The event is at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Our exhibitor packages includes one complete conference registration (Robin) and four additional exhibit-only passes. We will staff the SMT exhibit throughout the day Monday and Tuesday, and will be drawing up a schedule to ensure there are at least two people there during all peak times.
Today we met to flesh out some of the plans further. Paul Hoferer will be the "lead intern" on the project, as our other intern Lucy Sedgwick has a long-planned vacation scheduled that week. Please be sure to copy Paul on any IABC-related emails - [email protected].
We want to make it a fun, personal-expression-focused event for participants. Here are some of the ideas we are pursuing, and please feel free to add your ideas in the comments:
Free SMT hats in exchange for registering for SMT (or for being already registered on any of our sites)
Some sort of Flickr account or other method to display photos we will take of anyone willing to pose with one of our hats. Ideally we would like to be able to upload photos on-site and have them display during the conference in a custom module on the SMT homepage (Jerry, Tanya... can we do this?)
- Robin plans to liveblog selected sessions.
- To facilitate on-site registrations, we'll ask people to give us a business card, then we'll enter the necessary data and create the registrations administratively, which will generate an email to the participant instructing them to confirm their registration. (Tanya, is there some way we can use batch processing to give these people a "purpose-built" registration email that thanks them for registering at IABC, rather than the standard email?)
- We will give out some sort of paper takeaway (perhaps a bookmark, if we can't come up with a more webby idea) with SMT branding.
- Everyone staffing the exhibit should bring a WiFi-equipped laptop with them, so we can show off the sites to multiple people concurrently.
- The main brand we want to reinforce is SMT, but we'll show off the other sites as well. Paul is going to work on a PPT presentation that we can have scrolling continuously on a spare laptop.