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Jaime Gottlieb
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A south Florida native, Gottlieb is a Creative Writing graduate from Florida State University and was a freelance Arts and Entertainment feature writer before joining ADOTAS in 2004.

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Canvassing Virtual Tradeshows: The Praise, Criticism and Hurdles Facing the Web Meet-and-Greet

Written on
February 15th 2006
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by Jaime Gottlieb  |
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The Internet is both a place that connects people and stands between them. While your MySpace account may have brought you back in touch with those random high school and college pals that you somehow lost touch with all these years later, you’re really the same distance away from them that you’ve been all this time. You won’t get any hugs or handshakes to welcome you back into their lives, but more than likely, the only cheerful expression you’ll get is by way of a smiley emoticon.

That’s really the beauty and the beast of the Internet, and when it comes to connecting for business, it’s no different. In fact, many of you are probably already booked for any number of industry tradeshows, cutting barters for ads and sponsorships and setting up meetings with that company executive you’ve been trying to pitch for months. When you think about these tradeshows, which I consider a form of business speed-dating (15 minutes to chat, pass the digits and move on to the next one), you still more than likely maintain relationships with some of the contacts you’ve made while attending such events.

But with the increasing popularity of virtual tradeshows - which give you the incomparable incentive of conducting meetings in your pajamas — there is still a lingering debate: Do they really pull through with their intended purpose or do they just keep us further away from each other and human contact? Perhaps the real topic of discussion is what makes them so popular and what makes them work.

What makes them popular is the easier question to answer. Attendees can move through the exhibit halls and speeches while checking emails and making calls from the office or even lounging around at home. No money or time wasted on travel expenses either. And despite what criticisms these events incur from breaching that person-to-person contact, they actually do work.

One such virtual tradeshow, the eComXpo, which will be making its third run this coming April, must be doing something right. The tradeshow, a sister company of InXpo, the leader in the production and management of online events, already boasts more than 7,000 advertisers, publishers, search marketers, merchants, affiliates, networks, agencies and vendors on board, making this the world’s largest tradeshow for ecommerce marketers.

That attendance numbers, which are up from 92 exhibitors and 1612 attendees from its first run this past February, comes as no surprise to its event director John Grosshandler, who explains to ADOTAS why there’s an increasing popularity in these virtual tradeshows. “The interesting thing about virtual trade shows is they’ve actually been around for more than 5 years and if you were to do a Google search on virtual trade shows you’d get at least 10,000 results,” he says.

“So there were a lot of companies that came and went during the Internet bubble because of all the obvious perceived advantages of virtual events, given all the issues there are involved with personal events. Grosshandler adds, “And what these companies that came and went 5 years ago found is that for a variety of reasons, the timing wasn’t right. The technology, the platforms if you will, weren’t robust. The people weren’t used to IM, which is a critical component of making a tradeshow work…People didn’t live on the Net the way they do today.”

And like anything else in the ever-evolving Internet world, virtual tradeshows are a work in progress. They may be a bit rough around the edges for now, but if there’s anything our beloved industry has taught us, those issues will be smoothed out in due time. As Danny Schonfeld, Ad Network Manager of PrimeQ Interactive Advertising, Inc. tells it, one of the issues holding virtual tradeshows back is that lack of person-to-person contact that many criticize. “The ease of anyone to attend is a major aspect that allows for some of the larger companies to meet smaller companies and individuals whom normally are overwhelmed by big trade show presence,” he says, “…almost leveling the playing field in regards to fancy suits and silly toys that normally attract those walking the shows. The online community is all created equal and can be seen for what they can provide and does away with all the showmanship our industry has come to rely on.”



Reader Comments.

Ziff Davis Media has been producing virtual trade shows for the IT community for the past two years. We have tackled the “hand-shaking” and “lack of actual face time” interaction by including technology from a relationship marketing vendor - Intro Networks - http://www.intronetworks.com/introNetworks_content.html

Sponsor feedback has been overwhelmingly successful.

Posted by eric biener | 2:44 pm on February 16, 2006.

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