Tag: "Twitter"

October 27th, 2010

A San Francisco Treat at FastTrak

As MC² continues to sponsor the FastTrak education program for Exhibitor Magazine, I continue to share my experiences hosting FastTrak and planning our Tuesday night special event. I hope you find this information useful for your events. Please post any questions and I will try to answer them.
The 2010 San Francisco FastTrak was held from September 28 – September 30. As the FastTrak sponsor, MC² arranges for the seminar location and hotel accommodations. We also organize a Tuesday night special event to bring everyone together to network in an informal setting. Here are the highlights of my experiences planning the San Francisco event.
Hotel/Meeting Planning
We’ve traditionally held the San Francisco FastTrak at the Marriott Fisherman’s Wharf, which has always been a pleasant experience – from location to service. But earlier this year, we were approached by the Hyatt Regency to host the conference. To moderate our costs, we decided to move the event from the Marriott at Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hyatt in Burlingame, near the San Francisco airport.
The change resulted in significant savings. As the event sponsor, MC² saw a 25% decrease in costs to run the event. But better yet, the attendees saw a 50% decrease in their room rate. On top of that, we were able to offer additional perks such as free WiFi in hotel rooms and free airport shuttle transfer (there was about a $50 taxi fee to the Wharf).
Making a change in venue and working with a new hotel staff for an annual event can certainly create challenges. Anthony, our contact at the Hyatt, and his team were exceptional to work with. They helped us decrease costs, but still delivered a high-quality experience.
Open Mic Forum
Recently MC² and Exhibitor Magazine has started hosting an Open Mic forum or Town Hall session to give attendees an opportunity to discuss issues affecting their work and careers. This time, we decided to tackle what digital media means for our industry. We had a great discussion on how exhibit professionals are approaching virtual trade shows and social media. The group gave us great feedback on our FastTrak Twitter account including the kind of tweets they’d like to see. (More on this in a future post.)
Hosted Evening Event
As I mentioned earlier, we like to plan a special event for Tuesday night that has a local flair. I also like to give attendees an opportunity to get to know MC² better. San Francisco’s Tuesday night event was dinner at the Broadway Grill, which is a local favorite for great American food and exceptional live music. One of our friends – and a FastTrak speaker – Glenda Brungardt, Tradeshow/Event Manager from HP gave us the recommendation for the Broadway Grill. Thanks from everyone, Glenda!
Our contact from Broadway Grill was Gary Gueits. He went above and beyond the ordinary by suggesting we have an exclusive wine tasting from the Trinchero winery in Napa.
Chris Siconolfi from Trinchero Family Estates came with a great selection of excellent Trinchero Family brand wines. While we tasted, he gave an engaging presentation about wine basics and easy-to-remember tips for pairing food and wine. One tip in particular has really stuck with me: When wine pairing, you do not need to always follow the rule of white goes with white meat and red with red meat. Think about the other ingredients in your meal and choose a wine flavor that compliments all those tastes. I realize that this can also holds true for event planning – don’t be afraid to try mix and match new things and change up your events. While we tried a new approach to this year’s San Francisco FastTrak by moving outside of the city proper to a new hotel, the core elements were never compromised – a high-quality educational platform and a fun, local experience!
We had a great time. The food and service were impeccable at the Broadway Grill. Chris’s presentation was not only informative, but entertaining as well. And he made wine pairing less intimidating. The event was a great success and a true San Francisco experience!
I hope you found all of this helpful. Below please find the contact information for the Hyatt, Broadway Grill and Trinchero Family Estates. They were all excellent to work with and we hope to work with them again soon!
Hotel:
Anthony Woodley – Catering Convention Services Manager (Planning contact)
Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport
1333 Bayshore Highway
Burlingame, CA 94010
650-696-3032
Anthony.woodley@hyatt.com
Event:
Gary Gueits
Broadway Grill
1400 Broadway Ave.
Burlingame, CA 94010
650-343-9333
www.bwgrill.com
Chris Siconolfi
Senior Regional Sales Manager, California
1168 Cervantes Way
Pacifica, CA 94044
650-557-2070
csiconolfi@tfewines.com
Thoughts, suggestions, comments? Drop me a line at jbodenmann@mc-2.com or comment below!

April 26th, 2010

Exhibitor2010-Powerful Partners

Like every Exhibitor Show, it’s a kick off to the year ahead and our message… and 2010 is a very important year.
In years past we have taken a more laid back approach or focused on results. But this year we wanted to focus on what was important in this economy; the strength and stability that comes from our Powerful Partners.
We have powerful partnerships within our organization between co-workers, departments and nationwide network of offices to the relationships we have with our preferred international business partners. We also focused on the partners we have with the sponsorships we support, like Exhibitor’s FastTrak and Alex’s Lemonade. But most importantly we focused on the powerful partnerships we have with our clients.
In the exhibit:
In our exhibit we had a fun interactive match game that we developed to demonstrate some of the more famous Powerful Partners we all know. From Abercrombie and Fitch to Fred and Wilma and Tiffany and Co. After each match there was a fun fact about each partnership.
If you played our game you received a blue handheld massager… Perfect for those show floor aches and pains we all get. After that you were entered to win our daily drawing of an iPod touch with a Grand Prize drawing for an iPad. Congratulations to all of our winners!
At the show:
For the first time we offered FREE Wifi in the square… something that was never done before. When an attendee accessed our connection they were routed to our Exhibitor Show page which included photos, videos, tweets and information about the show.
For the first time we were also active in the social media arena pre, at and post show. We found this to be extremely useful in determining what interests attendees and to keep up with whats going on.
After the show:
We left the Exhibitor2010 show with a lot of solid leads, great information and a powerful network of connections. Perhaps even more importantly, we were able to forge new relationships using social media during the show, something every exhibitor should be exploring with their attendees.

November 20th, 2009

Atlanta Strikes it Big!

Hi everyone and welcome to another addition to my blog. The purpose of this space is to share my experiences and information I develop as we continue to sponsor the FastTrak program for Exhibitor Magazine.
Atlanta FastTrak, November 2009
We have officially wrapped up our 8th year with our Atlanta FastTrak on November 10 – 12, 2009.
This time we developed a town hall discussion in place of one of the peer-to-peer roundtables. We had an engaging discussion about budget cuts and shared cost saving practices.
We also discussed social media outlets and how our industry is utilizing these tools. We discovered that more than 50% of our attendees are using social media on a personal level, where only ~30% of companies are participating. Though MC¬≤ as a company participates in social media, we rolled out a MC¬≤ FastTrak twitter account to update attendees on the program throughout the year… but to also offer onsite updates during conferences. Click below if you’re interested in following us at
MC2_FastTrak
MC2_Exhibits
Please feel free to share your thoughts with us on your experiences with social media as well.
Hotel/Meeting Planning: The Atlanta FastTrak is held at the MC¬≤ Conference Learning Center in our office in Lithia Springs, GA only 15 miles from downtown Atlanta. Having the conference in our facility is a great way for the attendees to meet our people and to see how we operate. Our Vice President of Operations, Ben Lewis offered well-attended tours of the Atlanta production facility for those who were interested.
Hosted Evening Event: This Tuesday we went back to the basics and organized an evening event that included an all-American pastime… Bowling! While enjoying pizza, sandwiches and cocktails our six teams bowled three great games.
We saw some great bowling skills from some of our attendees including a few graceful wipeouts… even some break dancing! The following day we awarded players in the following categories: Best Bowler (Including highest score and number of strikes), highest number of Spares, highest number of Splits, highest ball Speed, lowest score and the most gutter balls.
It was a great night filled with good conversation and networking with a lot of laughs, cheers and high-fives from all of the teams.
Thank you to all who attended our event and the Atlanta FastTrak program. We appreciate and support your dedication to your career and future in the trade show and event industry.
Thoughts, suggestions, comments? Drop me a line! jbodenmann@mc-2.com

Tag: "Twitter"

A San Francisco Treat at FastTrak

Exhibitor2010-Powerful Partners

Atlanta Strikes it Big!

The High Potential Trade Show Marketer

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City Spotlight

Green Tip

Complimentary White Paper

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