Linux for Suits - Showtime

At his blog, Ryan Skadberg says Overall, lots of great ideas, I just wish I could have seen some interesting ideas about the vendor part of the show. I'm always looking to make our booth more exciting and different.

And he's right that I left booth advice out of the piece. So here's some.

1) If you've got tech to show, demonstrate it. Don't just show off boxes or boards or whatever it is you sell.

2) Bring your geeks and do on-site tech support. Customers often come looking for help they can't get on the phone. And new customers of technical products need to be able to relate to the geeks who know those products best.

3) Forget the schwag. In nearly all cases, gimmicky give-aways don't work. One exception: t-shirts. They're good for building loyalty with employees as well as visitors and customers.

4) If you have people from the company speaking in lecture rooms, post it at the booth. Say so-and-so will be speaking about such-and-such at Room C-13 or whatever.

5) Pack cell phones and keep them on. Have a master list of everybody's phone at the booth. Shows are for meeting people, talking trash, and showing stuff off. Make it as easy as possible for the right reporters, or the right customers, to talk to the right staffers. Also for the staffers to find each other.

6) Set up meeting space. Seats and tables, stuff like that, if you have room for it at all. If not, create a routine for going offsite nearby somewhere to do the same.

7) Even if you're not showing stuff off, rent a Net connection and some electricity and set up at least one desktop with a Web connection. Makes itself useful countless ways. If you can get it past the unions or the hotel's crazy connection system, set up a wi-fi base station with Net access too. Name the SSID after your company, so users will know who to thank.

Okay, I'm out of time here at the airport where I'm writing this. Any other ideas from the rest of ya'll?