Rob Wickings's Blog, page 75
June 18, 2012
Lessons Learnt From A Trade Show Stand
I spent the weekend helping out the bro-in-law at a trade show. “Sounds like a bit of fun”, I thought. “How hard could it be?”
Yeah. About that.
1 – Know Your Product. It’s very easy to pitch in and say you’ll help out, but customers will focus in with laser-like precision on your weak points. If, like me, you have done no prep, you will look like a stuttering moron within moments of the show opening it’s gates. This is even more likely to happen when your collegues, who do know what they’re talking about, have gone for a coffee. On that subject…
1a – Be Clear About Your Product – if you’re spending at least a part of time with every contact explaining what it is that you do, then maybe a banner or standee making that clear might be worthwhile. Although it does give you ample opportunity to practice the patter.
2 – Know Your Place. The venue and organisers will promise you a prime pitch with a guaranteed amount of foot-fall and through traffic. These promises will hold a vague and disappointing relationship to the truth. If there is building work going at the venue, expect big changes to the arrangements.
3 – Know Your Customers. It’ll take a while, but you should be able to parse out the time-wasters from the people with a genuine interest in the product. Although in that learning period you will lose at least one potential client when you can’t get rid of the wingnut who thinks you’re there for a nice long chat on an unrelated subject. Always be polite, though. You never know.
4 – Know Your Neighbours. Don’t ignore people running stands around you. They are invaluable founts of support and, in my role as embedded blogger for the weekend, a prime source of decent copy. If nothing else, you can commiserate with each other about the customers, the venue, the lousy coffee or the weather.
5 – Know Your Freebies. People come to trade shows to accumulate free stuff. They arrive in an acquisitive frame of mind, and if you can grab their attention with a brochure, a pen or something that makes them feel like they’ve got something for nothing then so much the better. We had sweeties and Green Directories on the desk, and if you were nice to us and seemed like a genuine contact, there were bags and t-shirts to be had. Don’t be thinking we’re handing out the expensive ski jackets, though. Have some sense of perspective. You can try them on, but don’t try it on.
6 – Know Your Limits. Working on a stand at an event is surprisingly tiring. You’re on your feet all day with your game face on. It’s not done to tell a member of the public to FOAD, however much they might deserve it, and the simple effort of staying courteous can take its toll. Take plenty of breaks, stay hydrated, and be aware that the big night out you’ve planned after work could look increasingly unattractive when compared to a quiet cocktail in the hotel bar and early to bed.
7 – Know Why You’re There. Trade shows are about awareness and contact gathering more than anything else. A big order at a show would be nice, but you shouldn’t bank on it. Sometimes it’ll take six months to be able to see whether taking a weekend off has actually converted into sales that make the effort worthwhile. For me, it was an experience in focussed live-blogging, and I took a lot away from my time on the stand. Whether mine hosts did has yet to be figured out.
June 14, 2012
An Excuse For Fashion
Readership, I’m sure you’re aware that although X&HT is my home and you are all my dearioes, I do like to spread the love around a bit. For example, I run the blog for Pier 32, a promotional clothing company that deals exclusively in ethical and Eco-friendly items. Writing about sustainable fashion is, to put it mildly, a bit outside my remit. But I like a challenge, and I haven’t been booted off the job yet, so I must be doing something right.
This weekend sees me in Brighton, helping Pier 32 at the Eco-Technology Show. It’s a huge showcase for all things eco and, you know, technological. It’s a good fit for us, as Pier 32 believes in using smart solutions to ethical questions.
It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, although I’m still a bit un-nerved at the idea of going out and networking. It’s important to stretch oneself as a writer, I suppose.
You can find out more about the show here, and keep an eye on my Twitter feed and the Pier 32 blog for updates from the show.
Back to the usual geekiness next week. For now, darlings, I’m a fashionista.
June 12, 2012
Tuesday Tunes: The True And Complete History Of Cerise Sauvage
I like my playlists to tell a story. It’s important for them to have an ebb and flow, almost a three act structure.
Today’s playlist is the soundtrack to a short story I wrote a couple of years back. It was an attempt to write about a nemesis, a totally over-the-top, unapologetic female villain. If you haven’t read it, give it a go while listening to the playlist, which features tracks from St. Vincent, Rilo Kiley, PJ Harvey and Fever Ray.
I present the True And Complete History Of The Harlot, Seditionary and Murderess Cerise Sauvage.
(The pic is Cherry Bomb by DeviantArt user LekiLuv. Check out the fullsize pic here.)
June 9, 2012
Three Flash Film Reviews
I spent my Jubilee bank holiday in the most appropriate way possible: avoiding any and all Jubilee celebrations. I think the flotilla might have been on in the background while I was running a salsa playlist through Spotify. At least, I seem to have a memory of a very damp choir and a lot of boats moving extremely slowly down the Thames. Must have been riveting.
Anyway. As a result of successful avoidance tactics, I spent a lot of time in the cinema this week. Rather than drag out three long posts (in one particular example it would be very easy indeed to spin off into major rant mode) I thought I’d do a more condensed version. Three films, 200 words a piece. Here we go.
Snow White And The Huntsman was a pleasant surprise. It embraced the darkness at the heart of the tale, rolling in elements of Countess Dracula and, in the icky relationship between the Queen and her brother, Game Of Thrones. Kirsten Thomas brought a determination and toughness to the role of Snow White, and I bought her as a warrior princess. But this show belongs to Charlize Theron, who takes an iconic villain and gives her a touch of vulnerability and motivation. The whole shebang rolls along pleasingly, looks great and is never boring.
Prometheus made me angry. It strives to answer all the big questions and please an entrenched fanbase and fails dismally on both levels. Bulging with plot holes and fubars, and full of unsympathetic characters doing unbelievable things, it’s a Faberge egg of a film. Gorgeous to look at (and so it should be, helmed by one of the industry’s prime visual stylists), but hollow on the inside. Ridley Scott seems to think there’s another two films in the franchise. I’d rather he got this one right.
Meanwhile, Wes Anderson gets everything right in his latest, Moonrise Kingdom. An exquisite little puzzle-box, the film considers the joys and heartbreak of first love in his typically idiosyncratic way. Anderson is at his best when he’s in full control of the environment, and his New England island setting seems to have sprung fully-formed from his brow. Some will find the deadpan delivery and arch, precise camerawork (Anderson loves his grids almost as much as Kubrick) irritating. I loved every minute of it.
There you have it. It’s surprisingly difficult writing to tight wordcount. I hope I chose the right ones, and got them in (approximately, at least) the right order.
June 6, 2012
A Ray Of Light As Night Falls
It’s the first week of June, but it feels more like autumn. The wind hushes through the trees, and they bow and rustle, whispering secrets if you have the language to understand them. I walk home along the road with the cemetary at the bottom, and all I can think is: how appropriate.
Ray Bradbury died today, and Hallowe’en was always his season. Its early arrival is an omen that could have come straight out of the pages of one of his books.
He was a young adult writer well before that phrase become commodified. He wrote for people on the cusp; kids becoming adults, adults on the threshold of old age, at the point where they can become kids again. Temporal borderlands. Emotional frontiers. He wrote science fiction where the science didn’t matter, horror where the scares were secondary. His work looked backwards to an imaginary past, and forwards to a future where the most awful part was the forgetting of all that we had learned.
I discovered him in a second-hand bookshop in Woodford, Essex, a place of which I hope he would have approved. I remember it as a place of many rooms, a labyrinth, a time sink, the place where, after a couple of bags of Wine and American Hard Gums and that week’s 2000AD, all my pocket money vanished like fog in dry air. I haunted that shop, a wide-eyed, scrawny phantom, a little lonely, a little lost, a little empty, and his stories filled me. I gulped them down like dandelion wine, thirsty for something I didn’t yet have the words to express.
He, along with Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock and others are partially to blame for the writer and the man that I have become. Because of them, I know to look out for the strangeness and magic in the changes of the seasons, for the humour in the worst and blackest of moments, for the bright spot in sorrow. Is it right and correct that Ray should pass the day after the Transit Of Venus, the moment when his rain-world did its best to blot out the sun? I think so. I like to see him with hand outstretched, a magnifying glass held high, projecting the image of it onto his palm. The fire and the rain, caught together in a shining instant. A world in his hand.
Ray Bradbury was 91. If you haven’t read him, I recommend finding something of his in your local second-hand bookshop. Try Farenheit 451. Or Something Wicked This Way Comes. Or The Martian Chronicles. Or The Machineries Of Joy. Or The Golden Apples Of The Sun. Or The Toynbee Convector. Or…
