FOSE Followup Folly
First allow The Marketing Consigliere to apologize. He migrated to WordPress 2.5 this weekend and found out there’s a major bug that doesn’t allow you to upload images. He will keep his text brief so your eyes don’t glaze over!
A week after FOSE and his blog about it, he received an email that caught his attention, but not for the reason that the Marketer who sent it wanted. Apparently CompuSystems‘ service, BuyerConnect, is telling him that it has a record of all the exhibitors he allowed to scan my tradeshow badge. And that “Compliments of show management, you can access the contact information for these exhibitors – FREE OF CHARGE – when you visit the BuyerConnect website.” All I have to do is go to a link they provide in the email and type in the ID and password they’ve provided.
Hallelujah! The Marketing Consigliere never knew he could get vendor contact information “FREE OF CHARGE!” In a Network-Centric Marketing world, at that! He guesses the free program from the show listing all vendor contact information doesn’t count.
He hopes that their Marketers have some back office intelligence that would measure his behavior if he went to their site; it would be of particular value to the exhibitors if there were some data from a lead scoring engine that could be shared with them.
However, the back office intelligence would be the only intelligence present. The email copy lacked intelligence. What Marketing muttonhead thought that The Marketing Consigliere would be like Pavlov’s Dog, rushing to connect with the vendors he spoke less than two minutes with? Why not provide him with a feedback mechanism that allowed him to rate the booth aesthetics, competence of the booth staff, or measure his recall of the exhibitor and its products or services?
In a B2B world with an increasing reliance on critical CRM tools, BuyerConnect and their customers are blowing a C4ISR Marketing opportunity. So much more could be done with the technology they are leveraging, and they could have done a much better job with their messaging.