tradeshow is suppose to be about getting the word out and while no one is going to need a sign to know to tweet on an awesome new 3D TV, without a message it’s completely on the user to figure out how or even remember to do so. We all know that social works best when messages aggregate whether it’s to trend or simply for metrics and responding by the brand yet if you asked me what the twitter handle was for Philips I wouldn’t have a clue (and no, it’s not @Philips).
Of course there were a few companies that really “get it” and made it more than evident to figure out their show specific or mainstream channel, often using their own big screen displays to get the message across. These should be the goal example for all exhibitors and really is just a starting point. Given the adoption rate (facebook’s userbase is large than the population of all but two countries) social urls are very possibly the most important fact you should be sharing, even versus your own website.
This means going beyond a sign and putting social urls on pull up banners, flyers, business cards, even window clings on the side of TVs… Heck, we even went so far as to make a tshirt with a fill in the blank for our various product managers and marketing teams to use for promotion around the show.
Let people know where you can be found, give them a reason to share, and you’re the one they’ll be talking about.
In closing and very unrelated to this message, it’s been a while since this blog was last written too but look for more posts coming along as I get this all fired back up.