News that VNU’s 2007 Incentive Show has gone virtual offers me an opportunity to talk about the merits (or lack thereof, in my opinion) of virtual events. I’ve never understood how a virtual tradeshow is any different than simply visiting a website. There’s not a single shred of information in a virtual event that I can’t already find somewhere else on the Internet.

The main reason a vast majority of people who attend tradeshows do so in the first place is to step away from the virtual world for a few days and actually have a face-to-face discussion with peers about the issues important to them. If you take that element away, all you really have is a website. In fact, you have something worse than a website, because now you are making me go to a website at a specified day and time rather than on my own time.

The reason tradeshows continue to survive and bounce back, even after an event like 9/11, is because there is no other way to replicate actual in-person connections. Please don’t tell me that text chats, audio chats or even video conferencing can be a substitute. They can’t. Even if 95% of the experience is replicated, there is something about that last 5% that is impossible to replicate that makes all the difference in human relationships. Proof positive: Second Life, the virtual community that comes about as close as technologically possible to replicating human interaction has a real-life, in-person convention.

If all you are trying to accomplish is strictly information dissemination, then a webcast will suffice. The fact that people have to travel to your event of course means additional cost. But let’s face it, if your show isn’t worth traveling to in the first place, putting it on the web isn’t going to work either – something else is missing. And it may just be that your industry already has enough networking and face-to-face discussions and another tradeshow isn’t needed.

The term virtual tradeshow is an oxymoron.