How Social Media Has Transformed Trade Shows

Social media activity at one of the world's largest trade shows skyrocketed this year: Ten times more people contributed information and commentary through the handful of active platforms than did at the previous event. Was it a show known for its youthful crowd or cutting-edge consumer gadgetry? Not at all: It was September's International Manufacturing Technology Show.

"Traditionally, manufacturing has been an older crowd that was slow to adopt social media," admits Monica Haley, marketing communications manager for the Chicago-based Association for Manufacturing Technology, which owns the trade show. But this year, according to Haley and co-worker Lee Anne Orange, special projects manager for exhibitions, something changed. Watching the discussion unfold on Twitter, in particular, caused many to reassess their perception of these forums. Social media went from "things their kids did" to effective business and marketing communications tools.

Haley has worked with AMT's social media initiative since its inception in 2006 and helped to debut several platforms at the 2008 IMTS (the show is biennial.) She didn't think the association should be limited by the increasingly outdated notion that social media only caters to a younger demographic. "That inevitably would change, as we knew it would. And we wanted to get out ahead of the curve," she explains, adding that this year's success in large part was driven by the proliferation of mobile technology.

"More people are walking around with smartphones and iPads and using them at the show," Haley points out. Plus, there's the popularity of the platforms themselves: Facebook grew from 100 million users in 2008 to more than 500 million in just two years -- while increasingly gaining users a good deal older than the college crowd for which it was originally created. Twitter's community exploded from about three million just two years ago to more than 160 million in 2010. LinkedIn grew nearly 350 percent in the same period and now has more than 80 million users.

Clearly, the masses have embraced social media; for trade show organizers, it's just a matter of learning how best to use it.

Not for prime time only Don't rush into this new technology without a strategy, cautions independent trade show presenter Emilie Barta, who also worked with the IMTS event this year. Barta, who is based in St. Louis ("but I live out of a suitcase"), helps associations and exhibitors fine-tune their messaging; in her experience, audiences will be quick to dismiss your efforts if you don't take the task seriously.

A crucial point, says Barta, and one that might be counterintuitive for many trade show organizers, is that the best strategy is one that isn't built around the event itself. Rather, it should be based on creating a year-round community. "Social media is used to develop relationships and have conversations, not just broadcast sales messages," she notes. "A trade show provides a disservice to its audience members if it does not employ a 365-day social media strategy. The shows that do that and have very conversational approaches are the ones that succeed. The actual trade show just becomes one of the things to talk about in a given moment."

Jordan Schwartz, whose Seattle-based company, Pathable, provides custom social media platforms for events, fully agrees with Barta and adds, "If you regard any kind of trade show or conference as a two- or three-day event, you are squandering an opportunity. The best value that an exhibitor can get from a trade show is a long-term relationship with a customer. You can try to start a long-term relationship with a five-minute visit in a booth, but its really going to be most valuable when trust and understanding and background knowledge are built over time."


Working the platforms The social media team that worked on this year's IMTS show devised a strategy that relied on five social media platforms. Although the show itself occurs only once every two years, the team maintains their presence on four of the platforms year-round, and simply shifts focus before and during the event, with the posts then becoming more timely and information-based. That's a natural use of the platforms, Barta explains, and is part of what differentiates one from another. "You have to give the messaging to your audience in the way they want to receive it," she says, noting that some people prefer Twitter, while others prefer LinkedIn. "It's a different way to build communities, and those communities may take on different personalities."

For IMTS, the team focused on the communities they have cultivated through the following media.

Twitter. AMT attempts to share information year-round on Twitter, according to Monica Haley, but as the actual event approaches -- and then, especially, during the event -- it becomes a primary means of communication. "During the six-day show," she says, "posts are going to be coming in as fast as they ever will." Think of Twitter like text messaging: Its immediacy works particularly well when trying to reach mobile attendees on the show floor.

"We did a lot of interaction with the exhibitors," explains Barta, who tweeted from her own account during the show. "If they were hosting something in their booths at a particular time, we promoted that. If we stopped by a booth and saw something cool, we took a picture and promoted it."

Facebook. This was another area of focus during the event itself. Facebook, though, has the potential to address both immediate concerns and more in-depth conversations, because people use it in different ways. On one hand, especially for those with a lot of Facebook friends, the status updates in the live feed can become buried relatively quickly. But it's also easy to navigate directly to an event's page, to take a quick look at what's been posted and see any conversations that have sprung up in response.

"With Facebook, it's all about having a conversation," notes Barta. "It's about using the platform to get conversations going among the audience. It's a great way to get information from the audience -- to get people to comment and have people comment on each other's comments. You also can have your audience members post pictures. It kind of becomes a bulletin board."

LinkedIn. This is an important platform for the association in general, but during the event AMT kept the activity here fairly low. "We decided we'd have a little bit of conversation on LinkedIn," explains Haley, "because we always have LinkedIn groups associated with manufacturing and the membership. But it doesn't necessarily lend itself very well to a live discussion. It works very well as a kind of static post that unfolds into a discussion over a longer period of time."

As with every platform, though, it all depends on the nature of the group. "Most people look at LinkedIn as their professional Rolodex," points out Barta, and there could very well be opportunities through that platform for people to connect at the show. (Note that many event-specific social media agents, such as Pathable and CrowdVine, offer some integration with LinkedIn contacts.) Plus, adds Barta, because LinkedIn has more of a corporate following, "you might get an audience there that would never touch Facebook."

YouTube. The IMTS team made good use of YouTube as a marketing channel before the show, and also used it as an outlet to post reports during the event. In the months leading up to opening day, they uploaded a lot of content to convey basic information about the show and about Chicago. Attendees could watch informational videos (featuring the association's vice president of communications) about navigating the O'Hare and Midway airports, for example, and getting into the city. The team also tapped the exhibitors for contributions.

"We solicited them to contribute on YouTube as well, by doing a program where they could make their own 60-second videos to try to convince people to visit their booths," Haley says. "They put them up, and people got to vote on them. The one that won got to be featured on the home page, and we gave it some other recognition as well."

During the show, the social media team recorded people answering a question of the day, which was edited and posted on YouTube daily. They also shot and posted additional footage of various aspects of the show to reveal what might be otherwise missed by many attendees at such a large event.

SCVNGR. This was the one platform where use was restricted to the event itself, by necessity. SCVNGR is a geo-location game that can be played through an app on mobile devices, or via text messaging for those without smartphones. "Basically, we didn't want to leave out one important social media component," says Haley of ATM's decision to experiment with geo-location technology.

SCVNGR provides a way to direct attendees to predetermined locations to complete "treks." The competitive aspect, as well as the opportunity to earn prizes by completing these treks, can increase attendee engagement. There also are potential sponsorship opportunities. In the case of this year's show, the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau provided the platform. (For a closer look at SCVNGR's use, see "Experimenting With Geo-Location") Continued...

Calculating spontaneity While it's crucial to plan a year-round social media strategy to represent a show brand, it's just as important for organizers to plan some of the communication that will occur during the actual event. That's another point that might seem counterintuitive, given the notion of a micro-blogging medium like Twitter as a way to spontaneously convey news and information, but it can help jump-start and grow the conversation taking place on-site.

The team at IMTS did just that by creating a number of posts in advance. Messages were worked around known scheduling and program information, including information about speakers and specific seminar issues. The team kept things organized by creating an Excel spreadsheet, listing the times down one side and the social media platforms across the top, so they could determine that communications would be spaced appropriately.

About a week before the event, Haley manually entered all of the posts into HootSuite, a social media dashboard site that can be used to create a schedule for Twitter and Facebook updates. "We wanted to have the messages pushed strategically, so they didn't all appear at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday," she explains. "Nor did we go quiet for two and a half hours while we were all in a meeting. We had consistently planned communications, with real-time posts about things like someone well known in the industry turning up on the show floor."


Keeping it real The nature of social media platforms is to foster authentic conversations among participants. Every platform discourages sales pitches, and most have strong anti-spam mechanisms in place. The trade show environment should be no different, despite the fact that exhibitors are there to market and sell their wares.

"The only way for an exhibitor in an event community to connect with attendees is to be an interesting and engaging person," explains Tony Stubblebine, founder and CEO of the event community platform CrowdVine -- and the lead engineer on the team that developed Twitter. "We've moved away from straight sales and marketing to having an informed conversation. Exhibitors need to send people who can have that conversation."

Social media can be a huge benefit to exhibitors, adds Pathable's Jordan Schwartz. "Giving exhibitors the opportunity to be participants in the community and to engage with attendees as peers can help them establish the relationships and the trust that can ultimately lead to the kind of business that they're trying to develop," he notes.

Of course, show organizers will be held to the same standards of authenticity. They should avoid marketing heavily and do what they can to encourage, but not force, an honest communication among attendees.

"Social media communication cannot be contrived," says Emilie Barta, "because people can see right through that. The conversation has to grow organically. If the organizers are going to hire a group of, say, 20 people and pay them per tweet, people are going to find out about that, and it isn't going to be taken well."

Besides the schedule reminders and show observations brought up by the IMTS team, what information should organizers post?

"There's a bunch of really easy ways for you to contribute," says Stubblebine. "There's a huge stream of worthwhile content -- that which was generated to put on the event, and the social media feeds of the speakers and exhibitors. If organizers just mine that information, to retweet it or blog about it, it ends up being a win-win, where the exhibitor and the speaker feel like the conference is promoting them, and attendees who otherwise are not in that particular loop are getting access to interesting information." Continued...

Generating revenue Because many shows are still in the experimental phase of their social media initiatives, generating revenue still is just a goal in many cases. Monica Haley of IMTS, for instance, says that at this year's show she heard a lot of interest from exhibitors regarding sponsorship for various parts of the association's social media program. "A lot of them didn't realize how much it was going to be pushed at the show," she reports. "So in the future, it's going to be an option."

Other opportunities exist, particularly in event-specific community platforms. Pathable, for instance, began offering revenue-generating features this past May. With Pathable, all show attendees have the opportunity to register and create their own show profile. Exhibitors and sponsors can join the community as well and set up online trade show booths. The virtual booths can include downloadable documents and pamphlets, and even embedded videos. They might have exhibitor logos and additional marketing materials, and they offer attendees the opportunity to schedule one-on-one, in-person meetings.

Specifics are determined by the client, but one suggested model is to offer every exhibitor a free basic listing, and to charge a fee for an enhanced one. The model comes directly from that of the traditional show program directory and can be found in a number of different platforms, in various iterations.


Not letting up Perhaps the biggest challenge to social media practitioners is to maintain communications when the show closes up shop and exhaustion sets in. The team at IMTS, says Haley, is going to do its best. "We want to keep them talking where they are," she says of the various social media communities. "We'll come to them. It's just a matter of us getting our act together and being reminded on a regular basis to look, to contribute or to just thank someone for talking. Everyone needs encouragement." Haley adds, "To have a real conversation of content, you have to put some real quality time and effort behind it."