Making Trade Shows Interesting

One of the hard parts about run­ning a con­fer­ence is fig­ur­ing out a reas­on­able strategy for the trade show. Some con­fer­ences don’t have a trade show at all; if you can get the attendees to pay all the costs asso­ci­ated with an event, then that’s a worth­while strategy. 

From 2001 until late last year there was such a down­turn in the high tech industry that vendors were hav­ing a hard time jus­ti­fy­ing the costs for booths and booth staff. The XML con­fer­ence cer­tainly noticed the down­turn. It was­n’t all about the money, of course. As Tim said, a web site can func­tion as a booth and does­n’t pack up and go home after a couple of days.

Except for, every­one now has a web site, many com­plete with blogs and RSS feeds and Flash demos of happy cus­tom­ers using the product to do mar­vel­lous things. If you know the names of the com­pan­ies whose products you’re inter­ested in, or the stand­ard name of the type of product you’re look­ing for (so you can at least google for it), then you’re prob­ably well served by the web. Always assum­ing that what you’re look­ing for is the slick, pol­ished, demo inform­a­tion that most web sites spe­cial­ise in. If you don’t know what types of products you might need, or you don’t know the names of rel­ev­ant com­pan­ies, then you have a harder time try­ing to find it. Or maybe you’re just sus­pi­cious of wheth­er the products shown in the slick demos really can solve the issues you have.

I’m reminded of the sci­entif­ic research com­munity. When I was doing my PhD, you either had time to keep up with the related lit­er­at­ure, or you had time to do your own research. You did­n’t have time to do both. The way you found out about stuff that actu­ally was rel­ev­ant to what you were work­ing on was to go to a con­fer­ence or two a year, listen to the papers, and talk to people. Merely pub­lish­ing your research in a recog­nised journ­al was not enough; you had to take the research to where they were going to be. I think we’re get­ting close to this with web sites, where one of the only ways for vendors who aren’t house­hold names to be found is to go to a trade show and make it worth­while for attendees to stop by their booths.

So what makes it worth­while for attendees to stop by a booth? Part of the answer is for what they can­’t get off the web. Eric Sink points out, amongst a lot of oth­er inter­est­ing com­ments, that the big dif­fer­ence is face time. Time to put com­pan­ies and products into per­spect­ive, com­pare them to the com­pet­i­tion, maybe talk to some real developers. Time to see wheth­er they can trust the vendor to ful­fill the prom­ises that vendors always make about ship dates, fea­ture sets, and stand­ards-com­pli­ance. And time to find out about that new style of product that they had­n’t known even exis­ted before this week.

At the XML con­fer­ence we’re doing our bit to help attendees get an exper­i­ence they can­’t get on the web. We’re emphas­iz­ing inter­op­er­ab­il­ity demos, and com­par­at­ive product demos. We’re get­ting new vendors on to the show floor, and a lot of vendors this year are plan­ning product launches at the con­fer­ence. It looks like it’s going to be a good com­ple­ment to the tech­nic­al pro­gram, show­ing attendees anoth­er side to the innov­a­tions going on in XML-land.