Expos Exposed

Perspectives

A trade-show veteran's frustrating search for the greatest show on-line

I have been to so many trade shows that I could single-handedly clothe the nation's poor in logoed T-shirts. Sometimes I go because I need to learn something, but mostly I go in my capacity as an explicator of all things Internet marketing. I am a public speaker, a keynoter, one whose words of wisdom are supposed to keep attendees from demanding refunds for their all-inclusive, VIP, open-sesame conference passes.

So 9 or 10 times a year I battle my industry colleagues for taxicabs in 100-degree heat and 100% humidity. I pay too much for a nonsmoking hotel room so designated an hour after the last guest checked out. I stand in line for 20 minutes to feast on $9 hot dogs because the $12 pizza is all gone.

The last event I attended (I won't name names--I continue to need this group's business) brought home to me just how much I dread these things. My spirits sagged as I walked out onto yet another show floor with its acre upon blister-inducing acre of flashy, prefabricated booths staffed with so-glad-to-meetcha salespeople. My heart grew weary as I slouched past the endless ranks of exhibitors displaying off-topic tie-ins (basketball dunking, silly Star Trek skits, '50s music) and fishbowls full of business cards. My soul darkened as I experienced once more the long lines for bathrooms, longer lines for phones, and the industry-standard ratio of one chair for every 1,000 people.

Then came the presentations: hour after hour of vendor-demo-ing, PowerPoint-slide-showing, VP-of-marketing-hand-waving boredom. Most of the sessions were so poorly attended that my entrance raised the room population by 10%. All heads would turn to look at me because an opening door was more interesting than the pontificator at the podium.

There had to be an alternative, and technoptimist that I am, I thought I might find it on the World Wide Web. For a couple of years I had been hearing a low-level buzz about virtual trade shows, Web sites that either complement or replace traditional events. The idea is to give surfers in the privacy of their offices access to vendors, show-floor news, and even audio and video clips of presentations. It sounded like an attractive option to someone as fed up with reality as I was.

Why Suffer in a Crowd When You Can Suffer at Home?

Despite some early interest, virtual trade shows appear not to have taken off outside the high-tech industry. After searching several Internet directories, I found only two shows not directly related to computers. One site was poor; the other was pitiful.

The sadder of the two was the work of SEMCO Productions, creator of Medtrade, one of the largest real-world trade shows for medical products in North America. The medical industry has been at this convention thing for some time, and I hoped that that expertise would have translated on-line. Indeed, the site's home page informed me that I had reached "the complete on-line trade show for the home-health-care industry," where I could

• buy or just browse
• communicate with suppliers
• find new resources
• make air and hotel reservations
• register for the [physical] show
• get exhibit and show information
• stay up-to-date on the latest in news and trends...at the moment they happen!

Now, I wasn't visiting a virtual trade show to register for the real thing or to make airline and hotel reservations. I also didn't need exhibit or show information--the whole point was to avoid actually going anywhere. Ah, but the new resources sounded interesting. And when I read that Medtrade's physical shows play host to 1,200 exhibitors, representing 2,500 manufacturers, I figured this was what I had been looking for: the opportunity to work up calluses on my mouse finger instead of on the soles of my feet.

There were a whopping 14 medical-products companies listed. Fourteen. Each company was represented by a page or two of products like the Vibramatic and Multimatic Massage/Percussors from General Physiotherapy Inc. (A few of those pages included links to the companies' own Web sites, but I'm not awarding points for that.) They call this browsing?

If I couldn't browse, maybe I could buy and communicate. As it is my job to have more patience than a glacier, I looked through the 14 vendors to find one I could buy from or communicate with. My favorite was the Graham-Field page, which encouraged me to click on a map of the United States to find the salespeople in my quadrant of the country. There they were, along with their telephone extensions. Not the phone numbers, mind you, just the extensions. Where is it written that you can check your brains at the door when you put information on the Web? If Graham-Field paid SEMCO's posted rate, then it shelled out between $800 and $1,500 for its page. I wonder if anybody reviewed what this listing looked like after cutting the check.

OK, so browsing and buying were out. At least I could read up on the latest news. That section consisted of two white papers. One was subtitled "How would the typical home oxygen concentrator patient thrive under proposed Medicare reimbursement cuts?" Another was about how home-health-care nurses needn't tell their patients they have HIV. Neither article was dated, and neither was news. If the site had listed them as papers delivered at some specific show, I would have taken them at face value. But it promised me "the latest in news and trends...at the moment they happen!" Grrrr.

(When I tried to return to the SEMCO site in April, I discovered it had gone the way of all flesh. A call to the company elicited the fact that SEMCO had contracted out the site's creation and promotion and--deeply unhappy with the results--had finally pulled the thing. The company says it is working on a new trade-show site that it hopes it can be proud of. No debut date has been set for incarnation number two.)

Medtrade is a fine example of a real trade show moving onto the Web in a bad way. It struck me that a company with no physical offering might fare better. The other listing I had found on Yahoo! was for an on-line-only event: the Extraordinary EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) Virtual Trade Show, created by a company called Virtual Trade Winds. Upon entering the site I experienced a momentary surge of hope: EMC had worked hard to emulate the geography of a traditional trade show, and that boded well for its content. I started my journey in the Exhibition Hall, where vendors ordinarily congregate--and sure enough, courtesy of a drop-down menu, there they were. All 11 of them. Sigh.

EMC's constituents sell microwave equipment, power amplifiers, antennas, capacitors, connectors, and other related items. Each exhibitor had a "booth" (a few pages hosted on Virtual Trade Winds' server) with product pictures and information and lots of links to the company's own Web site. It was pretty much what you'd find if you roamed the aisles at a regular trade show, minus the free key chains and hourly demos. But with so few exhibitors present, the experience was like attending a trade show in your neighbor's garage.

Disappointed with the informational pickings, I decided to seek out a little companionship. So I sauntered over to the Coffee Shop, hoping for an elbow-rubbing chat room. All I found was a form requesting that I divulge my experience and affiliations, along with the already-filled-out forms of those who had come before me. Not real convivial.

Since that was a bust, I wandered over to the Conference Room, where visitors are invited to ask questions or post responses to existing questions. Not a schmooze-fest, exactly, but at least it offered the promise of some interactivity. What I discovered were 16 messages sent during the past year. It was like finding a pile of While You Were Out notes in an abandoned building. It's hard to strike up a conversation in an empty room.