Quote:
Originally Posted by FightThisPatent
Austin (my former home town) would be a great venue for a show.
Fight the longhorns!
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Not sure I agree that people would turn OUT for a show in Austin, but I do love visiting that city... and it's only a short drive for me.
Which brings me to my point... about how many shows to attend, etc. One factor to always remember is location. You may only be able to attend 1 show per year that requires a lot of TRAVEL expenses, but it makes NO SENSE to skip ANY show that is a drive from your location. If you're in CA, it makes little sense to miss a CA show. If you're in FL, why miss Internext? Etc.
Like Mike said, I also remember the IA2000 days. And while I technically agree that ROI isn't what it was then, that's mostly because the industry was just crazy easy back then ... we were ALL making just stupid gobs of money and having a blast. That said, the ROI of shows STILL justify representation by your company in some way. It's less a matter of if you want to attend or not in my opinion, but more a matter of how many people you send, how much you spend there, etc, etc.
I can't remember a single show that YNOT has attended that hasn't resulted in business -- the only way we can mess up is if we spend more than we should while AT the show, which is easiest to do in Vegas because of the nature of that city.
Other than Cybernet Expo of course, my two favorites are Phoenix Forum and Internext Florida. Those two shows have a wonderful atmosphere for networking and building relationships with people in the business. Kudos to AVN and CCBILL for the jobs they do on those two shows.
And I'll add this about Cybernet Expo ... the crowd we attract is actually comparable in size to some shows you wouldn't think ... plus we tend to attract a different crowd. We actually DID have quite a few webmasters/affiliates walking around this year. In other words, if you attend our San Fran show it's probably NOT going to be the same crowd you saw at another show -- or at least a good portion of the crowd won't be the same. That alone makes it, in my biased view, more than worth the cost of adding it to the show schedule for 2010.