Seeds, Conferences, and Our Booth

Well, I figured I should report back on the “seed sowing” venture I took in Washington this week. The political conference I attended was a great opportunity to connect with people in the community of my likely customers, and even more, in the leaders who might be able or willing to carry more of my message out to other people. That’s good marketing because it is good leverage. I’m not sure what will come of these seeds yet, but they are out there.

I learned a couple things about having a booth at a trade show. First, it is really helpful to have something that gets people to stop by the booth. We tried several things to test them at this show. I have been proposing a Free and Fair Elections Amendment to the US Constitution. At the show, we handed out little ¼ page flyers to draw attention to it, one page information sheets, and had a ballot box at our table for people to cast their votes on the amendment. The handouts worked well, but few were enticed to vote at the table. Even when asked, few people stopped to vote. Likewise, only a few people dropped business cards into a box for a drawing for a free book.

Fortunately, I had one other trick up my sleeve. I had created a nine question “Liberty Quiz” which people found interesting and challenging. It turned out that the quiz was pretty difficult, and no one got them all right. As people came by the booth, we started issuing a challenge: “Be the first to get them all right!” Now that attracted people. They were curious, engaged, and wanted to know the right answers. It was fun, and it was educational, and people engaged with my book and our booth.

I found that the conference was a great place to make contacts, but not a great place to sell the value of the contact or to engage much discussion in most cases. This conference was full of presidential candidates, think tank leaders, famous writers and other public figures. My approach was to engage them enough so they would remember me on follow up, but not to try to have a lengthy conversation while there. I will only know if this was a good strategy on follow up, so I will owe you all some answers there.

The more interesting contacts, in many ways, were the writers and media. There was a whole organization around the radio, and I tried several times to get on the radio, but we were too late. Most of the programs were full. But there was a cable TV group there called Liberty TV which has 80 cable stations in its network and 4 radio stations. Walking by, I saw that they had no one actively being interviewed, so I chimed in: “Do you need an interview subject?” “Well, what are you about?” I told them about my book, and received about 25 minutes of interview time which will be edited and aired in late July across their network. They will also send me a copy of the DVD for posting on our website. Things like this make me think that conferences are like fishing trips. You never know what you will catch, but I got a real keeper on this one, even if not a lunker.

Enough for now.