No Travel Required for this Kind of Trade Show

You may have heard of the term "Virtual Tradeshow" and been interested to learn more.

I visited Unisfair, a provider of virtual tradeshow environments, and had a look around their virtual showcase. It had an exhibition hall, where I found virtual exhibitor booths. In the booths there were flash presentations, webcasts, pdfs, and even live chat (and soon to be internet phone capabilities). The conference hall also had presentations. During a live show, there might be live video presentations. A virtual trade show usually takes place live on a certain day, but can remain on-demand for weeks (or months) after the live event.

Unisfair says that they have registered up to 3000 people for an event, and that the average visitor stayed for two hours. They say that there are two main reasons that people go to the virtual tradeshows (similar to real trade shows), one is for researching, the other for networking. They have built certain features to facilitate both. For networking, they have a networking lounge where you can chat and meet people. You can also create a profile, and browse others.

It seems like an interesting concept. Some of the unique benefits of a virtual tradeshow vs. a real-life one include:

· people don't have to leave their desk (that includes participants, speakers, and exhibitors)

· everything is track-able – this is very interesting for lead generation, you can track who visits your booth, how long they stay, what they view or download, you can rank the leads based on behavior, and send them directly to sales

· event can remain on-demand - so that you can continue to drive leads from it

Now don’t expect virtual graphics or entertainment sophistication like Second Life. But I think they have tried to make it an exciting and fun environment. Again, I only saw the on-demand showcase, which is more like a sample. I’m sure a live event will be much more interesting. You can also read a bit more about this in a NY Times article, “Cyberspace Trade Shows Bring Action to the Desktop”.

 I registered for a live virtual trade show that runs on November 8^th called “Selling to the Mid-Market”, by CMP Channel (Unisfair is hosting it).  I can kill two birds with one stone, experience a virtual trade show, and do some learning and research on the mid-market. And I think I can live without scoring any real-life chachkas…I wonder what virtual chachka might be….perhaps a free screen saver or desktop (hmmm), or maybe if you are qualified, online credit for something (yay!).