My Thoughts of ResortXpo: First Day of the First Show

It’s great to be able to see a year’s worth of worth come together.  I am SO lucky to work with such a great team.  They humor me on my crazy ideas like Virtual Conferences!  I am so glad we decided to take on the challenge of creating and hosting the first ever Virtual Conference for the Ski Industry.

Did everything go seamlessly?  No.  We had a few bugs.  But, it was totally worth it!

–Trade Show Booths.  At the last minute we realized that the Trade Show was hard to see on some computer screens.  Although we tested it before it went live, it wasn’t until the day of the  show and comments started coming in, that we realized it was not as “user friendly” as we had hoped.  A few tweaks and changes later and it was fixed.  But, the design suffered a little bit on large monitor screens.

–Sending messages.  One of the biggest aspects to a social networking site is to be able to send messages to friends and others on the site.  This morning we realized that the message pop-up box had technical issues and was not fully visible in any browser other than IE6 and IE7.  We’ll limp through this show with that.  The change means updating some code, which we are not very excited to do while the show is open.

–Training.  Sometimes being ahead of the curve means you not only have to train your own staff, but the vendors, and attendees of a show like the one we produced.  That’s been the biggest challenge…helping people see the big picture and how to use technology to interact with other people.  We knew we had to create Training sessions for the seminar speakers.  But, then at the last minute, we also needed training materials for the vendors at the show, and even the attendees.  Once people get the hang of what’s available, they do get excited and even addicted to all the options available.  It’s just getting them to that point, that is the challenge.

–The Seminars.  Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I ended up being the first speaker of the show.  After a last minute issue with the upload of my presentation, we finally got the seminars off with a bang.  If you want to see an on-demand viewing, check it out here:
http://www.resortxpo.com/ski/seminars-101

All-in-all, we accomplished quite a bit.  We were able to prove that a Virtual Show can work.  And work well.  We proved that speakers, vendors and attendees even with NO technical expertise (just a bit of training) will participate and interact.

I look forward to tomorrow.  It’s the second day of the show.  But, interestingly not the last.  Unlike a traditional show that closes down after the speeches have been given and the booths wrapped up, ResortXpo.com will stay online until the next show which will be in November.

One thought on “My Thoughts of ResortXpo: First Day of the First Show”

Comments are closed.