Are the platforms that are being chosen by these vendors literally “booked” until the previous event ends? Aren’t these…online? Why can’t we get demo environments or access to “booths” more than 2 days in advance? Who’s tech support during the event? This points back to the platform side of things. Plus…training the sales team on how the day-of operations will work! This is all the time received for set up, testing, getting the lay of the land. Yet, at least twice, from 2 different vendors, I’ve been given access to the virtual room just 2 days in advance of the event.
#AIM CHAT ROOM FREE#
If you’re like every cybersecurity marketer I know, you’re not exactly just hanging out with a ton of free time on your hands. My schedule is packed. You need to create your own trail of breadcrumbs to the booth and the only way I see it is in also speaking at the event. You could make a friend or two!Īt a virtual booth? Sure, I guess you could make some crazy-looking video, but: budget, resources, and the chance that people even visit your booth to see it? Low. At your physical booth, a tchotchke or cool giveaway or in-person speech or book-signing could draw a crowd. Now you must market your virtual booth harder than you’ve ever marketed your physical booth.
However, now that must be factored into your budget if you have a virtual booth. A well-done, attention-grabbing guerilla activation is *chef’s kiss*. Now I have to pay more for a weird stunt (or speaking)! Maybe digital matchmaking? Digital games? Something, anything, other than the completely uncreative attempt to recreate the experience of a “booth” that ends up looking like a 2-d version of the most boring Pokemon card in the world.
And I haven’t seen ANY virtual booths choose a video STREAM option – wouldn’t that be the lowest hanging fruit? That we all cam together at least as you stroll the booths? Like at a live event? Why bother? And why bother answering any of these faceless entities trying to chat with you until you pop over to another tab?Īnd on the marketing/vendor perspective, you can’t build relationships via a 5-second chat at a virtual event. You’re going to be bombarded with people trying to enter a “private chat” with you. The biggest problem with virtual booths is there’s no reason to visit one. In fact, budget must have been one of the only considerations. The virtual booth experiences across vendor platforms have proven that user experience is not a priority when vendors are picking booths. Virtual booths are like 1997 AOL Instant Messenger, except worse, because I remember that refreshing your friends list at least let you know who was actually online. Not being able to pull metrics on how many people downloaded a specific product sheet you spent time uploading to the virtual booth. Why are there not better virtual booth options yet? Who is picking these virtual booth technologies?! But I expected that, given the newness of everything. It was an incredibly unsatisfactory experience: rushed, built on crummy technology, and with very little training. I said this 4 months ago, when I was entering into my first virtual event sponsorship after the rug had been pulled out from all of us. That said… f rom the marketer’s perspective, it is ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars to *just* get a virtual booth and a list of emails for sponsoring an event. It is a grind, and I feel for event organizers, I really do.
So, I don’t take event production lightly. And COVID has really amped that stress up by about 10000%, especially because many event organizers had to change their entire business model to be fully virtual – when many had never done virtual events at all! I know that events is a difficult, stressful industry with incredibly high stakes (mess up the event and you’ve… messed up the event! There is no do-over or “quick, pull down the ad and switch out the graphic” for an event! ). One of these events (with 2,000+ attendees) was produced end-to-end in just 2 months after a speed switch from live to virtual because of COVID. In fact, I’ve worked in digital events and have helped produce multi-day conferences from 200 to thousands of attendees. This may be a little bit of a marketer rant, but I’m not too thrilled with the experience - both on the user and the vendor side - of how virtual booths are being implemented at virtual events. Unfortunately for all us marketers today, an AIM chat room is the model on which the 2020 virtual booth experience is built. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) came out in May of 1997.
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