Trade Show Guru

Are you a trade show kinsella? Do you know what a trade show kinsella is? I’ll reveal what a trade show kinsella is in a future post, but for now I’ll provide a hint. A trade show kinsella is a type of trade show exhibitor. If you are a trade show exhibitor that reads and follows the wisdom of the trade show guru, you wouldn’t be a trade show kinsella. Being a trade show kinsella is not a good thing, but there are many of them out there (along with all those trade show zombies). So my question to you is, can you guess what a trade show kinsella is? In the meantime, I read a great little obituary recently that I thought I’d share with you… [Read more →]

If you’re a regular reader of the Trade Show Guru, you know I’m partial to the word “rocks“. Some might even say I overuse the term, as I have written the posts “Netflix ROCKS” and “Avast AntiVirus ROCKS“, and the post “Balance” using the metaphor of a pile of rocks. Well, in this case, the word is appropriate. The movie Slumdog Millionaire ROCKS! [Read more →]

The dirty little secret to designing great trade show exhibits is that you don’t have to be a “professional designer” to design a great trade show exhibit. I’ve worked in the trade show exhibit industry for years and have seen more trade show exhibits than anyone should have to, and while I can usually tell the “professional” designs from the “in house” or “amateur/do-it-yourself” designs, that doesn’t mean all the former are great and the latter are not. Quite the contrary. [Read more →]

While I’m a big believer in the old saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and almost always free isn’t free. But actually, sometime free really is free. One example is anti-virus programs. In the beginning, I thought to get good protection again computer viruses, I needed to pay for it, so I bought McAfee anti-virus, in part because it included “free lifetime virus updates.” I thought it was a fair deal to pay for the program and then get free lifetime updates (without regular updates, an antivirus program is worthless). I assumed lifetime meant lifetime, but to McAfee it meant the “lifetime” of that particular version, which was about one year! After a year, I wasn’t able to update the virus database anymore, and the version became worthless. [Read more →]

A man and a dog were walking along a deserted road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when suddenly he realized that he was dead.

He vaguely remembered dying, and and he knew that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered to himself where the road was leading them. [Read more →]

Here in Santa Barbara, California, we’ve just gone through our fourth big wildfire in two years. The first wildfire was the Zaca fire in 2007 that burned in our “back country” and ended up being the second largest fire in California history. [Read more →]

Trade show exhibit booths are a lot like websites and blogs. If you want traffic at your trade show exhibit booth (and why have an exhibit booth if you have no traffic), then you’d better understand and practice SEO for trade show exhibiting. S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s necessary for blogs and websites if you want to rank high on the search engines and get traffic. [Read more →]

This week I’m taking a break from writing about trade show marketing in order to catch up on a few loose ends. In this post I’ll update on our tadpoles, talk about the Bad Behavior plugin to fight spam, and end with a rather humorous performance review I recently saw. [Read more →]

I thought I’d stick with the “secrets” theme this week, and since I’ve already written about trade show secrets (in general) and trade show booth staffing secrets, I thought I’d write about trade show booth display design secrets. To my mind, creating compelling and effective graphic designs for trade show booth displays shouldn’t require an advanced degree from an Ivy League school. In fact, it’s mainly just common sense. But that doesn’t mean that effective trade show booth displays are really all that common at trade shows. Based on some of the trade show display designs I’ve seen, I have no idea what the designer was thinking. But if you read this post, absorb the wisdom of the trade show guru, and follow these basic steps, [Read more →]

The success of your trade show booth in large part will be determined by your trade show booth staff. Here are my “Top Ten Secrets” to making sure your trade show booth staff, be it just you or a crew of ten, do a great job and maximize your trade show marketing success. Of course, you don’t want to forget the importance of having a compelling trade show display design, and the other basics of trade show marketing. And the truth is, just like my earlier “trade show secrets” post, these trade show booth staffing “secrets” aren’t really secrets, they are more just “common sense”, but “secrets” just seems to have a better ring to it. Plus, based on my experience at past trade shows, believe it or not, from some trade show booth staffing I’ve seen, the ten points below must be “secret” because some of the trade show staffers I saw didn’t appear to be aware of them! [Read more →]