E-show dailies: Good idea or not?
Prescott Shibles, a very savvy guy in all things tech, really hates the Folio Show’s electronic show dailies.
I have to say I agree with him on this one. The whole idea of plopping a print product—be it a show daily newspaper, a magazine, or a conference brochure—on the Web and expecting it to have the same impact as it would in print is, basically, silly. Web and print are two different things entirely. We read them differently, we expect different things of each, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
If you’re going to do an e-product, take advantage of what the media has to offer. Include links to surveys for each session where attendees can vote on the burning questions they want the speaker to discuss. Let people comment on the site, the venue, let them ask questions, contact speakers and organization leaders involved in the show. Let them download a podcast that’ll whet their appetite. Create an interactive way for attendees to meet each other ahead of time, to contact exhibitors, all that good stuff.
Much as I love it, print is a one-way street, for the most part. The Web is a busy intersection. Take advantage of what it can do.
Update: B2B consultant Paul Conley makes a great point about digital editions of show dailies—that the whole point of them is just to make the print edition available to non-attendess quickly. But why not give them a whole lot more than that, in a form that’s not so cumbersome (blogs, anyone)? And he makes another great point about how the writing (and the writers) themselves must work differently when it comes to the Web, and not just write the same way they would for a print show daily.
Related Topics: Marketing, Technology
November 6th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
You’re absolutely right, Sue, and what you just described is … a show blog! (I still think print has a role to play in conferences, but you’re right, you can’t take a print piece and stick it on the web and expect it to be useful. Oddly enough, it is easier to adapt content originally developed for the web for a print piece.)
November 7th, 2005 at 10:06 am
Exactly, Kevin, and that’s where Prescott ends up going on his post. Show blogs, done well, can do all this and more, as you well know from your own experience! And that’s a good point about Web-to-print conversion being more effective than print-to-Web, and yet so many shows still don’t do this for some unknown reason.
November 11th, 2005 at 1:46 am
I love show blogs. The Ad Tech blog was the first one that I ever became aware of and was actually the inspiration for our blogs at PBI. Since then, we’ve had so many magazines take advantage of blogs for shows: Mix, Millimeter, Video Systems, DIRECT, Live Design, Chief Marketer, and a few others that I’m forgetting. It’s wonderful to see people learning about what makes a blog good and thinking about reader needs from a different perspective. I’ll be interested to see if blogs have an impact on post-show coverage.
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