Year-round engagement is becoming the norm for trade shows and association conferences as planners use content marketing, social media, and other tools to maintain communication with attendees. ExpoBee’s “Industry Tracker” is a new option to facilitate communication by creating a customizable feed of news from an event’s exhibitors and host. Users select specific topics and companies to track and the system automatically pulls the latest news from the sources into a dedicated, branded Web site, accessible for free.
“If you consider how an individual goes to an exhibition, each person has their own unique set of needs,” says Rick Dobson, vice president of sales for ExpoBee. "They plot out their course based on the categories or companies they are interested in. We think that on a year-round basis individuals remain individuals and no one is interested in everything. So we aggregate the content and then give the individual the tool set that they need to essentially custom-publish their own news feed."
The event organizer determines the sources of the site’s content—typically exhibitors, sponsors, and industry organizations. Industry Tracker then uses a proprietary algorithm to pull content from those Web sites, social media accounts, blogs, and other outlets, and then organizes that content into categories of “Top News” and “Recent News.” Users have the option to create a more customized option, labeled “My News Feed,” by logging in with their Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn account and selecting specific topics and companies to track. Stories can be shared through social networks and users can also post comments.
“It’s another channel of distribution for exhibitors’ news and information that they don’t have to lift a finger to do,” Dobson says. ExpoBee provides tips and support to exhibitors on how to maximize their exposure. They also have access to an online dashboard to see how many people are tracking, commenting on, and sharing their news. There's no charge to exhibitors to participate, but they do have the option to upgrade to a premium account, for less than $1,000 a year, to gain access to contact information for site users. A portion of that revenue is shared with the event host.
The right column of the site is dedicated to news and information from the organizer such as registration details or post-event survey results. There’s also a dashboard for the organizer, which includes data such as how often exhibitors are sharing news, what news is generating the most shares, and where known users are located on a world map—information that can be helpful when developing programming for future events.
