A Wider Net

Then it will have to include these guys: Experience Chocolate.

Custom chocolate tastings… I can think of no greater marketing innovation. At the moment.

I’ve already informed the marketing team.

Thanks to Corporate Meetings & Incentives Magazine - I’ve had this clipped and hanging around my office since it was published in the March issue. I’d link you there, but the article seems to have been removed.

The PowerPoint files from the three discussions at Innovation Day are now posted here.

Editing the videos will take a bit longer as we have to squeeze them in between our client projects, and those gaps are rare (a good problem to have, I know.)

Here’s a batch of Innovation Day photos. I may go back and add some markups, but I wanted to get these up as quickly as possible.

Enjoy!

Innovation Day has come and gone and some of us will never be the same.

We had a great turnout, despite the pounding rain and brutal traffic. To anyone who attended, and to the companies who loaned us their products and their great people, THANK YOU. You made Innovation Day very special.

We should have a gallery of photos up by tomorrow. I haven’t received them yet, so I think I’ll wait for those before posting a throrough recap.

I feel like I should list a few highlights for you. That’s pretty tough because there were so many great products here. I will tell you a few things that surprised me, however.

Top of my list of surprises was the Scalable Display Technology demonstration. They showcased a tool that automatically aligns and blends multiple video projectors into one wide perfect image. They demonstrated with four projectors - a process that, historically, would have taken a seasoned pro hours or even a full day to perfect. This device did it in one minute, and it looked amazing.

The Philips 3D LCD screen was by far the best autostereo display I’ve ever seen.  It had fantastic depth, brightness, and sharpness.  The Akira seamless plasma array in an odd configuration was breathtaking. And without question, the things that people had the most fun with were the Lightspace interactive dance floor and the GestureTek GroundFX.

More to come as we recap Innovation Day.  Sleep has made a WORLD of difference.

Get these products to an ER! Some look like human hearts. Others - stomachs, livers, and lungs. Welcome to the fine art and science of Pharma-themed promotional items. Need a capsule-shaped tape dispenser? How about a hypodermic syringe USB memory drive? Maybe you don’t, but in the world of pharaceutical shows, this stuff is gold. And I found the BEST catalog of pharma-tchotchkes. Sourcery, a prominent high-tech promotional item manufacturer, has a division named, oddly, SourceryPharma, and they have an interactive flash catalog full of amazing products.

While I can’t see myself wanting to lock my bike with what appears to be an artery stemming from a human heart lock, I love the USB syringe and USB lighted beakers. There are tons of items in their catalog that make you shout COOOOOOOL!

They’re coming to Innovation Day with a basket full of goodies, and I can’t wait. I try to take joy in the little things. Even if those little things are pill-shaped LED Flashlights and Lung-shaped staplers. Coooooool.

The place has begun an amazing transformation. The main studio, which will feature six different LED display technologies from Element Labs, the ScentAir scent machines, and a fair amount of lighting, is sure to blow people away. These display products are incredibly bright and versatile, and with the 3D transparent illusions they create, I expect to see a lot of jaws hitting the floor.

The interactive demos, print samples, networking and collaboration demos, and the incredible 3D displays will get set up tomorrow.

I’m still working on my presentation materials <*bad*>. Needless to say, there’s a lot to distract me with 60 or so new products and technologies coming in the door. For that reason, I’ll make a quick post about a promotional item manufacturer that is coming, and then I had better get back to it. Tomorrow is going to be an exciting and LOOOONG day. Plus, it’s election day, and I have to get up early enough to vote on the way in.

By the way - we eventually did find the 10′ long coffin-shaped road case, and inside was a Mirage.

We’re starting to get set up for Innovation Day which takes place next week. The exhibit areas (pretty much every open space in our 70,000 sq ft facility) are getting cleared out. The exhibits are starting to arrive. Custom video is being produced for about a dozen of the 60 demos. The registered attendee list looks great. Everything is looking good, yet I still may not sleep until it’s over. I have to speak at this one, and (confession) I haven’t even started on my presentation. I have to do that over the weekend but, as you probably know, sometimes it’s a lot easier to write away from the office. Like right now, for example (how did I ever live without a laptop and WiFi?)

There are going to be some surprises for next Wednesday. The Lightspace interactive dance floor is going to be even bigger and better than we thought. There are some incredible promotional items coming that are “high tech pharamceutical-themed tchotchkes.” My favorite is the “hypodermic syringe USB drive”. We have some “living tables” coming. And you know your event is growing up when you start talking about measurements of weight in “tons”, lengths in “miles”, and linen order costs in “are you freaking kidding me?”

Turning your own production facility into a mini trade show has it’s plusses and minuses. On the plus side, we know where the venue is. On the minus side, there seems to be a natural law that mandates that “the more open a space is, the more likely it is that that area has no power or data”. On the plus side, if we need something we know just where to get it. On the minus side, that thing we need is probably buried behind a million temporarly dislocated items cleared out of those aforementioned open spaces.

You start to hear amusing quotes like “when you cleared the table out of the conference room, did you happen to remove the internet connection to the room by accident?” and “no, I haven’t seen a 10′ long coffin-shaped crate. Why?”

Perhaps the best aspect of events like this, is that it puts us in the shoes of our customers who own events. We get to see what it’s like to produce an special event while still satisfying all of our customer’s needs. And we have to repel an endless barage of really-great-yet-impossible-to-execute-on-top-of-everything-else ideas. I will be able to identify the people who read this blog. They’re going to walk up to me and say “See? See what it’s like?” Please do, I look forward to meeting you.

For the folks who are not coming, I look forward to hearing from you here.

The folks at Picture Marketing have developed a great way to add value to an event while driving traffic to a website and gathering valuable survey data. How do they do that? They take your picture!

It’s a concept that has been well-proven in sports stadiums across America. You have your picture taken, for free, in a ballpark, and the photographer hands you a card with a web site address on it and an index code. Using the index code, you can find your photo among the thousands of other shutter-blessed attendees. The hope of finding a great keepsake memory drives people to these sites and once there, nothing is free.
The Picture Marketing folks take a different approach to corporate events. They send you sets of camera kits and you equip brand ambassadors to take the pictures. A branded website is built for people to visit and view their photos. In the process of accessing the photos, the visitors can be polled for information, given offers for merchandise, or invited to join an online community. In fact, one customer used Picture Marketing to drive traffic to an introNetwork site.

According to Picture Marketing’s website, the desire to download their own photos results in an attendee response rate of 50-80% which is outstanding. Companies have to be careful how this is used, so attendees don’t feel like they’re being pushed into buying something. Done right, this is a powerful way to connect an onsite experience with a follow-up online experience. I’m excited to have Picture Marketing here on Innovation Day to show us their process and their latest toys.

nTAG makes digital nametags that are smarter than I am. When I meet people at an event, I may be pre-occupied sizing someone up, or hiding behind a ficus while I gather enough courage to introduce myself and try to strike a deal. But these little gadgets would be busy scouting the area for people I need to meet. It finds a match based on compatible interests, common goals, desired products and services, and other criteria. It doesn’t care about necktie patterns (although maybe it should), but it does let you know if someone nearby is looking to form a partnership compatible with your business, and it even introduces you. How much is THAT worth?

The new nTAG nametags are small, elegant, and functional - especially when compared to their predecessor. The old ones, which we covered in a webcast shortly after their launch several years ago, were a little clunky in appearance. They were cool, and the concept was sound - it just needed to evolve. Well, they’ve evolved.

These slick badges have little displays on them that tell you about the people nearby. They allow you to share your contact information with attendees and exhibitors, even long after you’ve met them. With them, you can participate in polls, assessments, and audience response activities.

They’re primarily an onsite service. If you’re looking to network people prior to an event then you would need a solution from the online networking systems like introNetworks, BD Metrics, or Leverage Software. The data from those systems can be fed into the nTAG system to create a seamless pre-, during, and post-event networking and communications service.

Regardless of which solution you choose, and I strongly recommend you consider some kind of networking solution for your event, you should take time to ask your stakeholders what they want to get from the event. Who do they want to meet? Why? And how can those conversations help them grow their business? Answers to these questions, and others, will form essential groundwork for building the networking environment. Good preparation will make the experience intuitive and highly rewarding for participants. You will be rewarded with a higher percentage of repeat visitors, larger audiences, and greater satisfaction ratings.

Social networking is commonly misunderstood as a business version of a dating service. Too often, people assume that social networking is limited to helping attendees find other attendees to talk to. To be clear, there is huge value in connecting attendees with other attendees who can help each other solve problems and grow professionally. But if you think that’s all there is to it, or if you’ve never considered Social Networking, then you must read on.

Social Networking is already huge, and the exploding growth of social media websites like You Tube and MySpace indicates that the trend will only increase as the younger generations move higher in business. More and more, people seek to find information provided by trusted peers, or information recommended by trusted peers. We will find that social networking components will be demanded in the enterprise, in marketing, and at events.

At an event, social networking has an obvious role. It can connect attendees, build an enthusiastic community of users, connect future business partners, and unite employees from distant divisions. Buyers can find ideal sellers or products, and sellers can do more to find the perfect buyers. Recently I used a social networking system at Infocomm and I was surprised to discover how easily it helped me connect with potential new partners, clients, and vendors.

Another common misconception is that an event social network is only temporary. For association events in particular, these sites live on indefinitely, building membership and helping to share ideas and solutions among members. These community sites are gaining in popularity for almost any annual live event.
In the enterprise, social networks allow employees to find mentors, or sales people to find current training materials and product information.

In healthcare communities, patients dealing with the same condition can find each other for support.
One of the companies that really gets it is introNetworks. They have developed a platform for social networking that, in their words, connects anything to anything. Sure - it can help attendees find each other, but that’s just the beginning. An introNetwork can help connect buyers to sellers, partners to partners, employees to mentors, and people to media (papers, podcasts, etc).

Customers determine how the introNetwork will be used, and what information is to be asked of users in order to productively match them and start conversations. This is one area where introNetworks shines - the profiling process is slick and refined to make the process easier and the results effective. Once the users complete the profile, they are presented with a unique “Pin Map” that looks like an array of push pins on a map. The center pin represents “you”, the user, and the closer the pin is to you, the more likely that the person or content represented by that pin is a good match for you.

They recently added a bunch of new features including calendars, forums, and revised search and connection finding. Many existing features have been enhanced or revised. The application is built entirely in flash, making it compatible with nearly any browser on Mac’s or PC’s.

I could go on for days on this system, but after trying it I have to admit- you need to try it yourself.