NXT Up August 15, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : General, What's New?, Networking , trackbackBack in June, when the NXTcomm trade show was still in full swing, there was some grumbling in the blogosphere about attendance for the first year show.
While we were excited about the conference’s potential, and folks like Corporate Events Thoughts were very enthusiastic about show floor, there were some detractors about the event.
Scott Wharton over at ipBusiness said morale was “down everywhere,” something I certainly didn’t observe — in fact, no one who saw this work of art could have thought such a thing. It didn’t stop there. “IMS, IPTV, VoIP, WiMAX, all topics with their significant announcements and promises of greatness in prior years, were relegated to minor and spotty success stories but not much new to add to the telecom conversation,” he wrote.
The official audit numbers for the show tell a different story, one that matched the “mood” I and many of my colleagues perceived. According to the results, courtesy of Exhibit Surveys, Inc:
NXTcomm attracted 15,273 attendees to its debut at Chicago’s McCormick Place on June 18-21, with some 500 exhibitors occupying over 200,000 square feet of exhibit space… Nearly 450 journalists and independent analysts attended, and industry members generated over 480 announcements and press releases from the show… 81 percent of the 2007 exhibit floor was rebooked for NXTcomm 2008 in Las Vegas
Basically, attendance was down marginally, not surprisingly in a first-time show environment. But almost all aspects of the show were up, or far stronger than originally expected. Low morale, indeed.
One area where Wharton was spot-on was his critique of the old school NXTcomm technique and his suggestions for the 21st century convention:
Trade shows need to stop just selling more exhibit space and thinking about conference content dominated by one-way PowerPoint and start thinking about how they can better facilitate this in-person networking vs. just hoping that it will happen organically.
This means coming up with creative ways to aggregate people with common interests perhaps in non-traditionally ways. In the case of telecom and shows like Nxtcomm, this means offer better meeting space options compared to the Stalinesque offerings of today and deemphasizing the tried-and-true booth space.
I’m not so sure what’s so “Stalinesque” about NXTcomm’s meeting spaces, but he raises a point. In order for the show and shows like it, to remain relevant, they have to adapt to the needs of an increasingly mobile, connected attendee base. Conversations like the one Wharton starts with this bit will help make that happen. But the numbers don’t lie — it seems like NXTcomm is adapting just fine.
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[…] show, we have seen that trend toward less-ubiquitous trade shows, though I think it speaks well of NXTcomm that it was able to outstrip expectations last year and should do so again this […]