As if it’s not difficult enough to fill room blocks these days, we now have outside travel firms attempting to look like official travel vendors for shows. This has most likely been going on for a while, but the problem of rogue group travel companies attempting to snag attendees away from booking hotel rooms within your room block is worsening. More and more I’m seeing these companies buying Google AdSense keywords for names of tradeshows in an attempt to book rooms for attendees outside the organizers block.

But it doesn’t stop there. Looking at the ad itself, and then clicking over to the group travel company site, an attendee might think they ARE booking in the block because the travel company makes it seem like they are an official vendor of the show. It’s happening at the moment to The International Traders Expo (the first tradeshow I lanched and later sold), but I saw it happening to another newer tradeshow I attended as well.

See the screenshot below (click on the image for full-size):

Click on that ad and you see this (click on the image for full-size):

In this particular instance the company is HDMC. Come on HDMC, long-term this is not good for our industry or YOUR business. If we can’t fill our room blocks and have to pay attrition because you’ve duped our attendees into booking elsewhere, eventually we’ll stop doing the event – and you’ll have less and less conferences from which you can poach hotel rooms.

Hotel executives: how about helping us out and by NOT taking reservations from the worst of these violators?

So Avid won’t have a booth at NAB this year. As usual when an anchor exhibitor and sponsor exits, a few people are talking doom and gloom for the future of the show. A blog over at CreativeCow.net has interesting discussion about the issue.

On the one hand, I think the move by Avid may bode well for us – we’ve been trying to get Avid for a few years to exhibit at our small event. Because our audience of content creators is relatively new to the video editing industry, Avid could reach an untapped audience who hasn’t yet determined their loyalties – 99% of the NAB attendees already have. Dollars no longer allocated to NAB could be up for grabs.

On the other hand, Avid may find their “change of strategy” to meet with potential and current customers directly (through road shows or small meetings in the customer’s offices I’d imagine) may prove difficult. This strategy and argument isn’t new of course – many exhibitors who have pulled out of tradeshows have come to the same conclusion. The trouble is, a major tradeshow like NAB serves the attendees well for one simple reason – they can take 2-3 days and demo all of the products in one fell swoop. They can speak with all of the company representatives, get all their questions answered, and then make an intelligent buying decision while all of that information is fresh in their minds.

If the top 20 companies decided to take the road show model, and I’m a potential customer, I then have to attend 20 different events or have twenty different meetings in my office over months and months. At the end, when I’m finally ready to take all the information I’ve gathered and make a buying decision, I’d find myself saying, “Now did product X that we demo’d a few months ago have feature Y? I can’t remember now!”

Tradeshows work because they save people time – plain and simple. The pendulum of show participation swings back and forth for all industries. My guess: Avid will be back – just like IBM returned to CES after not participating for several years.

I just came across a great blog post that describes, in detail, how one person attempted to live-stream a conference online and in Second Life. As expected, bandwidth issues presented major problems. However, it’s an interesting read for anyone wanting to tackle internet broadcasting of your sessions.

http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/11/diy-streaming.html

I’ve received a handful of emails asking where to find our speaker agreement. Here it is. I’m open to any suggestions anyone has to improve it.

Yes it’s long, but it’s actually about one-third the length it was in the original drafts. But the length and detail, I believe, let’s our speakers know how serious we are about the commitment and quality we are expecting from them.

I was asked to guest post over at the Confabb Blog. Here is my post below.

Naming a new conference or tradeshow is tricky business. I know – I’ve changed the name of one of our shows every year since the inaugural event – and probably broken every brand marketing rule in the book by doing so. Our 2008 event, the 4th Annual, will have it’s fourth rendition of the name in as many years.

On the one hand, it’s given bloggers in the industry a lot to talk about after every show and allowed us to focus more directly on the true nature of the industry each year. On the other hand, the event is known by a multitude of names – and variations of those names – no doubt causing confusion among attendees and exhibitors.

When launching a tradeshow for a brand new industry, that industry tends to change quite a bit in the first five years. It’s incredibly diffcult to nail the name the first time around when so much changes so quickly. Here’s the list of the names our show has had and why we changed each time:

1) Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference

We de-emphasized the word Podcasting the first year because very few people had even heard the term. The iPod was the hottest gadget around and we thought the direction of the show in the future would be about creating media for portable devices

2) Podcast and Portable Media Expo

Podcasting was now a more recognizable term and it was a hot topic for companies looking to get on board

3) Podcast and New Media Expo

We realized people weren’t creating content just for portable devices like iPods and MP3 players, but creating content for the web and allowing their audience to consume it wherever they wanted. Time to de-emphasize the “portable” aspect of the event.

4) New Media Expo

Podcasting and New Media has become redundant – a bit like having a “Book and Publishing Expo” so time to drop the podcasting term and go with the term that covers all aspects of online content. We were also getting pidgeon-holed into the reputation of being just for hobbyist podcasters and not serious business content creation.

In order to avoid this name jumping altogether, consider a more generic name that alludes to your subject matter. The “E for All” show is a great example. No mention of gaming in the name, yet it’s the primary focus. But it also allows the show to grow in various ways they may not see at the moment without having to change the name down the road.

10 years ago, a frequent name change may not have mattered too much. But in an era where everything is “tagged” with terms – photos, videos, blog posts and articles, it may become difficult for attendees and exhibitors/sponsors to find content on your show if they are searching for an old term. Recent photos and blog posts about our show may be tagged with the term “Podcast Expo” and yet the current name is “New Media Expo.” An interested person searching for Flickr.com photos of our shows may not find them easily when they are tagged with old names.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken the “E for All” approach and named the event something that is both easily put into an acronym (”Are you going to SEMA this year?”) and something that would allow me to take the show in different directions without having to change the name.

Give yourself that flexibility and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.

We’ve finished the Speaker Agreement for 2008 event. Because we’re paying our speakers next year a percentage of the profits, we’ve added in quite a bit more language about how they need to perform in order to get paid and what we are expecting from them. Yet, like any contract, you have to decide how much is really necessary to put in there to make sure you get a session that meets the expectations of your attendees and yourself.

We’ve added in language that says how long their actual presentation must be, and the maximum number of minutes they can dedicate at the end to a Q&A period. This is because one of our speakers this year ended their one-hour session after 30 minutes. I didn’t think we’d have to be specific about this, but apparently we do.

But I also heard from several attendees that one of the panelists appeared to be on drugs during the session and disrupted the flow of the workshop. Wonderful. Do I need to now put a clause in the speaker agreement that they won’t be intoxicated or high during their presentation? We haven’t, of course, because I think it was a rare enough event that it won’t happen again. The detail side of me says I need to put as much stuff as possible in their to ensure a great experience for the attendees. But the realistic side of me knows I can’t account for every single thing that may go wrong. But I take it as a reflection on our company and the event when a speaker screws up. For that one-hour – they ARE the show and representing our company.

In the end, I have to set the expectations as best I can and choose our speakers wisely. Needless to say, that speaker won’t be invited back.

Getting attendee feedback seems to be a standard practice in the tradeshow business. Learning how we can do a better job by asking the attendees what they liked and didn’t like, in theory, is suppose to help us improve our events so that more attendees are satisfied and more come back in the future. Yet I’m finding that 99.99% of the feedback is useless to us, either because the attendees simply don’t understand our business (“Make the conference sessions free next time”) or their suggestions are things we know about, yet have no control over (“The WiFi Internet sucked – you need to do a better job of that – you’re a technology conference!”).

Regular readers of my blog know that last one angers me every time – Internet providers at hotels and convention centers simply aren’t up to the task of providing stable wi-fi to 500 modern Internet users in one room at one time. We have meeting after meeting with the providers prior to our events, where we specifically warn them about what they are going to encounter, and yet the Internet goes down or is nearly unusable about 75% the time. And yet we, as the organizer, are blamed for being ill-prepared. Even on the exhibit hall floor, you’d think that paying $1,000 per connection would ensure rock-solid bandwidth – instead it’s a crap shoot – and I’m sick of it.

Anyway, back to the surveys. I’m finding more and more, that most general attendee feedback just isn’t worth the hassle. Feedback like, “It was too cold in the room” followed by the attendee in the same room saying, “Are you guys too cheap to turn on the air-conditioning?” are enough to drive any event organizer mad. Individual opinions simply aren’t consistent enough to make any changes that would please more people, and it’s a waste of our resources to even ask for it. So we won’t be in the future.

Yes that’s right, we’re not doing any general surveys for future events.

What we DO plan on doing, is feedback for individual speakers about their workshops. Even though we know speakers will get feedback ranging from “Terrible speaker” to “Best Speaker at the Expo!”, there are probably a few things the speaker can learn from and improve for the next presentation.

So is it possible that we’ll miss the .01% of the suggestions that might actually be worthwhile because I’m not willing to sift through the 99.99% of the feedback that is worthless? I suppose, but as a small company we have to dedicate our resources to where they are best used, and filtering through all the nonsense to get to that piece of information just doesn’t make sense.

We just launched our speaker proposal page for the 2008 New Media Expo in Las Vegas. We made a few changes to the submission process for next year including A) not taking requests for panelists and B) we’ve decided to pay our speakers. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Although many people are happy and willing to speak at the event for the exposure we give them, there has always been a quiet grumbling about how trade show organizers charge for the conference and don’t pay their speakers.

I don’t know that we will make the change to paying our speakers at all the different events we produce, since the New Media Expo is more of a “how to” event, I think we will get higher quality presentations from those we do select because we have decided to pay them.

In trying to determine exactly how much to pay, I researched and pondered everything from a flat fee to a fee based on attendee satisfaction surveys – the happier your audience, the more you would get paid. In the end, I decided to go with a percentage of net profits from the conference. 20% of the net profits will be divided among the workshops equally. Another 5% will be allocated based on how many attendees (free or paid – doesn’t matter) the speaker brings to the event based on their own efforts (email blasts, website banners, etc.). Emile (our CTO) has built a pretty sophisticated tracking system that will make this very easy to calculate.

This also ups the ante for our speakers, who must agree when they submit their proposal, that even a subtle sales pitch in their session will result in not getting paid their percentage. Like everything else, it’s a work in progress, but the goal is to deliver the most compelling content possible so that attendees walk out saying it was the best conference they’ve ever attended.

Update: I’ve worked it out with pc/nametag. As I expected, it took calling American Express and initiating a chargeback to get their attention. When they realized they weren’t going to get paid anything, and that we might be going to court over it, they decided to give me a call. We came to an agreement about how much of a discount I would get for the lanyards. I was never looking for a total refund, but I did feel a partial refund was fair. I’m pleased that they did the right thing.

I’ve learned quite a bit about printing in the last few years. We trade show organizers love to print – from brochures and programs to lanyards and badges, we print a lot of paper. We just finished up the Podcast and New Media Expo, and for whatever reason we had a terrible experience with our printers this year.

First up: pc/nametag printed our lanyards this year and they were awful. The logo we needed to print on the lanyard this year was very detailed, so we had to go with a screen printed lanyard rather than a sewn lanyard. The proof looked great and I was impressed with their “Actual Size” proof layout. But I knew we were in trouble immediately when I opened the box three days before the Expo and pulled one out. It looked nothing like the proof (see photo below). The proof above the lanyard that approved said “Actual Size.” Does the final product look anything like actual size to you??

Obviously the lanyard did not print actual size. I gave pc/nametag every opportunity to make it right, even overnighting them one of the lanyards so they could take a look. All they could say is, “looking at the lanyard, it did in fact imprint according to specifications.” So I guess now I’ll be dealing with American Express for a chargeback. I hate to do business that way, but pc/nametag has given me no choice.

Lately I’ve noticed another disturbing trend with printers – being charged for overruns. Both pc/nametag and our directory printer charged us for additional units that were printed beyond what we ordered. We ordered 2,500 directories, but paid for 2,600. We ordered 2,000 lanyards, but were charged for 2,095. So let me get this straight. I order a specific amount, but you decide to print a few more and charge me for them. Can you imagine this in other industries?

“I know you ordered a half sandwhich, sir, but the chef decided to make you a whole sandwhich so we’re charging you for a whole.” Or how about this one: “I know you ordered a 10×10 booth, but we gave you a 10×20 so you’ll need to pay for the 10×20.”

Charging for overruns has got to be the most absurd thing I have seen this year. If your machine can’t accurately print the number of items I ordered and it prints more, THAT’S NOT MY PROBLEM – IT’S YOURS. Any printers out there who are reading this, feel free to somehow justify your overrun charges in the comments. I’d love to hear how you think this is fair and a necessary business practice.

Everyone who has ever launched a trade show has been in the “chicken or the egg” conundrum. Sponsors like the idea of your show but don’t want to commit until they see who else is committing. But no one is willing to be the first to jump into the pool. I’ve seen many an unscrupulous trade show organizer (usually someone brand new to the industry who has never organized an event) outright lying about who is sponsoring the event. They launch their website with several impressive logos. Yet when asked, the sponsor has never heard of the event and has no idea why their logo is on the event site. The inexperienced organizer’s hope, of course, is that the company is too large to find out what is going on and by the time they do, they will have secured their largest competitor based on the false information and they will come on board anyway.

But it never works that way. Every time I’ve seen this happen, the event implodes after the first show or never happens at all. And why wouldn’t it – if that’s how they handle their business you can imagine how they’ll treat their exhibitors down the road.

The ethical way to get that first big sponsor to come on board, of course, is to play the “if” game. “If I got XYZ company to come on board, would you do the same?” Get two big players in the industry to come on board together, thereby, alleviating the “I don’t want to be first” nervousness.

But what happens when one of the “big boys” gives you a verbal YES but needs a week to get the CFO to sign off? This is a dangerous time. Two choices here: announce it and pray the paperwork gets signed so that you can capitalize on it NOW and bring in other exhibitors, or, hold your tongue – as hard as it may be – and wait for the signed contract.

I don’t know if this is what happened with E for All, the show launched to replace E3, but it looks like they may have taken the first choice and got burned. The trouble is, when you go ahead and announce a verbal commitment, if they don’t come on board you end up doing more damage than not announcing it all. In this day and age, when bloggers and online news websites can post in minutes, you may simply fan the flames of talk about how your launch isn’t going as well as hoped, and how several large companies aren’t coming either. All of a sudden, you find yourself worse off than if you had never announced the big guy at all.

In the end, we’re better off waiting until the deal is official. The damage done by having them back out would outweigh any benefit gained by announcing it early.