Vendors attend trade shows to hawk their products. They pitch to the attendees but attendees seem to be dwindling over the years. For the ones who do show, it seems to take more little toys, t-shirts, Ipods, etc. to attract them and keep them at the booth. Most booths contain solitary, lonely looking figures. It's sad.
One adaptation shown by some vendors has been to lure the wandering press. They know that pitching to the press gets you way more bang for the buck. Get a story into a magazine, or these days a website, and you may have magnified your efforts a thousand fold.
But within the CAD, CAM and CAE industry, venues for editorial coverage in print have shrunk. Some magazines have gone away. Penton folded CAE magazine in 2001. Canada's CAD Systems stopped publishing in 2002. My old magazine, CADENCE -- once the largest CAD publication in the world -- was subsumed by Cadalyst in 2003. Computer Graphics World is still around but it stopped covering CAD years ago. Even magazines that survive have gotten thinner and thinner.
Several factors may have contributed. In a business that is advertising supported, there may not have been enough advertising to support all the magazines. However, from my point of view, the demise in print in due far more to the rise of the Internet. Most people find their information nowadays on the Web. In fact, I will more likely look for an article on the web even if the print magazine which contains the article is in a pile on my desk. Call it the Google effect. More importantly, for every magazine that went down, several other sources of information have spring up. As proof, I cite our CADdigest Weekly newsletter which last week listed 92 CAD, CAM and CAE articles. That is more than the monthly total of all the CAD magazines even when CAD magazines were in their heyday.
So for all the product managers and marketing personnel bemoaning that no one will review their product, take heart. There are more sources now than ever. It's just that the game has changed. Life may have gotten a little harder. You now also have to deal with message boards and blogs, whose authors often hide their identities.
Next, I'll explore how one company has used blogs to great effect.
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