
Guerrilla Marketing: How Twitter Changed The Way We Will Approach Tradeshows - jack
I've been a long-time HN lurker, but we recently returned from a trade show experiment I thought I'd share with the rest of the small startups here: what happens when you drop the $20k booth, and pick up Twitter as the main marketing tool instead?<p>As startups, we're often forced to be ultra-conservative about where we spend our money. Last October my co-founder, Rian Gauvreau, and I launched Clio, a web-based practice management tool designed specifically for solos and small firm lawyers. We've been building buzz about it using word-of-mouth marketing, but wanted to step things up at a tradeshow and try to get the word out in the mainstream legal press and blogs.<p>The legal industry's biggest tradeshow, LegalTech New York, was the obvious place to do this - it just wrapped up yesterday. We wanted to attend the show and raise the visibility of Clio, which traditionally would be done by buying a booth, flying out 2-3 people to staff it up, buying some giveaways, etc. Renting the space for the booth alone would be $10k (just for a 10x10 booth), while buying a booth can easily be another $5-10k.<p>Looking at a $20k+ tab to have a booth at this show, we decided we should look at an alternative: just showing up at the conference with a laptop for demos, setting up meetings beforehand with e-mail, and leveraging Twitter to connect with existing and potential clients at the meeting (lawyers have a surprisingly vibrant presence on twitter - http://www.lextweet.com/).<p>The response? We spent 2 solid days answering DM's to set up meetings, even connected with giants in the field like Bob Ambrogi (@bobambrogi) via Twitter. It was easily the most positive and exciting tradeshow experience I've had, and we didn't spend a penny on the traditional booth, shwag and rental expenses. For any other HN startups out there: think twice before shelling out for an expensive booth to get the message out: you might be surprised at how effective Twitter can be as a marketing tool.<p>We blogged about this recently at http://www.goclio.com/blog/2009/02/05/ltny-wrap-up-how-twitter-changed-how-we-will-approach-tradeshows/. We're at http://twitter.com/goclio.<p>Would be interesting in hearing other experiences/opinions around tradeshows.
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tptacek
This is just awesome. Can you tell us more about how you engaged people on
Twitter? Did you spend a lot of time building a Twitter following before you
did this?

We've been doing guerilla stuff at conferences for a couple years now;
clearly, it's better to book a room somewhere and pay for a bar than it is to
buy a booth. But doing direct outreach with Twitter sounds even more
effective. And my target market is very much on Twitter.

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jack
We actually hadn't spent much time on Twitter prior to the show. Went in with
about 60 follows, and left with roughly double.

We found what worked best was making some informative posts on the hashtag for
the conference. In our case the conference hashtag was #LTNY.

We just requested that people DM us for a demo, etc., and the response was
phenominal!

You can see the amount of traffic, as well as some of our posts at:
<http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23LTNY>

