Twitter has made live blogging a reality. You can now get a series of Twitter feeds live from any tech trade show on the planet, from people with different agendas; delivering a pretty well rounded overall view of the show direct to your browser. When you combine this with the fact that most of the tech publications are cutting back on costs, it’s easy to see why tech trade show attendances continue to drop.
Cover the coverage
Some of the best known names in tech reporting, now rely on reading live blogging feeds, instead of attending events in person. For example, John C Dvorak was talking on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte recently, when he said how he now attended fewer tech trade shows and; “covered the coverage” instead. Laporte said that he has been doing this too.
Of course, as fewer and fewer people actually attend these shows and keynotes,we will get an increasingly polarised view of what’s going on.
I wouldn’t put the blame directly on Twitter. I’d blame social media as a whole. While most of my interest is in tech stuff, I was more than ready to have the tweets, blogs and podcasts I follow move on from CES.
But is this killing trade shows? I don’t think so. There’s just something about being there that cannot be replaced by technology.
I don’t really agree that Twitter is killing the tech conferences. You can’t do networking (like real human interaction) on Twitter. Technology is not that advanced yet. At tech conferences are all about bringing the industry together, face to face.
No way.
A trade show is an event, networking, having drinks, eating food, going to a new city, catching up with old friends.
Twitter only gives you a snippet of this experience, its nice but very disjointed. Oh and YOU are not in control, whereas being there you can learn whatever you want, meet people you want to meet or not.
For Twitter to impact trade shows, it doesn’t need to stop everyone from attending; just dent the numbers significantly enough. Whether the decline in numbers will speed up because of Twitter is what I am wondering?
I think Twitter has the ability to help trade shows. I don’t think there are many people who say, “you know, I’m going to skip this show and just read so and so’s tweets on it.”. I think reading tweets, seeing live streams, and pictures just makes people more rabid to attend the next show. Now, it’s up to the trade shows to embrace social media, allow this to happen, and to help lead their own destiny by building in these social media aspects into the shows.
Is Twitter killing trade shows? http://is.gd/ifT4 (via thetechnewsblog.com)
Trade shows are about meeting people, understanding ideas, seeing things, making deals: I love Twitter, it is a helper and fast for news, but trade shows like CeBIT are full of intensity that you will miss when there are only the news via some media. Let us meet in Hannover. Trade show organizers should use Twitter to make their events more attractive to attract even more attractive people. So: Twitter could stop the decline, because it could shift the attention from news back to people.
RT @fernando_solera: Soraya: "El #PP apoyará todas las medidas del Gobierno" #controladores #estadodealarma http://is.gd/ifT4