I hope everyone out there has a Happy and Healthy New Year! I thought I would take this moment to recap our first year in social media.

If you haven’t already, please enjoy the first season of my tradeshow podcast entitled Tradeshow Tips located on my youtube channel located here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TradeShMktCoach
I hope you find it useful and ultimately profitable!

Second I would like to thank a few of the twitter friends I’ve made over the year who consistently post valuable information. You may want to take a look at them and see how these individuals can help your business grow:

@MarketerExpo
@CorporateFx
@MoeningGroup
@tradeshows
@SunsetTransLV
@thesalesinsider
@eventfizz
@boothtag

Be safe everyone! To a profitable 2012!

Many times company continuing the “Branding” of the company products and services and including the trade shows into this as well. VP’s of Marketing will order shirts for the personnel that will be standing booth duty. These shirts will also come with an ultimatum saying, “You are orders to wear these shirts as a representative of this company for the length of this trade show” the problem is they give the booth personnel one or perhaps two shirts and expect these people to appear every day with a clean shirt and a smile on their face.
Oh yes, if you are in a place like Las Vegas you can probably get these shirt cleaned over night, but when you get the cleaning bill, you could have purchased at least two more shirts for what you paid to have the shirt cleaned. In other places over night cleaning service may not be available.

So what do these booth personnel do since they only have one or two shirts? They wear the shirt, then take it off, hang up in the hotel closet, and then put it on the next day. Can you imaging what this shirt will look like on the second day? Besides what it could smell like? It may be necessary to have any prospects or suspects that come to your booth to stand down winds so they don’t get a whiff of you and your shirt that you have been wearing for three days.

If you are going to have your booth personnel wear company shirts please give them enough shirts to make their trade show experience an enjoyable one.

Good morning John:
I read your April E-Newsletter and I see all of the services that your companies offers, especially in the area of trade shows. Why do you call yourself a coach and not a consultant?

Allen, New York City

Dear Allen:

I get asked this question a lot, usually when I meet someone in person. This is the first time I had someone actually write to me about this. Well, I hope I do not alienate too many of my consultant friends and business associates, but I think after they read my response they will have to agree. I was a business consultant for over ten years, back in the eighties. Back then; it was assumed that if you were a consultant you had a lot of experience, besides a strong educational background. As we moved in the business world of the nineties, more and more people, fresh out of school entered into the different industries and they instantly became Consultants. I had always thought that Consultant and Experience were synonymous. Obviously, that is not the case today. When I decided to call myself a Coach, it was because all that I know about Coaches is that you MUST have the experience and the longevity in your field before you can call yourself a Coach. I have that longevity, experience and more to be able to assist my clients.

To your continued trade show success

John Hill, Trade Show Coach