tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10118571.post-40598726520731217632008-03-19T07:25:00.001-07:002008-04-03T21:42:22.779-07:00It is Wednesday, the final few hours for the vendors at BrainShare to have a presence. Even though there are still three full days left, today is usually a extremely slow day in the partner area.<br /><br />Each year I come to BrainShare with a marketing purpose. An attempt to practice many of the things I preach in this blog about marketing. Also, to see where Novell stands with their marketing, since so much of my effort is in direct response to Novell's actions or inactions when it comes to collaboration marketing.<br /><br />What worked for Novell<br /><br />For Novell, what worked was the content of the conference. I have not heard anything but rave reviews for the sessions and speakers. I have been following blogs and twitter accounts, and all of them seem to indicate that this year was an exceptionally good year for content of sessions, specifically GroupWise and Teaming sessions.<br /><br />Also what worked appears to be new people here at BrainShare. A lot of new faces, new companies, new partners. And the new attendees are younger, a good sign for a Novell, since they are attempting to penetrate a market that is made up of a large number of young people well versed in Linux.<br /><br />BrainShare is really about the attendees and training. The session experience is key to the success of the event, and in addition to the great content, the scheduling and registration process was very well done this year. Novell is executing the event well.<br /><br />What worked for GWAVA<br /><br />GWAVA has the largest presence at BrainShare every year. This is a direct result of the amount of traffic and business GWAVA received from BrainShare the previous year. Big Booth means big year, and this year was no exception.<br /><br />Something else that worked as an experiment, was the introduction of GWAVA TV and using Twitter.<br /><br />These tools are still in their infancy as a business tool, but I wanted to experiment with using them here, to learn how to better take advantage of emerging social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. Here are some of the things I learned:<br /><br />GWAVA TV - It is extremely easy and extremely cheap to live video.<br />I've always wanted to broadcast live from BrainShare and this year I got to do it. We put cameras in the GWAVA Booth and did live interviews. We had a mobile unit and did on the street interviews with customers, attendees and vendors. We also were able to easily stream the keynote live, with good video and adequate audio.<br />We did the live video using a video camera on a tripod in the aisle during the keynote, hooked up to an iBook which was tied into the BrainShare wireless network, that broadcast the event across Mogulus (www.mogulus.com). It was set up at the last minute and worked extremely well.<br />The first morning we had 50 people tune into watch. I will consider that a success since it wasn't advertised, and wasn't actually set up and going live until after the keynote started. The team just decided to give it a try and see if they could do it. They could, they did, and it worked. Thanks to the 50 who tuned in. We measure success in the beginning with small steps.<br /><br />Twitter - My media team, headed up by Lorri Randle of MediaJoltz, www.mediajoltz.com, was the driving force behind Twitter at BrainShare this year. We attempted to use Twitter to reach out and communicate with attendees in a way that hasn't been done before at BrainShare. It has been done before at other conference, but not here.<br />I will claim success on this one as well. Even though the number of participants is relatively low, the acceptance and networking that occurred worked exactly the way it was suppose to. People became connected and established relationships that normally would not have happened.<br />The challenge was teaching attendees what Twitter was and why they would care. Lorri created Twitter cards to hand out to people to get them to sign up and follow us at www.twitter.com/brainshare. We handed out a lot of cards and saw people begin to use it for the first time.<br /><br />Great GWAVA Bug Hunt - What also worked was good old fashion networking. The Great GWAVA Bug Hunt is a traffic builder of most of the vendors in the partner hall. Three days of running around getting a piece of paper stamped, bringing it back to get a mouse, and then being entered for a drawing of an iMac works every time. This year was no exception. This year I also opened the traffic builder to those who are not normally part of the GroupWise community. Partners like XIOTech and Compucom. The traffic builder was a big success, specifically for the new vendors who saw a large spike in traffic to their booth.<br /><br />What didn't work for Novell<br /><br />The Monday morning keynotes fell flat. The twitter community was a bit ruthless in their expression of the dullness and flat out boring presentations. The presentations lacked enthusiasm and were disconnected from the audience. I won't say much more than that, since this morning at 9am the keynote presenters will have a chance to redeem themselves.<br /><br /><br />Also, the traffic in the vendor area was down. And not just a little bit down, it was way down. Normally I have nearly 1,500 people participate in the traffic builder. This year the number was closer to 600. Nearly a 1,000 fewer people through the booth Sunday through Monday.<br /><br />I have no idea why at this point.<br /><br /><br />What didn't work for GWAVA<br /><br />For GWAVA, our presence was too large for the amount of traffic we received. Many of the GWAVA employees who were here, stood with their back to the aisles, allowing customers, or potential customers to wander around looking for anyone to make eye-contact with. It was unacceptable behavior and one that will be remedied next year.<br />How do you remedy this next year? You don't bring those people back.<br /><br />Also, my presentation theater didn't work out they way I wished. One reason is Novell. They did an excellent job of creating good content and keeping GroupWise customers busy, which means they weren't available for training in my booth. This is ironic, since I've created the training sessions because in the past quality training was lacking. This is where Novell did an excellent job and I will need to adjust in the future.<br /><br />The biggest thing GWAVA did wrong was inadvertently pointed out to me by another company. They complimented me on the great job I did last year and explained how they adapted their own marketing to what GWAVA had done. And then this vendor said four words that he attributed to me..."Don't Confuse the Customer"<br />He had taken this advice from me a year earlier and then applied to his own marketing, his own booth, and his own efforts. The results for him were the best BrainShare he had ever experienced. He came over to find me and thank me for my comments from a year before.<br />Unfortunately this year I didn't listen to my own advice.<br /><br />The GWAVA booth was/is spectacular, but if you don't know GWAVA then you don't know what GWAVA does. GWAVA has so many products and so many different stories that it is hard to know what and who to talk to in the GWAVA booth. This is a systemic problem that occurs with any company. Next year I will fix it. The way you fix it is to make painful decisions. You decide your top product you want to promote and you focus almost exclusively on that and abandon all other products. It is painful for the developers/product managers/and sales because they want to talk about each of their pet products.<br /><br />Moving forward<br /><br />Failure is much better than success when experimenting with what works for your marketing. You learn from your failures, you seldom learn from your successes. This year was a good year of learning for GWAVA and my marketing team. Hopefully it was a good year of learning for Novell as well.Richard Blisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06711443052326619281noreply@blogger.com