Being a small-ish business that's just bought another small business, our second acquisition in 18 months, we fell to talking about business development, or marketing (it's usually the same thing when you're an SME). There's blogs and tweets of course, we have offices in the UAE, Beijing, Moscow so we can get the word out in new countries, and we will e-contact all our existing and recent past clients. There's trade papers. There are online sector-specific newsletters (I can never find us in them so I have little faith that possible clients do). Google ad words are good and we have had some quantifiable success there.
Then someone suggested trade shows. I've always hated trade shows. I loathe the over-heated, over-stuffy, over-badged, over-boothed plastic blandness of it all. Cellophane-wrapped peppermints in bowls and tiny biro pens. I'm not talking necessarily about media shows. At least they have big TV screens and fancy cameras, and the better ones have debates or keynote speeches.I went to a railway show once in Berlin. No speeches but huge locomotives on special tracks in the convention centre. White sausages and beer being scoffed by large train executives from all over the world. I have been to a bus show in Birmingham with huge clean blue buses and silver coaches, and acres of safety CCTV demonstrating how the whole journey could be recorded and linked, in real time. You could torture people by making them watch a bus journey in real time on CCTV. I'd start with the 134. I went to a holiday industry show which managed to deglam and defun everything to do with travel. Local government shows, yes, there are dozens of them. Health. And Safety. IT of every hue. Textiles. Dyeing. Dying.
That is the trade show story - they're dying. B2B trade show revenues in the US were down 6.4 per cent in 2010, according to American Business Media. Two years ago Apple said it would stop going to the Mac show. A bit like the headmaster saying he's not going to turn up at school. Spending on shows down too. It's the things I mentioned first - Google, blogs, tweets - that are killing them, along with recession. But like the desk phone and the lawyer who won't action a contract without a hard copy, and the bank that takes three days to move money from your account to someone else's, they're not dead yet. They'll just become emptier and more depressing.
The best ones will become conferences. The others will go online. We'll stick to the Google ad words. And pass on the peppermints.
Then someone suggested trade shows. I've always hated trade shows. I loathe the over-heated, over-stuffy, over-badged, over-boothed plastic blandness of it all. Cellophane-wrapped peppermints in bowls and tiny biro pens. I'm not talking necessarily about media shows. At least they have big TV screens and fancy cameras, and the better ones have debates or keynote speeches.I went to a railway show once in Berlin. No speeches but huge locomotives on special tracks in the convention centre. White sausages and beer being scoffed by large train executives from all over the world. I have been to a bus show in Birmingham with huge clean blue buses and silver coaches, and acres of safety CCTV demonstrating how the whole journey could be recorded and linked, in real time. You could torture people by making them watch a bus journey in real time on CCTV. I'd start with the 134. I went to a holiday industry show which managed to deglam and defun everything to do with travel. Local government shows, yes, there are dozens of them. Health. And Safety. IT of every hue. Textiles. Dyeing. Dying.
That is the trade show story - they're dying. B2B trade show revenues in the US were down 6.4 per cent in 2010, according to American Business Media. Two years ago Apple said it would stop going to the Mac show. A bit like the headmaster saying he's not going to turn up at school. Spending on shows down too. It's the things I mentioned first - Google, blogs, tweets - that are killing them, along with recession. But like the desk phone and the lawyer who won't action a contract without a hard copy, and the bank that takes three days to move money from your account to someone else's, they're not dead yet. They'll just become emptier and more depressing.
The best ones will become conferences. The others will go online. We'll stick to the Google ad words. And pass on the peppermints.
