Return from the SISO Executive Conference

Wow, in the middle of summer I am yet again insanely busy, with a client event and then the SISO Executive Conference in NYC.

I was especially looking forward to Barry Libert's sessions on community building. Barry is an old client when I was helping him at Shared Insights, so I got a chance to speak with him at the function on the battleship Intrepid the night before.

We agreed that some of the reasons why social media or inbound marketing is not taking off in the event space is because:

1) The events business is a technology laggard;
2) The whole area is reasonably new;
3) Not every event manager is focused on social media as a means of providing value to the market, just another tactic to 'drive revenue'.
4) There is not alot of strategy making going on, just using tools such as Twitter which may or may not work.

As Barry mentioned, the key also is giving up control, ie letting the users build content within your community which is SCARY. Most traditional event producers won't let this happen.

Oh, and I came across this blog called the Trade Show Marketing Report which is going under apparently. Looks like some good content and right about social media......

Onwards to Labor Day