11 Social Media Wall Design Ideas for Events and Trade Shows

The concept of a Social Media Wall in of itself has great potential: Gather up all the relevant social media output around a company or organization at a trade show or special event, and put it on display for interested attendees to see! Yet, clever design and execution are required to get the full value.

Here are 11 things that SocialPoint has built into the design of our Social Media Wall Event Displays, so that exhibit and event marketers can make a bigger impact:

1. Bring Content to Life

Instead of just showing content with traditional templates, we created templates that transform your attendees thoughts, ideas and photos into fun designs. Most companies are able to find a design template that fits their event theme or brand design.

2. Images and More Images

There is only one thing people love to see more than their name in lights…it’s their pictures. Photos of attendees and interactions are the most common element we see shared on our Social Media Walls. But how do you present the photos? Big photos, square photos, circle photos, Little photos, scrolling photos, bursting photos, and much more. And most of all, photos that move – see the next point!

3. Put Content in Motion

Animation is one of the key elements to our successful Social Media wall, because it causes people to stop and look. Your audience’s messages and pictures float, flip, scroll, and pop, a constantly changing, more visually interesting display. (To see what we mean – click the play button to watch the movie.)

4. Emphasize Your Brand

Our Social Media Wall becomes yours, with your brand colors, themes, art work and/or event logo, the hashtag you want people to share, and the main message or call to action you want remembered.

5. Incorporate Branded Slide Shows

You can create slide shows out of full-screen graphics featured at specific intervals, to highlight your own products, offers, branding or other announcements. You can highlight speakers, key opinion leaders and much more. If you show content on multiple screens, you can create and time slide shows to match your marketing objectives.

6. Create Games with Leaderboards

The most prolific and popular social sharers get their moment in the sun, and you get an ever-updating, competition-enhancing visual. Ranks those who share the most messages, photos, retweets, or those who get mentioned and retweeted the most. Can also include prizes offered to entice more social sharing.

7. Social Videos

Your attendees are posting videos as well as social media photos and comments. Watch the video above again, and notice there were even video social shares playing, too!

8. Cool Shapes

We can frame social shares in different shapes and sizes, from circles to squares to rectangles and quote shapes. Pick what you like best.

9. Bright Colors

Make exciting messages and images even more vivid with bright colors, used in backgrounds, shapes, messages, and designs. Not that you have to use bright colors, if they don’t work with your (#4) branding.

10. WordClouds

Popular WordClouds let attendees literally see the “buzz” of the show, displaying the most shared words in your target audience’s social messages. A great visual that reveals the wisdom of crowds.

11. Social Metrics

With social metrics, our Social Media Wall becomes a social media dashboard for both left-brain and right-brain attendees! It reveals the amount and timing of social activity associated with the event, with cool graphics, colors, and design.

With color, shape, movement, and more, we can help make your Social Media Wall a success, by employing great design along with your great company, event, and attendee social content.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our social media walls and interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 27 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In Social Media, Social Media, Social Media Ideas for Events, Social Media Walls, trade show

How To Write Successful Questions For Your Trade Show Trivia Game

Our Challenge Bar Trivia Game is perhaps our most popular game. Trade show attendees love to play trivia to test their knowledge, compete with friends, and win prizes. And we’ve made it easy for trade show exhibitors and event marketers to host this crowd-gathering activity in their booth, with our easy-to-customize software.

But while our technology is easy, the visuals bold, and the crowds eager, it takes some strategy in formulating the questions to get the best results.

Here are some guidelines when you are organizing and writing Challenge Bar Trivia Game questions:

Aim For Happy Attendees!

Beginning with the end in mind, you want trade show and event attendees to be:

Entertained by an enjoyable experience
Challenged, but not too often stumped
Educated about your company or organization
Feeling more connected to your company or organization

To improve your chances of creating trivia questions that make your attendees happy and better connected, consider these strategies:

Choose Trivia Questions Content Focus

From our experience, clients use the game as another brand touch point to reinforce key messages and learning objectives.

By focusing the trivia questions on the content in their booth, players are able to “ask a booth staffer” or look at a brochure or look at the company website if they need help finding the answers to a question.

Here are 7 different kinds of trivia content we have seen during hundreds of events:

Product features and benefits trivia
Learning objective trivia
Company trivia
Industry trends and challenges trivia
Regional trivia (About the city or the region)
General trivia

The more specific your trivia questions are to your company, the easier it will be for your booth staffers to help the players answer questions. You are also rewarding expertise in your industry or company.

PRO TIP: Most clients use a mix of product/company and industry questions with a few regional trivia questions.

Organize Trivia Questions Into Categories

Organize your questions into 5 to 7 categories, with each category containing at least 5 questions, and potentially up to around 20. These categories should cover different subsets within your overall area of knowledge. For example, if you have overall questions about construction, you could group your questions into subsets about plumbing, electrical, masonry, roofing, and landscaping. While those categories won’t be seen by players, when the event is done and the scores are tallied, you can see in which categories your players’ knowledge is strongest and weakest.

PRO TIP: Some clients will start by identifying the categories and assign learning objectives to each category. Then, they create questions.

Consider Trivia Question Difficulty Level

If you make all the questions easier, then everyone can enjoy playing longer and not get knocked out so quickly they get frustrated. This also works if you want everyone to win a prize. If you make the questions harder, there will be fewer winners, but the winners will be very proud of having won. The best games start with easy questions and have hard questions later to help separate the winners. (By the way, SocialPoint’s Challenge Bar Trivia Game lets you assign greater point values for more difficult questions.)

Choose Trivia Question Format

The most common question formats are multiple choice, and true or false. Because multiple choice questions have 4 answers each, and true/false questions only 2 answers, it’s easier for players to guess the true/false questions. If you want people to learn as well as win, you can have multiple choice questions with 3 choices that are all true, and make the 4^th choice “all of the above.”

PRO TIP: Some clients will borrow questions from their training and development department. It saves time!

Consider How Many Trivia Questions You Write

The more questions you write, the less likely that returning players, or players sitting next to each other, will see the same questions. Which keeps them from learning an answer and using it for their next game. We strongly recommend reformatting your questions to create 2-3 questions from each learning concept to save time. You can easily turn one trivia question from a multiple choice into a true/false question, or vice versa.

We recommend that you try out your questions with people on your staff or in your industry to ensure they are clearly written (so that people get them wrong only because they don’t know the answer, not that they can’t understand what you meant to write), and have the level of difficulty you want.

PRO TIP: Encourage other team members to get involved in question creation. It’s a great way to divide the work and speed up the process.

I hope if you’ve been considering using a digital trivia game in your trade show booth, you now have a greater comfort level that you can craft questions that will help you better meet your overall marketing goals with the attendees who visit your booth.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our digital games and contests, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 22 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show promotions

10 New Ways to Visualize User-Generated Content with Event Technology

Mobile devices and social media technology makes it easy to create attendee engagement experiences in our events.

You can capture polls, votes, surveys, ideas, questions, photos and much more through event apps, audience response apps, social media, SMS, tablet activations and much more.

In return, there are many fun, animated displays that will display user-generated content in real time back to the audience. Here are 10 user-generated content visualizations that will forever change the way you use event technology to show user-generated content at your events.

1. Circle Poll Chart

The Circle chart is a fresh take on showing poll results from an audience response app. The circles and the connected bar at the bottom of the screen give your results more of a modern look.

Using bar charts to show poll results is kind of like wearing mom jeans to a fashion show. You can do it, but friends don’t let friends do that.

Use the circle chart instead.

2. Scrollable Idea Voting Screen (Mobile)

Businesses run on ideas and input from employees, customers and partners. Being able to capture and show ideas collected from the attendees in the room via your audience response app is powerful. Plus, you may want to allow people to vote on those ideas as well.

This screen is a simple way to visualize the ideas collected (and moderated) from the audience, then allow them to vote for their favorites.

3. Scrollable Idea Voting Screen (Big Screen)

It’s one thing to show ideas on the event app. What if your session speaker or facilitator wants to show the ideas collected from the audience response app on the big screen? Using this visualization, attendees will be able to see the collective ideas, while the facilitator and the group discuss a single idea.

This is helpful for two reasons: (1) You can focus the attendees’s attention on the screen instead of their mobile devices. And (2) you can include attendees who are not participating via the audience response app or your event app.

4. Interactive Q&A Question Display

Interactive Q&A is a staple of every conference session. Today’s event technology and audience response apps makes it easy to collect questions from the audience, select the order of the questions to push those questions to the big screen or confidence monitor.

5. Wordcloud

Who doesn’t love a wordcloud? The Wordcloud is a great way to capture themes in attendee’s comments from the audience response app. People love to see how their comments can be summarized and presented in these types of visualizations. It’s great for attendee engagement!

We have noticed that wordclouds get the best results when you ask attendees to share 1 to 3 words in the audience response app.

6. Caption This

One of the fun visualizations that we created is the ability for attendees to caption photos. “Caption This” is a simple and fun way to get the energy going in the audience and discover who has witty comments.

7. Trivia Leaderboard

People love to see their name in lights. Putting an attendee’s name or a team name on the leaderboard will get your attendees excited. There are several ways to put together and brand team-based trivia leaderboards.

Trivia games work with individual or team game play. Also, trivia games can work well in conference sessions or in experiential marketing spaces.

Read: How Trade Show Booth Leaderboards Drive Repeat Booth Visits

8a. Social Media Wall and Digital Photo Wall

The only thing attendees love more than seeing their name on the big screen is seeing their picture. Today’s social and mobile technology makes it easy for attendees to take selfies and share them publicly via social media or privately through your audience response app. Social Media walls and Digital Photo walls make it easy to curate this user-generated content and show it on the big screen.

There are several different ways that you can create branded visual screens to show these photos. The Burst visualization shown above displays content in bubbles that then explode into many smaller bubbles. This screen can be very mesmerizing. Click to see more options.

8b. Social Wall (Flip Grid)

Corporate clients love grid-type templates. Showing social media wall content in a grid that is animated is very popular. There are several different ways that you can configure these templates for branding, animation and look and feel.

9. Social Media Leaderboard

If you want to drive audience participation and sharing with social media, a social media leaderboard is a great way to energize the audience. Leaderboards can be built out of several different types of attendee engagement behaviors. To make the social media leaderboards look alive — we recommend creating leaderboards around 3-5 different social behaviors, then set those leaderboards to scroll every 10-20 seconds.

10. Live Metrics

Live metrics are a great way to show the scale of a social media conversation. These visualizations, compliment your social media wall and show the power of the collective attendees to contribute to a conversation online and have an impact.

BONUS: Idea Voting Touchscreen

An Idea Voting Touchscreen is a great way to view content in an experiential space, whether you have a resource fair, lounge or even a hallway space. This touchscreen event technology creates a simple way to visualize ideas on a big screen and allow attendees to interact with them.

Conclusion

Tapping into the collective wisdom of your attendees and showing their user-generated content is a fun way to activate attendees and turn them into active participants.

While audience response polling has been around for more than 25 years, today’s mobile, social media and event technology creates many fun, new ways to visualize user generated content in your events.

Have an awesome next event!

If you’d like to see more about how you can integrate user-generated content into your event, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate greater attendee engagement at your events.

Posted on 20 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In Audience Response, Event Technology Solutions, Interactive Meetings, Interactive Meetings ebook, Social Media, Social Media Walls

New Timed Trivia Game – and 2 More Useful Product Improvements

We’re proud to announce 3 significant updates to the SocialPoint suite of products. Our customers are constantly challenging us to improve our products by adding new customization options, new reporting options and improving the user experience.

New Timed Trivia Game

We added a new timed trivia game in January, 2017. The timed game challenges players to see how many questions they can correctly answer in a short period of time. The game uses a new “winning streak” based scoring mechanism that awards the player more points for correctly answers multiple questions in a row.

This game helps you move people through your trade show or event booth faster. It is also easy to use with roving street teams at special events.

The Timed Trivia Game is a new selection you can make as part of our Challenge Bar Trivia Game. The Timed Trivia game also ties into our overall admin system, that makes it easy to customize the game to your brand, and to track and compare your results against previous events.

Upgraded Survey Builder

Data collection has never been easier when you use our most popular games and contests. Our new survey builder is light years better than our old one. The upgraded features provide two major benefits:

Better Data: We now have field-level validation on certain key fields. This makes your data more reliable, because people can’t enter an invalid format email address or phone number. Getting you more value from your leads, and saving time for your sales and marketing teams.

More Control: Now, we can accommodate mandatory and optional fields, plus give you a choice of how, if, and when you show your terms and conditions to survey-takers. So, you can make your surveys look the way you want.

Our New Survey Builder is immediately available for Challenge Bar Trivia, Audience Response Apps and Virtual Prize Wheels.

Now You Can Personalize Our Audience Response App Name and Icon to Your Brand

Now, Android and IOS users can save our web-based app to their home screen to get a full-screen, app-like experience. Attendees see the app icon with your name on, and click on your custom icon to launch the app. So you get more branding value from using our Audience Response app.

And it’s easier for them to find the app on their device, since it’s tied to your brand and event, rather than SocialPoint.

Schedule a demo of these new products!
If you’d like to see a demonstration of these new products and product enhancements, click on this meeting scheduler and we’ll show you how these improvements work and can help your trade show and event marketing programs.

Posted on 10 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In Event Technology Solutions, News, trade show, Uncategorized

What’s the Marketing Purpose of a Social Media Wall in A Trade Show Booth?

Social Media Walls are big digital monitors that show a constantly-updated stream of filtered social media activity about an event. They were originally invented for special events, to give attendees a way to see the pulse of the event, keep up to date with what’s going on, and visualize the event’s energy.

Other benefits of Social Media Walls at events include:

Recognize and honor the most active and interesting event participants
Incentivize more social shares to help promote the event, both on and offsite
Promote more learning and networking
Enhance the modern image of the event and its host (be it an association, media company, or corporation)
Provide instant analytics about the size and changes of social shares about an event, especially during important moments such as keynote speeches

Social Media Walls are now being used by more and more trade show exhibitors, because they bring some of those same benefits, but also many new benefits to the individual exhibitor:

Demonstrate the exhibitor’s connection to the community, enhancing networking and relationship-building
Enhances the exhibitor’s image as a modern company
Networking opportunities with industry influencers who come to the booth to see their own social shares and possibly their ranking in number of social shares
Attract booth visitors who are drawn in by the impressive visual and want to see a digital representation of the pulse of the show
Offer a safe ice-breaker to start a dialog with attendees otherwise reluctant to enter their trade show booth
Conversation-starter about the messages shared on the social media wall to help identify a prospect’s pain points
Highlight the company’s own thought leaders as a part of the overall industry dialog on social media

Therefore, Social Media Walls can be more than pretty pixels and digital decoration. In a trade show booth, a social media wall helps exhibitors achieve multiple key sales and marketing goals: enhance their image, attract booth traffic, build relationships, generate leads, and ultimately, generate sales.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our social media walls and interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 9 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In Photo Sharing At Events, Social Media, trade show

Meet SocialPoint At ExhibitorLive 2017 Booth 1812

Fun Booth, Big Results!

Have Fun, Win Prizes, & Test Drive SocialPoint’s Results-Boosting Digital Trade Show Games At ExhibitorLive 2017

Come mix business with pleasure at ExhibitorLive 2017!
Compete with your friends for “Top Dog” honors as you test your trade show knowledge!
Feel the rush of endorphins as you win prizes small and large!
Stave off trade show coma as you stagger though the hall!
Experience for yourself the crowd-drawing power of our digital games!
Salivate over our beautiful digital screens that are surprisingly easy to customize to your brand!

Win a Bose Bluetooth Mini Speaker!

Two lucky (or perhaps more skillful and smart than lucky) booth visitors will take home a brand-new Bose Bluetooth Mini Speaker! It could be you, so come visit our booth and play to win! One prize for our Digital Prize Wheel game and one for the Challenge Bar Trivia!

See Our New Product, The Virtual Prize Wheel

(It’s an Entry in the New Product Showcase contest!)

Attendees like to spin and win. Exhibitors like to have happy attendees flock to their booth. Sounds like a win-win situation. Come see for yourself. Take it for a spin.

Our Virtual Prize Wheel also automatically monitors your prize inventory so it doesn’t giveaway prizes that are out of stock. It can be visually customized to your brand and brand colors. It has detailed analytics that let you compare event performance, day by day, show by show, so you can find your own winners.

Come see our other digital games and contests, too.

Still Not Sure You Will Visit Us At ExhibitorLive 2017?

Sure, you could come and visit our booth and have a few laughs and win some prizes and enjoy yourself, yada, yada, yada. But you’re more the serious type and want to make sure you get lots of worthwhile business done while you’re at the show.

We feel you. Your time at the show is precious, and you need to make the most of it. Just know we’ve helped trade show and event marketers at over 1,000 events boost their image, draw more traffic and capture more leads.

Why Exhibitors Love Us

We have seriously powerful software that creates amazing experiences, customized with minimal effort, that allows for greater lead capture and show performance evaluation. And we back it up with expert, responsive service to ensure your event goes off smoothly.

That’s why our digital trade show games have been so successful for major exhibitors such as Starkey, ThermoFischer, and Delta Vacations:

“The SocialPoint game was an innovative interactive approach to drawing attendees to our booth. But the care and set up approach by the SocialPoint team also make this a win. They think of everything and make it easy to get help along the way.”

“We contacted them with not much notice and they pulled through despite all of the issues with being the first event in a new space. They asked the right questions and delivered exactly what we asked them to. Hiring them was a huge sigh of relief on my end as the event planner to know the content on the screens was taken care of.”

“SocialPoint allowed us to stand out among the masses of “info” vendors thus allowing us to attract more visitors than most. Everyone LOVED the digital prize wheel!”

Marketing Agencies Welcome!

Marketing agencies that help their exhibiting clients look and perform better love working with us, too, so if that’s you, don’t be shy, stop by and play our games and introduce yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Just follow the orange shoes to booth #1812. It will be hopping with the excitement of the best digital trade show games money can buy!

Schedule A Meeting To Meet Us In Our Booth

(We’re SocialPoint, in case you forgot)

The exhibit hall is only open for 12 short hours over three long days. Be sure to claim your chunk of it by clicking here and scheduling a meeting in our booth with our team. We hope to see you there!

Posted on 8 Feb 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In prize wheel, trade show, Uncategorized

Why Digital Trade Show Games Make Better Promotions Than Other Alternatives

Exhibitors have a lot of choices when it comes to promotions at trade shows. When they talk with us about the choices they are looking at, these are the choices they compare us to, again and again. However, for reasons given below, those other choices tend to come up short compared to our digital trade show games.

1. Do no at-show promotional activity.

Too often, exhibitors default to not doing anything to draw more attendees into their booths. These overworked marketers don’t have the time to put together – and execute – on a creative activity that separates them from the rest of the show. So, they end up getting passed by during the show by equally busy attendees that only go to the exhibitors that catch their eye or did a good promotion.

Similarly, some exhibitors don’t think they have the budget for a good promotion. What they are missing out on is that a good promotion more than pays for itself. For example, if you invest only 10% of your budget on a promotion that then generates 40% more leads, you came out ahead, and generate a far better Return On Investment with a good promotion.

2. Do an old-style, “analog” game or prize wheel

We get it, a physical prize wheel costs a lot less than our Virtual Prize Wheel. And the physical prize wheel can get people to line up just as well. The difference is that as attendees play our Virtual Prize Wheel, they are not only lining up to win prizes in your booth, they are also giving you valuable information about themselves, such as contact data and their interest level in a next step in the sales process.

Plus, our Virtual Prize Wheel monitors prize inventory levels so you don’t give away prizes you have run out of. And after the trade show is over, our clients get data about lead counts, day by day, and even show by show, so they can make better investment decisions about staffing levels and show selection.

3. Do a different digital in-booth activity, completely customized for your company

For some high-end exhibitors, they want to shoot the moon and make the biggest impact they can. So, they develop a brand new digital interactive tool that helps them present their company in the best light possible. While this could attract more attendees, will it ultimately pay off with a higher R.O.I.? Exhibitors who go down this path could find themselves in a tech development dead end, where they have invested a lot more time to create a tool that has limited uses, no future choices to tie into, no analytics back end, and ultimately, more cost and risk.

How do these 3 options compare to SocialPoint’s Digital Trade Show Games?

With SocialPoint’s digital trade show games, exhibitors get:

More booth traffic and leads than with no promotional effort at all
More data about visitors than with an “analog” prize wheel
Better ROI with less effort or risk than with a custom-built digital application

SocialPoint’s digital trade show games attract greater booth traffic with less up-front effort, cost, and risk. Sounds like a winning combination!

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 24 Jan 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In trade show, trade show promotions

How Trade Show Game Leaderboards Drive Repeat Booth Visits

How does a digital trade show game leaderboard drive more repeat traffic to a trade show booth?

It’s all about people — proud, competitive people – who like to win, be seen as winners, and stay on top.

This is what a digital trade show game leaderboard looks like:

Thousands of people have stopped in a trade show booth to play our digital games such as the Virtual Prize Wheel or the Challenge Bar Trivia Game, drawn in by the visuals and the crowds of excited players. Those games are very popular, and do a great job of bringing in people to the booth the first time.

The attendees might do so well on the game that they scored high enough to rank on the leaderboard. They see their name or their picture up on the big screen! Hooray! They leave the booth happy winners.

But remember, people are proud and competitive.

Leaderboards Drive Repeat Visitors

So – the high-scoring gamers come back, but not alone. They come back with their friends, because they want their friends to see them on the leaderboard! That’s what they care about. They care about seeing their own name “in lights.”

In doing so, they have recruited more visitors for the exhibitor’s booth! These new visitors will play the digital trade show games, and become new prospects for the booth staffers to talk to.

Over the course of a multi-day event, people come back to see, “Am I still there? Am I still above Joe? Am I above Sally? Oh no! I am below Sally! I need to try again!” And so, the exhibitor gets more info from them when they fill out the game surveys, and the booth staffers get another chance to talk to them.

At every event that I’ve been a part of where there is a leaderboard, there’s always somebody, somebody who wants to take a picture of their name on the leaderboard. They want to be in the picture and they want to be on the leaderboard.

So, if you have a leaderboard in your booth, then leave a space beside the leaderboard so that people can stand there and take a picture.

And if the booth visitors win a big prize awarded at the end of the event? Put that on the leaderboard and then they will come back again to get their prize – and bring even more friends!

Therefore, a leaderboard leverages the natural competitive drive of trade show attendees to help bring booth visitors back – with their entourage!

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 12 Jan 2017
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, Leaderboards, trade show

Using Digital Trade Show Games As An Icebreaker With Attendees

Ever seen a trade show attendee give your booth staffers the cold shoulder? Maybe you just need something to break the ice.

Many trade show attendees shiver at the thought of walking boldly into a booth and striking up a conversation. They just want to avoid getting pounced upon by an overzealous booth staffer.

It’s a real problem for trade show exhibitors, that attendees (who are at the trade show to find solutions to their business problems!) avoid booth staffers. Without a start to the conversation, there is no lead taken by a booth staffer.

Fortunately, digital trade show games can warm up shy attendees – and turn them into booth visitors – by acting as a digital icebreaker.

The Digital Icebreaker In Action

Here’s what our clients tell us happens, again and again:

Attendees walking down the aisles see the big, colorful digital screens featuring our games such as the Challenge Bar Trivia Game or the Virtual Prize Wheel. The attendees slow down and watch for a moment, watching the other players enjoy themselves. And soon enough, the frost starts to melt! They overcome their usual reluctance, walk into the booth, and start to play the game.

And as they attendees play the game, something wonderful happens. They have fun, plus learn about the exhibiting company’s products. Which makes them much more approachable by the exhibitor’s booth staffers.

Now, the ice is broken, the attendee has warmed up, and the booth staffer can start a conversation. How did you do on the game? What did you get right? Let me get the prize you won! Are you familiar with our company?

And because the attendee is already warmed up, they are much more likely to answer the booth staffer’s questions, and if there is a good match between the attendee’s needs and the exhibitor’s products, then a trade show lead has been created.

That’s no small feat.

And it started with the digital ice breaker.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you break the ice – and generate more booth traffic.

Posted on 28 Dec 2016
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show

5 Tech Questions To Ask For Your Trade Show Booth At Each Show

It goes without saying, but here it is anyhow: It’s no longer your father’s trade show.

Sure, trade shows are still about face-to-face conversations with real, live humans. It’s still about pressing the flesh and building relationships. But most exhibitors now augment that valuable personal interaction with some kind of digital technology in their booth.

From mobile phones to tablets to flat screens and touch screens, exhibitors bring the same tech they use at home and work into the trade show arena.

So, to help ensure you have a smooth tech integration at your next show, and every show after, here are 5 questions you should answer before the show starts:

1. Does our upcoming trade show provide lead retrieval machines and/or an app that works with the attendees’ badges?
While most exhibitors simply gather business cards for their trade show lead management, many rely on the lead retrieval machines they can rent from the official show provider. However, more and more shows are making a lead retrieval app available for use on smart phones and tablets. And some shows are even discontinuing lead retrieval machines in favor of these apps. So you need to figure out which of these you are doing at your show, so you can not only order the one you prefer, but then also customize the lead retrieval machine or the app to match your at-show lead qualification questions, and your post-show data format needs.

2. Do they have an official on-site tech rental company for tablets, monitors, and touch screens?
Because tech rental at a trade show can cost about the same as buying it, you may own your tablets and monitors, and are happy to ship them to the show and back repeatedly. If you don’t like to own trade show tech because of concerns about breakage, set-up, and obsolescence, then on-site rental is the solution. Just make sure they have in inventory what matches your needs, and that whatever applications you run will be loaded on them, and compatible with them. And get their phone number before the show starts, so if you have issues during set up or the show, you can quickly reach them – that support is also what you paid them for!

3. What kind of internet connection is available from the show?
Many exhibitors who use tech (like our trade show booth games) need to have the Internet in their booth, whether it’s for their lead retrieval app, showing off their website, or to present with an internet-based app. And so almost every show offers both Wi-Fi or hardwired Internet to exhibitors – at a very high price. If you use the show’s Internet, you get support and ease of use. And if you have a mission-critical need for dependable Internet or higher bandwidth, you may have to go with a hardwire connection. Since the FCC ruled that wifi blocking is illegal, we have found that using a hotspot or your own wifi is a viable and reliable solution in many venues. Talk to your company’s I.S. department about your options, including getting your own wireless internet hub to bring to shows.

4. What is the show’s hashtag?
Social media has become one of the strongest forms of pre-show and at-show promotions. As you publish messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (at least on the LinkedIn app, for now), use the show’s hashtag to give your messages the chance to be found by even more attendees – and even people who won’t attend, but are good prospects for your products. Just be sure to go to the show’s website and find out what their official hashtag is for that show, and even that year of the show, as it can change! Some shows include the year in their hashtag, and some don’t. And sometimes the show even changes its name! Also, click on the show’s hashtag on each of the 4 social media sites mentioned to see who included the hashtag in their messages, and then determine if they are people who you’d like to invite to your booth.

5. Does the show or show owner have its own LinkedIn group?
People you want to meet at the trade show are already gathered virtually in many LinkedIn groups, but especially if the show has their own LinkedIn group. You can research the group’s discussions to see who (among buyers) is already talking about going to the show, and reach out to invite them to visit your booth. You can also post your own discussion about what great new things you will be launching at the show inside the show’s LinkedIn group. If there is not a group owned by the show, then find the largest, active group that caters to your buyers, and get involved there.

Tech is here to stay at trade shows. Exhibitors like you have embraced the attention-getting power of digital devices and screens to get more attendees and create better experiences. Use these 5 questions to ensure you are prepared to get the most out of the tech you use at every trade show.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth

Posted on 15 Dec 2016
By Samuel J. Smith
In Social Media, trade show

Blog

1. Bring Content to Life

2. Images and More Images

3. Put Content in Motion

4. Emphasize Your Brand

5. Incorporate Branded Slide Shows

6. Create Games with Leaderboards

7. Social Videos

8. Cool Shapes

9. Bright Colors

10. WordClouds

11. Social Metrics

Aim For Happy Attendees!

Choose Trivia Questions Content Focus

Organize Trivia Questions Into Categories

Consider Trivia Question Difficulty Level

Choose Trivia Question Format

Consider How Many Trivia Questions You Write

1. Circle Poll Chart

2. Scrollable Idea Voting Screen (Mobile)

3. Scrollable Idea Voting Screen (Big Screen)

4. Interactive Q&A Question Display

5. Wordcloud

6. Caption This

7. Trivia Leaderboard

8a. Social Media Wall and Digital Photo Wall

8b. Social Wall (Flip Grid)

9. Social Media Leaderboard

10. Live Metrics

BONUS: Idea Voting Touchscreen

Conclusion

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Upgraded Survey Builder

Now You Can Personalize Our Audience Response App Name and Icon to Your Brand

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