I have been working a trade show to showcase one of our new products and I am always amazed at the diversity of people that wander by the booths. At a trade show open to the public you will get the good, the bad and the ugly!
My first experience, the first day and just as the show opened was an older gentleman who started out by asking me, “If I thought this Social Media stuff was going to impact business today”? I responded by saying it is impacting business already and went on to speak about how important Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and your blog was to business. I explained the concept of the blog and how it added relevant content to your website and how over a period of time you would add a great number of pages to your website. I explained how to use your blog as content for your Facebook and Twitter pages – feeding people back to your blog and from there to your website.
He nodded and looked like he was listening and then asked about adding new content to your website and how he had read that it was important for your search results to have regular new content. I responded by saying yes that is true and that is one of the benefits of having a blog on your site. He looked at me and said … “Well I don’t think a blog is important!” and I not so brightly responded that I would have to disagree with that conclusion. He looked at me anger all over his face and said, “Don’t tell me how to run my business!” and stomped away.
The booth across from me is a computer store and repair service. I would no more go to them and ask for them to fix my computer and then tell them how to do it because I had read an article somewhere. They are the professionals and they know computers and how to service them.
I had occasion to have a drywall installer in my home a while back. He was installing drywall in a room we were redoing. I watched and asked a lot of questions. The fellow was very generous with his time and my seemingly never ending questions. When he was finished the job was first class and I was very pleased. I decided to make one more change adjoining the area that had been done and with all of my new-found knowledge I figured I could do this myself. What a disaster – I quickly discovered a bit of head knowledge does not replace experience!
On the other side of the experience two booths down was a gentleman selling children’s books he had written and published and wanted to know about how Social Media might help his business. He listened and heard and we set an appointment to talk about this further at a later date. Am I going to make a lot of money of this future meeting … nope, but that is not the point. The gentleman wanted to learn and he will most likely use our software to deploy his Social Media Campaign and we might get a website out of it down the road. The thing is he acknowledged he wanted information and was willing to listen.
Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America. The newest project by OTR is OTR Web Host – websites for small business.