Tradeshow Organizer Frustrations with Internet
I just returned from Gnomedex. Chris Pirillo, the founder and organizer of the event does an incredible job of building buzz for his event. There are no printed direct mail pieces, no printed exhibitor/sponsor pieces. The only printed piece is the on-site Program. Chris relies entirely on blogs, email, podcasts and word of mouth to promote his event - and sells it out every time. Rich Westerfield talks about it here. It is a great example of a conference attendee taking the best of what he likes at conferences he has been to and creating his own. And his line item on the budget for marketing must be a tradeshow organizers dream.
One source of frustration for Chris and for me at every single event I have produced is the Internet access. It is constantly going down or so slow that it might as well be down completely. When I ran the Online Trading Expo, we had professional stock traders trading online with the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ on the exhibit hall floor. Every time we had problems with slow Internet. Sometimes it was not anyone’s fault - such is life when you are dealing with the Internet.
But many times, the Internet access provider simply did not believe me when I told them about the demands our attendees would put on the network. No matter how much I talked about how much we would test their system, they chose to ignore me and simply prepared the amount of bandwidth they thought would cover it. So how about changing vendors? Very funny. Every convention center I’ve ever been to has an exclusive with one provider - the motivation to do better has simply been removed - why bother when you know you have the contract until 2008?
The Bell Harbor Conference Center didn’t believe Chris. It’s unfortunate. While I was in the auditorium, and had access for a moment, I sent an email to my show manager telling her that we need to have a meeting with the Internet provider in Ontario - they MUST believe me when I tell them we need fat pipes for our show.
Any meeting facility Internet providers reading this? PLEASE listen to show organizers when we tell you what kind of broadband we need and make the exhibitors and attendees happy. You’re charging our exhibitors around $1000 bucks for three days! For that kind of money can’t you make the damn thing work right?
August 29th, 2005 at 4:03 pm |
Agreed. I run a show for WISPs and ISPs and ironically, we have the exact same challenges. We could easily get free access through a window these days, but the exhibitors would feel it on the docks or the attendees would find plenty of interesting catering delicacies during that sponsored lunch.
The worst part is that the buildings and their IT/Telcom Departments have installed shiny new Cisco APs everywhere thinking that common area hotspot trend would make even more money than a $1,000 CAT5 cable.
The only thing you can do is go to clue-free venues or larger hotels that aren’t up to snuff in wifi land. Otherwise, you are forced to deal with QoS akin to Kevin Martin’s dream monopoly we’re realizing in the US.