The fifth Gadget Show Live pulled in 79,775 attendees last week, leading Upper Street Events to hail the show, held at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC), a major success.

Gadget Show Live took place across six halls at the NEC last week (2-7 April 2013). 241 companies exhibited over the six days – one trade and five public. VIP packages and Saturday and Sunday tickets sold out in advance.

“Our fifth Gadget Show Live has been a fantastic success for both exhibitors and visitors,” commented Sally Bent, event manager. “We’re thrilled with visitor figures, which were exactly on target following our decision to limit daily numbers to improve visitors’ experience and overall enjoyment of the show. The best news is that this had no impact on retailing, which remained high for our exhibitors.”

As part of the show returning features were refreshed and as popular as ever, with crowds flocking to see video games stars Ali-A and KSI on the Game Zone Stage. Sessions in The HUB, Showcase Stage, Toy Arena and Photographic Stage were jam-packed.

The products featured in the Future Tech Zone were a massive draw to visitors and media – the demonstrations of the Jetovator and Flyboard on the NEC lake proved hugely popular.

The Super Theatre, featuring Gadget Show presenters Jason Bradbury, Pollyanna Woodward and Jon Bentley, was as busy as ever with the majority of sessions selling out. The new Gadget Show presenter – Rachel Riley – made her debut on the Super Theatre stage on Saturday.

Consumers also flocked to the show’s new features: Battlefield Live and the Toy Arena.

Battlefield Live posted a message on Facebook straight after the show: “Thank you to everyone who visited and played on the Battlefield Live and Kids Laser Tag attraction – we really enjoyed entertaining you all.”

Hosted by Toylogy.tv’s Peter Jenkinson, the Toy Arena allowed 4,000 children to get hands on with a wide range of toys.

Bhav Patel of the show’ exclusive toy retailer ToyGalaxy, said: “What an amazing show, sales were way above expectations and we were able to build our brand, too.

Simon Pilkington, managing director for new exhibitor John Adams, commented: “Launching HolograFX at Gadget Show Live has projected the company into the growing entertainment toy sector, by embracing new technologies and opening new doors at retail in this developing market. We have already signed up for Gadget Show Live Christmas in London.”

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This article has been written by Chris Heffer and follows on my from another of her posts about how an event organiser can use social media to enhance their event.

Chris thought that she would give the other side of the story and help people who attend conferences, to get the most out of them using twitter.

Twitter is a great tool to use at an event. If used successfully it can help to increase your personal brand and indirectly, promote what you do.

Be sure to follow the event hashtag while the people are speaking, if you can. You can retweet any  good tweets from other people also listening to the speaker.

How to increase your visibility at the event

One of the things I usually do to increase my visibility at events is to tweet some of the key facts or ideas from the speakers.  Tweet about the ideas, concepts and facts that people will want to retweet because it is interesting, insightful or useful. A lot of people can’t be bothered to tweet but it’s easy to retweet.

Example tweet

The format I generally use for this kind of thing is below. I usually copy and paste the start and the end of the message, then add the insight in the middle. See the example below

.@speaker-twitter-name says (insert your message) #event-hashtag

Be sure to put the full stop at the start if you use the @mention. If you don’t do this, it will limit the number of people who see the message. See this Twitter’s support page for more information about why.

If you do this, you will get people who are following the hashtag retweeting you and often the speakers will retweet you as well when they finish their presentation.

Do not forgot to tweet pictures

I often tweet pictures of the event and @mention people in the pictures if they are on stage.  Almost always get people retweeting it.

Continue on after the event

After the event I usually write a crowd sourced blog post with all the key information from the event.

Crowd sourced summary of #SBSS12 in 60 tweets!

Crowd sourced summary of #SBS2012 in 63 tweets!

Crowd sourced summary of #CSMB2B in 42 tweets!

I then tweet the blog out and @mention people who I have quoted and most people retweet it. For one of these articles, I was retweeted to over 90,000 people within 1 hour. This resulted in a spike in traffic to my blog.

Your turn

How have you used to twitter or any other social network to promote yourself at a conference? Do you think twitter can help enhance the experience or distract people from the content? What tips have I missed that could help you use twitter at an event?

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