This week we have a crack team of Invenio personnel exhibiting at an IT conference in Sri Lanka. A decade or so ago, corporate IT departments were in the midst of a love affair with the tradeshow. Each year, millions of delegates would converge at various conference centres in various locations around the world to see the very latest technologies on the market (or, in some cases, watch a powerpoint of soon-to-be-available technologies!). The big vendors would spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, dollars, deutschmarks and yen to attract us to the biggest, flashiest and outré stands that were stuffed with as much tat as you could stuff into your branded exhibition satchel. The market for stress balls and branded mints never had it so good.
But then came the internet.
With a few notable exceptions including the traditional “XYZ User Conference”, everybody wants to do business sitting behind a computer screen. These days it seems, businesses search for prospective suppliers through the proliferation of social networks that have sprung up. Blogs, discussion forums, twitters, facebook and linkedin are no longer the must-have accessory for the technology marketing fashionista - they are a mainstream requirement for IT suppliers everywhere if you are to stand a chance of getting on a shortlist.
Of course, social networking isn’t a new concept – it has in fact been around for decades in the guise of usenet and listserv et al... but its elevated position in how we use it to find new suppliers – has all but replaced the range of human interaction provided by an exhibition.
In his recent blog entitled “The Social CIO”, Alastair Behenna wryly stated “I’m going to have to leverage my “social” skills if I’m to succeed in “consumerising” corporate IT.” This, in response to a Gartner press release that declared a new dawn in which we’ll have occupations that include “virtual-assistant designers ... who create Web beings that replicate the actions of a human being in providing agent services on the Web”. OK, I’ll look forward to that.
But (bringing this blog back to its original subject) I think that social media is a poor substitute for real world business networking. The delegates in Sri Lanka get to shake hands with our CEO and have a proper conversation about how we can work together. They get to ask questions and get unrehearsed, PR-free answers. They get to see our team in action - and we get to look our prospective new customers in the eyes. And these are the things that this blog can never do.
Social networking is a great tool (in spite of my previous protestations!). But I think we’ll all be a bit better off if we keep a degree of human interaction in our business dealings with each other. And that means getting out of the office and into the exhibition hall to press the flesh and grab a few stress balls to give to the kids when you get home.
Comments