Updated December 2020 with relevant links

“We are not just passing into another historical period or another cultural modification.......But more specifically we are terminating the last 65 million years of life development.” Thomas Berry, historian philosopher

The universe  is constantly coming into being through irreversible steps of transformations; from a lesser to a greater order of complexity, from a lesser to a higher mode of consciousness. [This thinking holds true only if you subscribe to linear theory of evolution, which is opposite of cyclical evolutionary theory...well that is another conversation for another time]. It has been professed by social scientists that genetically we are very different from our forefathers some 200 generations ago as they were different from the Neanderthals. “What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

And of course, good or bad, COVID-19 is doing  it's part in digitizing our evolution.

This growing complexity is evident in our social lives and in our business lives.
Needles to say, if you are a brand marketer you are in for the ride of your lifetime: you have umpteen different social media sites to peddle your stuff and unnumbered “How To” blog sites to master one single craft.

To compound that, new social media tools are launching every day and new marketing best practices are emerging every minute of your waking lives.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone.

Get this, 90% of people move between devices to accomplish one single goal.
Talk about a disjointed social culture on the verge of total disarray. It is like we have been handed over the technology of the gods without being primed for it.

As marketers, is sanity an achievable alternative? The short answer is yes.
If we take a step back from this massive marketing permutation and combination that is going on every second of the day and focus on the human currency of our business and cultivate them we create tangible value for ourselves and our businesses. “Hidden in Plain Sight is Today's Greatest Overlooked Growth Opportunity ... It is our Customers.”

Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset maintains that once you identify your star customers and nurture them in such a fashion that increases their personal value proposition, you now have re-defined your relationship and transformed your customers into your brand advocates and key influencers in your industry. He calls this community marketing. Because, you are helping your customers build reputation that help them expand their support groups and build communities.

Cash rewards, discounts or 'try it before you buy it' is the game of marketing as we know it.
It is usually tailored towards customer life time value which is based on how much money they are prepared to spend. On the other hand, customer-centric marketing increases customers' life time value.

It helps build their social capital, increases their reputation and gives them access to new treasure trove of ideas. “This new concept of building customer advocates, peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing, hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.”

How to involve your customers to be your brand advocate?
Each industry is different. However, there are some basic principles that can be enacted across all industries.

Developing a thriving customer community keeps your bottom line on target and makes your top marketing dollars accountable. At the end of the day, your goal as a marketer is to create new opportunities for your business. One, sure fire way to do so, is to sustain your focus on ROR factor as postulated by Ted Rubin  (Return on Relationship) and echoed by  Bill Lee. ROR is a robust virtuous cycle in which you, (the marketer) provide them (your customers) with superior value and they (your customers), in turn, enrich your company. Catch the Ted Rubin's latest interview with Exhibitor Magazine here.

At the end of the day, you have taken control of your sanity. You have stayed true to your focus. Your life is enriched because you have helped another person flourish ... At last, you kick back and as you get to marvel at your own greatness, you come to "admit there is something glorious about being you."

Let's face it. When it comes to trade show exhibiting, most companies use the same tactics that they used years ago and the sad part is all the companies start to look and feel the same. Strategy seems to be an alien concept. Most exhibitors are peddling the same stuff with perhaps a bit different flavors. This scenario is specially true in a vertical markets.

So, what do you do as an Exhbiitor who wants to create a memorable splash at an event to gain high grounds.

"Inbound" Your Trade Show Presence: Do something phenomenal in your booth. It could be a unque architecture that represents your brand or featuring an activity in your space that attracts people naturally towards your space. At the Exhibitor 2012 we held seminars for trade show maeketers in our space through out the day. It created phenomenal buzz and people were organically drawn towards our exhibiting space.

Harness Social Media to Promote Your Presence: Start telling your tribe about the event far in advance about the trade show. Create a hashtag for the event and a compelling reason as to why they should visit your booth. It may include a special giveaway, a new product annoucement or even the opportunity to be one of first few alpha users of a certain product that is still in development.

Create a Foursquare location for your booth at the trade show. Surprisingly enough, people are checking in to specific booths on Foursquare when they attend a trade show. Offer a special promo to people who check in to your booth. The promo may be a 15-minute, one-on-one-consultation or an extra prize. This will provide incentive to people to check in to your booth and will promote your presence to other Foursquare users.

Excite Your Internal Brand Ambassadors to Promote the Event. Encourage them to talk about your trade show presence to their networks. For your sales team this is an ideal opportunity to broadcast to their leads the benefits that they will reap in attending this show. And of course, your marketing warriors should be in the forefront in promoting this event.

Create a Targeted Offer for the Trade Show. A unique landing page on your website that promotes your trade show presence and addresses the question “What is there for me?” Compound this unique attribution with downloadable ebook or whitepaper that relates to the theme of the trade show. If people are interested in what you are saying, they will have another reason to attend the trade show.

Generate a QR code that you can imprint on your trade show graphics. Encourage people to scan the code. Configure the code to send people who scan it, to a dedicated landing page with the same value proposition that highlights the trade show connection. Invite them to download a targeted offer. This will help you to generate leads from your trade show presence and will give you a way to track results from the event.

Promote Aggressively with Social Sharing. A compelling content is bound to go viral. Include social media share buttons in your landing page to encourage others to promote the event through their own social networks. Take advantage of the industry journals that you subscribe to. Go ahead, follow them, like them whatever you have to do to get your content noticed. Start a two-way conversation. Generate third-party recommendations from people not directly associated with your business. You are bound to increase your reach!

Think of your trade show booth as a destination site. Partner with local restaurants, entertainments and other flavors to provide compelling offers for your visitors that will strike a chord of memorability in their minds.

It is a striking irony that in a bio-diverse planet such as ours we thrive on the competitive herd mentality of trying "to fit in". We like to play it safe. We like to trod the path that have been traveled ten thousand times. We have forsaken the imaginative spirit of David Livingstone to be "the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary". The best we can do is "new and improved" of the same old stuff. For example, the daily staple jeans: we have a choice of high rise, low rise, classic rise, boot cut, straight cut, wide leg, skinny flair and more of the same. In vain, we do not think about fabricating jeans that will interact with the atmospheric conditions to provide optimum wearing experience. The technology is there yet the imagination and the capital to take it to this level is sure lacking!

In this terrain of sameness, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon strikes out as an evangelist of "Difference". Her message is elementary. Yet it is the key to survival in the post-modern era of Globalization 4.0. "In category after category," she writes, "companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate–which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become ...Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them." In her new book "Different" she talks about successful companies and leaders don't just try to out compete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they aspire to redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking. Companies should be in the business of what Professor Moon calls "idea brands," products and services that challenges the very concept to its' core. Cirque du Soleil is an idea brand, a circus that re-engineered the concept of mechanical, acrobatic performance into orchestrated rhythm of art and story telling. So is Harley-Davidson, which invented the idea of high-nosed, mid-aged, white-collar, weekend "biker outlaw." So is Skyine's Arrive. It re-defines the idea of trade show portability by packing a whole 10'x10' display unit into one carrying case. And so is Dove soap, whose Campaign for Real Beauty challenged the preconceived notion of fashion and style.

If you want to be the idea behind the "idea brands" ask yourself: If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss it? –as the advertising legend Roy Spence would say. Or one might say, are your bags of goods and services so distinctive that it has become seamless to the consumer experience. Very few companies can vouch for it. This is why so many companies feel like they're on the verge of going out of business.

Here is the key question to ask: If you are doing things the same old way, selling same old stuff, what would prompt you to do any different? The cardinal point to remember:

Being different is the ROI of memorability.

The fact that Pinterest in now the third most popular social media site, beating Linkedin and Tumblr tells us something about the contemporary mass psychological movement.
We are in the Age of Visual Content Revolution. Visuals have become the greatest crutch in the continuity of story telling. Ford, IBM, GE just to name a few have made the transition from stogy boardrooms to being active participants in this mass upheaval of ideas and culture. For artists designers and the creative folks, story boards and visuals were always part of the DNA. Now, visuals are grasping hold of marketers from different industries and they are realizing the forcefulness of visual marketing.

Visuals make your Brand Fluid!
Visual content draws upon your brand heritage and legacy. It helps in the story telling of your brand.  For example, the new Facebook timeline is set up for companies to have opportunity to share their history visually, like Coca-Cola has done below.

Brands like Starbucks, harnesses the power of social media to demonstrate what is going on behind the scenes between employees and customers. This humanizes the brand and promotes brand loyalty and awareness between companies and consumers. They have used visuals to make a powerful statement about their brand's stance on important issues that they believe in.

Visuals make your Brand Captivating!
Visuals capture more than just attention – they capture your heart and drives engagement. In fact, just one month after Facebook introduced timeline for brands, Simply Measured reports that engagement is up 46% percent per post, and visual content (photos and videos) have seen a 65% increase in engagement. Kudos to GE. They have proactively asked for fans to engage with the photos of their products, and the results are phenomenal! Now you know why status updates is loosing the battle to visual updates.

Visuals make your Brand User-Worthy!
If your customers are on at least a couple of the visually-friendly social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, or Instagram, get them involved in helping shape the story of your brand in a more visual way. Keep in mind that there are multiple industries in which prospects won't make a purchase without first consulting user-generated content. That is the reason perhaps why Dunkin Donuts is encouraging fans to create visual content that gets them excited about their product.

Referral traffic from social media sites to brand websites is on the rise. Shareaholic study revealed Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined; only Facebook and StumbleUpon generate more.

Bottom Line: Social networks are a direct link to how customers get to your actual website. When brands are communicated through visual mediums, customers are then taking the next step and going directly to your website.
No matter how boring the business of goods that you are in; give it a visual flair, weave a story, include your target audience to participate. And, simply watch how your brand evolves.

“Social media isn’t the end-all-be-all, but it offers marketers unparalleled opportunity to participate in relevant ways. It also provides a launchpad for other marketing tactics. Social media is not an island. It’s a high-power engine on the larger marketing ship.” Matt Dickman, technomarketer.typepad.com

It seems like, to counteract the virtual aspects of social marketing, trade shows have remained firmly within the confines of the 3 dimensions of our physical world. Trade shows are not only unique to meeting, greeting and collecting leads, they are the fierece battle gounds in business. It is one frontier where "the business value of Facebook and the other social media is still largely untapped " says Scott Wherley, vice president of global customer insights with Reed Expositions, one of the world’s largest event organizers. “Some companies are doing it well, but many are not making the most of this opportunity.”

Scott Wherley says, that some exhibitors are sending out tweets during the show, offering discounts on their products for those who come to their booth within a prescribed time (say, the next 30 minutes).

Since, social marketing is multi-channel and cross-platform, in the days and weeks leading up to the show, exhibitors are creating a buzz about the event on various channels. During the show, marketers are posting “Special Reports,” updating show attendees from the trade show floor about special sessions and surprises. The companies are posting blogs and tweeting several times a day, keeping their blog subscribers who were unable to attend the show in the loop as to what they’re missing — while creating fresh and compelling content, that amplifies SEO and generates prolonged awareness.

Dave Clarke, an award-winning editor, says, a physical trade show presence and a virtual presence are not mutually exclusive, though; in fact, just the opposite. "Ratcheting up your social media marketing, before, during, and after a trade show is proving one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your booth and cement the relationships you’ve come there to forge."

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."

Mary Anne Evans, known by the pen name George Eliot was an 18th century leading novelist, journalist, translator and I would have to add a visionary to that tall order. Nowhere since the recorded history of mankind, were we flourished with so many choices and options with an underlying layer of sameness. The sameness is so monotonous that it looks like the flat lands of North Dakota. To rise above this tedious monotony is our strongest challenge and hence our strongest growth.

Marketers (from trade shows to social media) of today has to be entrenched in this advantageous place that Mike Gospe calls The Marketing High Grounds. When marketing leaders at every level have empathy and profound understanding of their target market, so much so that they become customers' advocate: a connection emerges and a creative path forges that cuts through the clutter and brings home the point across.

Tell Me More. These are the 3 most important words that marketers love to hear from their target audience. All marketers agree that successful selling is not about selling but story telling. And... you got it right. People will pay more attention if the story is about them: if they understand that your product will add benefits and or solve problems in their daily living. Once that is achieved, the world class marketers move on to telling their prospects how and why their products are better than any alternative. The story should always end with a validating success story and an affirmation of the of the benefit statement. Mike Gospe gives us Personas, Positioning and Messaging in his new playbook for B2B marketing professionals: The Marketing High Ground. He states, more is not better. It is normal human psychology to be everything to everybody. Marketers throw a multitude of features and benefits at prospects requiring them to sort out what’s really important. This only confuses the issue and lengthens the sales cycle. "A positioning statement challenges marketers to hone a simple statement that identifies the target market (via the persona), names the product and maps it to an appropriate category, prioritizes a benefit most relevant to the persona, and clearly distinguishes its uniqueness against the nearest competitive alternative."

Seth Godin, famed author of Survival is not Enough does not have a birthday anymore. He gave it away. In a single splash of marketing flair, he brought into forefront how each one of us can be the saviors of our Blue Planet. I was introduced to Charity Water.

This piece is my salute to our combined energy in bringing clean water to all of us. What is so genuine about this organization is that 100% of public donations go directly to water projects. All operating costs are covered by a group of private donors so every dollar goes towards uplifting lives and enriching life stories. One dollar {or 4 quarters} a day for only 20 days can bring clean water to one human being for 20 YEARS. That is the power of your dollar and the vastness of your heart. Enjoy it.

Being in the forefront of creativity we are the ones to impact a change. Spread the word. Seek a campaign. Partner with trade show exhibitors, retail giants and media masters. Make a difference. "Elevate yourself from the wretchedness of grabbing to the magnanimity of giving." The Hopi prophecy says: "We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For." Create your community. Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for your leader.