Russian Internet Week RIW-2010

I first attended the RIW 2010 exhibition as a participant and one of the Inside company representatives, and to be honest: for the first time I was a participant in the exhibition. Therefore, she made a lot of new, interesting impressions, which I would like to share with you dear colleagues and just readers of this blog.

A little about the exhibition itself. It took place at the Expocenter, on the stands there was a riot of colors, the sound of megaphones, music and politely or cheerfully (depending on the mood) smiling company representatives, among whom was your humble servant.

Unfortunately, the exhibition hall had excellent acoustics and, as a result, everyone listened to everyone, and as a result, sometimes they did not even hear themselves. In addition, of the problematic issues, one can note the poor quality of Wi-Fi Internet provided free by Beeline (which could not withstand the influx of visitors almost from the very beginning of the exhibition) and the high cost of cafeterias. Of the pros, space and cleanliness in all rooms can be noted.

And of course, if we talk about the exhibition, then its most important part is visitors and participants.
People were very diverse: cheerful and focused, questioning and explaining, searching and finding, young and old, participants and visitors, security guards and organizers of the exhibition. Whoever we have met here: teachers and artists, poets and journalists, directors of large companies and female models, students and serious IT specialists.

What brought all these people to the RIW 2010?
Based on communication with those who came up to our stand, as well as on the basis of everyday experience, we can assume that the visitors of the exhibition were attracted by the desire:
• To see, learn something new, amazing, interesting, useful;
• Find customers for your business;
• Find an artist (s) for his (her) tasks (s);
• Get interesting impressions of the surroundings, atmosphere, pick up funny free little things (there are few such people and mostly students, schoolchildren, or random passers-by).

We, like other exhibitors, wanted to attract new customers for our business, strengthen relationships with regular customers and generally: tell visitors about what we do and why this is an important, interesting and necessary business.

Funny moment: at the exhibition, competitors come together and work side by side - shoulder to shoulder. And at the same time, by and large, they do not interfere with each other. This is, in a sense, the Olympics that replaced real wars. This is an active competitive process in which the knowledge of specialists, the professionalism of the company, and the right approach to the client are important. This is where the specialization of each comes to light. Literally any word or any additional opportunity described or offered by one or another company, specialist, plays a role in the distribution of orders between end developers. In my opinion, a natural redistribution of the market takes place at the exhibition in miniature and in accelerated mode with its own laws of monopoly and its element of chance. It seems that the exhibition is a model of the market in the relevant field - that part of it,

Now a little about personal impressions from the exhibition. What immediately attracted any normal man in this showroom?
Of course, beautiful girls are models who smoothly paced between stands, with one appearance attracting glances not only to their beautiful outfits (for some it consisted only of paint), but also to the names of the companies that they advertised, stands near which take pictures with them, contact details and services provided by companies. The company producing the product called Megaplan was especially distinguished in this way of self-advertising. On their behalf, beautiful mollusks and dryads, riding around Segway scooters dressed in the "Bodyart" style, called out loudly (through a megaphone) to visitors. Is this way of advertising good? Perhaps, yes, because now everyone knows, or at least heard, absolutely everyone who visited the exhibition or read articles on it. Does such an advertisement have any disadvantages? And again, perhaps yes. Such an advertisement is somewhat shocking: people look more at half-naked beauties than at a stand. I remembered for a long time a very serious and middle-aged business client who, at the time of the appearance of one of these naiads, asked me to interrupt my explanations, because I quote from him: “The brain is disconnected”. After the girl disappeared behind the stand, he fortunately woke up and repeated his question. However, the advantages of such advertising still clearly outweighed the cons, so draw conclusions ...

Some original souvenirs from various companies were also interesting, for example, at the stand of Kaspersky Lab CJSC, you could get for free "Personal protective equipment that is not part of Kaspersky Anti-Virus."
Speaking of customer acquisition. What methods were used at our booth? Well, firstly, we brought a bunch of sweets and other sweets with us, and secondly, of course, the main chip used in conjunction with our 1C-Bitrix partner at any exhibition: beautiful butterflies that are freely located on all tables and posters. These bright-winged beauties actively migrated into the hands of our future customers in exchange for business cards and completed profiles.

And of course, when talking about attracting customers, one should not forget about the actively held contests and master classes - the embodiment of a person’s craving for knowledge and “free cheese”. Every half hour our stand was filled with a small crowd of people eager to get a prize or learn something new, the former often turning into the latter, and the latter into customers.

What developments based on the 1C-Bitrix product were future customers interested in? Requests were very different: from a business card website to a corporate portal. However, in my opinion, most of all people were interested in photo galleries, online stores and cheap business card sites based on the First Site edition of 1C-Bitrix: Site Management system. Visitors came up, asked questions and received competent professional answers from our specialists, signed contracts. None of those who visited the exhibition were left without an answer, consultation or site, if one was needed.

In addition, at the exhibition, an exchange of experience took place between partners of various companies - leaders providing universal paid site management systems, such as 1C-Bitrix, UMI, Amiro and others. We, the developers, shared our experience in implementing such systems in various conditions on various projects and quietly drew conclusions for ourselves. For example, which system is more suitable for online stores, and which - for the development of portals in a short time.

So, for our company’s specialists, the exhibition has become a good reason and a way to get to know our customers better, exchange experience integrating various content management systems, gain new customers and strengthen relationships with old ones, learn something new about the technologies we work with ourselves.

And of course, the exhibition brought a lot of positive emotions, especially its completion and the competition for the best speech about the 1C-Bitrix: Site Management system. In my opinion, the exhibition was very effective and brought a lot of pleasant acquaintances and emotions.

Thank you all and to the new article!
Oleg Stepanov.