Three years ago, I came up with an idea to get a little more local exposure for us, and to also help out area chambers of commerce. The idea was to have a business-to-business (B2B) trade show, where businesses that sell to other businesses could mix and market. On March 5th, we held our third one. It went great!
Thanks to all of our customers, friends, and partners that attended the Third Annual Delaware Expo Trade Show. The weather was perfect yesterday and we had over 1,000 attendees at the show. The exact number was close to 1,200. Our show is now the largest business-to-business networking event in the state of Delaware, with over 120 exhibitors. We got a lot of positive feedback on the show, and some ideas that we will use to make the 2009 show even better.
I was interviewed by WHYY television from Wilmington, and there were also several newspapers that were present that did stories on the show. We landed a spot on the front page of today’s edition of the Delaware State News. We are waiting for the pictures to come back from the photographer, and once those are available we will put them on the web site.
This show was planned and executed entirely by the Delaware.Net staff. We also sold all of the booths using our new Store-Logic Ecommerce engine.
We gave some presentations on search engine optimization, blogging, and more. Here is a picture of me giving my presentation:
Here is Greg, our SEO guru giving his presentation:
One of the coolest surprises for us came when Monster Racing brought their new NASCAR race car to the show, complete with a Delaware.Net logo on the side of it. They will leave our logo on the car for the rest of this season, so in a way we have our own race car. 
We used a new thermal name badge printer this year from Zebra, and it really helped us get the name badges printed faster. We didn’t anticipate the number of walk-ins that we had, so for 2009 we will get a second Zebra printer so we can print them even faster. Those printers are like $600, but they really made registration faster. Special thanks to the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce for bringing additional badge holders when we ran low.
As usual, the staff at the Dover Downs Hotel and Casino did a superb job. We also used a new pipe and drape company called Diamond State Party Rentals. They did a great job as well.
Our team did a fantastic job pulling the show together.
