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The DFN Weekly

Booth Conduct For Dummies

By

Wingnut

Of
Pepee's Pornn Palace

For those of you who have been to an Internext show you know the convention floor is full of vendors hungry for the business of the convention goers. The vendors go to great lengths to lure the convention goers into their booths for a chance to sell their wares.

These guys get pretty creative with their booths, like flashing strobe lights with dancing content barely covered. Maybe even give away a brand new BMW X5, or $100,000 cash, but I’ve yet to see any normal webmaster walk away with those type prizes. Translation: I didn’t win them.

However the smaller prizes that some of the vendors give away do make it into the hands of the everyday webmaster (not me personally), but I did see DVD players, and some cash prizes handed out.

Now having said that, I witnessed some very interesting points about two booths in particular at this year's show. First, the booth I would say was the most visited of the show, I did not see empty the entire 3 days. It was a great booth, lots of lights focused in on a raised stage, great sound pumping into the air. There was fantastic content walking around performing on stage in BDSM type play. Sounds like the perfect booth, right? Wrong.

I still have no clue which company had the booth. There was no clearly visible name on the booth, no flyers or handouts around the booth, no real evidence of anyone talking business in the booth. This is one small but very important part of marketing that they forgot. Even though they did forget this part, I will be looking into the show guide to see what they have to offer, because the show they put on was very memorable.

Now the vendor the takes the butthead award for this year's show did not make the mistake of the most visited vendor. Nope, their name and business was clearly visible on their booth, their matching shirts, the handouts and everything was in place. The booth was in a great location, they had a great setup to conduct business. They had lots of nice comfy chairs and couches for their potential customers. Anyone who has been to one of these events knows that your feet get damn tired on the concrete floor, and the booths with chairs or couches get lots of visitors. It’s a real win for both sides as the vendor can now approach and talk about their offerings. Which brings me to the point of this article, with such a great set up for a booth, why was it always empty? Read on and see if you can figure it out.

It’s near closing on the second day of the show, and I run into some folks I know and wanted to introduce them to Old Tom. So while the introductions take place and the chitchat that goes along with meeting new people, Voltar and Jojasa take a seat in this "perfect" booth.

As we wrap up our conversation and are about to leave one of the reps from the booth walks over to us and says "excuse me this is a private area, you’ll have to leave." So we did, and moved to the next booth and started to chat with the folks from Maxcash; they too have a place to sit and talk business. Now mind you that none of those 10 reps with the matching shirts came over and tried to discuss what their payment processing services has to offer the owners of Cloud Cash.

So it became very clear to us why that booth was empty during the show; is it clear to you? This, in my opinion, is a far more costly error than the booth in the first example, simply because even though I know exactly who they are and what they offer, I will never give them a second thought. Nor will Voltar, Old Tom, Jojasa or anyone else that had the pleasure of attempting to enter that booth.

Wingnut