A Wider Net

Exhibitor 2007 just concluded and it appeared to be a great success. There were tons of interesting exhibit materials, technologies, and services on display. There were also thousands of great people in attendance.

I will cover some of the products that caught my eye in the coming days but, in the meantime, have a look at this collection of photos from the show. If there’s a photo you want to know more about please leave a comment there or here and I will add more information if I have it.

I’m heading out this afternoon to Exhibitor 2007 in Las Vegas. This show hosts several hundred sessions for around 6,000 attendees. Exhibitor 2007 will showcase all the latest technology and techniques for making the most of trade show exhibits, marketing, and management. Attendees are increasingly interested in getting their CTSM certification (Certified Trade Show Marketer). It also covers a wide range of corporate event-related topics.

I am presenting “Building Larger and More Connected Audiences - Online and Onsite” this Tuesday morning. I will be sharing tips and case study analysis for Event Portal Websites, Blog-based Event Portals, Social Media and Social Networking, Webcasting, and Connecting Multiple Simultaneous Events. At first I was afraid to fill 90 minutes, but with all those subtopics I seem to be having no trouble at all. In fact, I have a lot of pruning yet to do.

Exhibitor is fertile ground for this blog, so I expect a good stream of posts for you during after the event. See you on the other side!

So what happens when the America finds out that the premium brands it trusted to feed fido and fluffy is the same slop sold under store brands? Say “buh-bye” to your customers and the poor pets that were poisoned.

Talk about “brand awareness”, people are more aware now that these premium brands have a value proposition equal to that of 40lb bag of Winn Dixie dog food. Ouch. It would have been one thing if a premium brand had a quality control problem, you could recover from that.  Consumers are now exposed to the dirty truth that they have been charged outragous premiums for a product sold under store brands like Walmart or Stop & Shop. Do you think Colgate or P&G will regain the trust of consumers who for years happily paid a premium for what they believed to be a superior product? Does Colgate or P&G think these customers are going to forget?  Some may be tempted, but I hope not. 

Lesson; Packaging and marketing will not be enough to save you (Eukanuba, Iams & Science Diet). When you have built your brand on a house of cards (or your ubiquitous kibble), take pause and think about creating some level of differentiation on a product level.  Until then, I bid thee farewell.

This morning I fed my fossil-fuel-depleting Hondacar at a local Sunoco. The experience of pumping fuel at this particular Sunoco was downright Evil. Let’s take a look at how the customer experience has changed since the days of full-service.

You used to stay in your car. A reasonably friendly person used to pump your gas, check your oil, wash your windshield, and more. I remember - although the memory is about as foggy as the memory of when I was four and my brother-in-law bounced me off a ceiling (yes, that explains a lot). Both were a long time ago.

Now you have to get out of your car and risk spilling the most foul-smelling liquid ever on you. It stays with you like garlic, and unlike garlic it has this nasty tendency to explode. The gas stations are nice enough to place a roof over your head to protect you from the elements, although they’re usually so high up and so small that even a gentle breeze will allow a hailstone to target your noggin.

And you have to have a credit or debit card or you’re faced with dragging your credit-challenged soul into the building where a nervous cashier awaits, one hand on a trigger.

But the real evil is the way they work hard to confuse the customer experience at the pump in order to extract more money. Rather than designing an intuitive friendly experience, they place controls out of order and ask confusing questions that cause you to think, and who wants to think when they’re commuting?
Logically, they should order the gas choices from left to right, from cheapest to most expensive. Sometimes they go backwards, and I can forgive that. But this pump ordered the fuel choices in this order: Most Expensive, Cheapest, Middle. In no state in America can this possibly make sense, except maybe the ones still reeling from their hanging chad problems.

So they push you towards premium or middle-grade - you have to hunt for the cheap stuff, which my car specifies as it’s preferred libation.

Next, you insert a credit card - and the first thing it asks you is “Debit Card Yes/No”. I stared at it, dumbfounded, and wondered what marketing genius whipped up this scheme? It knows it’s a credit card. It could ask Credit/Debit, or simply assume you want to use a credit card as a credit card but no - it asks “Debit Card Yes/No”. The question, answered positively (the most common response to a hurried buyer) will help the gas station avoid credit card processing fees and the bank gets to charge cash advance interest.

I imagine that Sunoco has determined that most people won’t notice. That the minor inconvenience introduced by rearranging the pumps and asking illogical questions will go forgotten the moment the driver leaves. Maybe that’s true - maybe the consumers ONLY care about price. Personally I find good user experiences are a way to win customer loyalty. And to that point, I’ll pass on Sunoco for a competitor every time.

Hooray for Widgets! You just have to love these cute tinkertoys of usefulness.

Yahoo has released Yahoo Widgets 4.0 (you may recall when Yahoo bought the widget system called Konfabulator). New improvements include superior performance and a Vista-like docking system that works on XP computers.

Widgets, a staple of the Macintosh OS and the new Windows Vista, are little applications that can users can select and sprinkle around their desktop or join together into a little tool conglomerate. They perform all kinds of functions ranging from the silly (cartoons-of-the-day, vote for best buns) to the useful (news feeds, alerts, information displays, calculators, sharing tools). Why am I getting this feeling of Deja Vu?
Recently we’ve seen a surge in branded widgets made to promote a service, like Priceline, or a product, like an upcoming movie or album. They provide useful functionality in return for a consistent place on your desktop. These are the electronic equivalents of a stapler branded “Remember to drink Coke at lunch” sitting your real world desk.

Some branded applications go beyond the mere “widget” and are called BDA’s or Branded Desktop Applications - but that’s another post for another day.

Yahoo Widgets - who says OS X and Vista should have all the fun?

Thanks again to Techcrunch for highlighting this release for us.

Techcrunch covers Zoho Meeting, a web conferencing application with lots of great features that Webex is missing (like, hopefully, a reasonable price). I like the fact that it’s compatible with a very wide array of platforms, and I love the fact that you can record the sessions.
I must add a disclaimer, however- if you’re thinking of using this as a sales tool to a bunch of people, please reconsider. In fact, please reconsider using a web conference at all. If I get one more invite to a boring impersonal audio-only web conference sales pitch I may need a webexorcism.

Hellvetica… Helvomita… Helvetica is the most widely… er…. regarded font next to Arial, which only get’s it’s notoriety because of it’s homonym-ity with a half-naked Mermaid.  The anorexic font gets it’s big screen debut as Helvetica makes it’s way around the globe.

Check out the Helvetica vs. Arial game.

Also see the rest of the links to other Helvetica goodies at Buzzfeed.

Those of us in the Boston area will have to wait until May to catch it at SEGD.

You might be asking - if this is a videoconferencing unit, wouldn’t the person holding it be unable to participate in the conference? Yes - and don’t you have that person in mind, right now?
The Tandberg FieldView looks like a large digital camera, but it’s actually a wireless (WiFi) portable videoconferencing rig that I can’t wait to try. It weighs only 1.5 pounds, has a 10x optical zoom, and can capture 720×480 resolution video (good quality) at 30 frames per second (smooth motion). It records and stores videos on an SD card. It even has a built in LED light for dark areas.
The touch screen viewfinder on the back allows you to annotate the video for the remote viewer.

Things you can do with it:

1. Conduct site surveys where one person goes and everyone else watches and asks questions of the site host.

2. Share your facility with a client by literally walking them around the place while you conference.

3. Conduct a quality video conference from almost anywhere, including Starbucks.

4. Demonstrate a trade show booth location to an exhibitor prospect, while the show is going on.

5. Show your boss the amazing widget you just found on the trade show floor, and ask if he wants buy one million of them, or two.

Business 2.0 magazine recently featured a list of 25 startups to watch. Among those are some interesting companies for marketers to watch and event planners to use. There are also a few companies that probably shouldn’t be considered “startups”, especially at the current web2.0 business development pace, but forgiving that, here are some examples. Oh, before I go onto the list, can I just say that’s it’s time for a new naming trend? Dropping the last vowel (or all of the vowels) from your name is going to look mighty dated pretty soon. There are a bunch of branding teams who might want to try hardr.

The list:

1. stumbleupon - Find web sites based on your interests and habits
2. slide - creates embeddable photo slide shows
3. bebo - Watch - 30 million users - might be where the fickle myspace and facebook users are flocking
4. meebo - Instant messaging ajax application that gets around firewalls
5. wikia - Watch - user-written magazines might be the next big thing in publishing
6. joost - Watch - founders of Skype and Kazaa have cred and this video network already has viacom
7. dabble - organize videos into playlists you can share
8. metacafe - Use if you’re pushing videos on You Tube
9. revision3 - Use (watch diggnation if you’re trying to stay on top of geek tech)
10. blip.tv - video platform for syndicating serial shows
11. fon - trying to leverage everyone’s wifi routers for common use
12. loopt - Watch - app lets friends keep track of where their friends are - has awesome location-sensitive targetting potential
13. mobio - Watch - speaking of location-sensitive targetting… mobile services like local movie listings.
14. tiny - Try - might be a moblogging event candid miracle.
15. soonr - Try - allows you to find and view stuff on your desktop through your phone.
16. turn - Consider - a new online advertising model.
17. adify - Consider - online ad marketplace with 4,000 publishers.
18. admob - Consider - ad distribution service for mobile phones. I hate the thought of ads on my phone.
19. spotrunner - need a cookie-cutter 30 second TV ad?
20. vitrue - allow your customers to upload videos about your products
21. successfactors - a six year-old company with $100 million in revenue is a startup?
22. janrain - helping you log in once, and access multiple sites with passwords
23. logoworks - The online logo buffet line
24. reardencommerce - also not a startup but worth a look for personal travel and agenda planning.
25. simulscribe - Try - converts voice mail to text emails.

Buzzfeed offers a link clusterbomb around Calvin Kleins new scent for “technosexuals” - people who use text messages and blogging to arrange hookups. That’s without a doubt the most bizarre market segmentation I’ve heard this year.

The new product is called CKin2u and CK hopes to capture this vertical-trying-to-be-horizontal with the same level of success they enjoyed with CK One - whose name seems to imply a product meant to appeal to people who prefer to be “one” - alone, and unsmelled.

We don’t often see these kinds of campaigns in the B2B space