ExpoGlobus.com

Bill Gates is said to have given the following forecast: by 2018, there will only be two kinds of companies — those on the Internet and the out of business ones. It is unknown whether the founder of Microsoft also meant virtual fairs, or whether he was just talking about normal websites. Quite possibly he didn’t even utter such words. Only one thing is certain: the phrase “virtual fairs” came into fashion in the middle of the current decade. Some optimists assumed that in the near future virtuality would be able to replace traditional ways of promoting business, namely trade fairs. The optimists were wrong.

The earth shall rise on new foundations…

In recent years, the number of visitors and exhibitors at traditional trade fairs has steadily declined. The organizers have had to lament their losses. On the other hand, a great deal of fuss was made about Web 2.0 with its interactive opportunities for global communication. Social networks, blogs, VoIP phones, YouTube and other direct and spin-off products of the new development stage of WWW progressed at full speed. And so did the number of users. Under these conditions, organizers of traditional fairs, as well as those who wanted to make money from the new trend, saw in virtual fairs an opportunity to offer the business world an innovative product based on advanced technologies.

Virtual fairs began to spring up all over the place: universal, sector-related, regional fairs, in America, in Europe, in the CIS states… Of course, online fairs had several advantages over conventional ones. The most important one is cost saving: you don’t need to send your staff to distant countries or spend money on delivering exhibits to fairs. A virtual stand operates 24/7, 365 days a year, whereas a real one has time limitations. Finally, the Internet enables you to get information about the visitors to your stand and to take this into account (length of visit, products of interest etc.) in order to use it for marketing purposes.

Unfortunately, the first five years of experimenting have given rise to a rather negative result. Why?

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch…

The biggest disadvantage of virtual fairs in their current state is the impossibility of fully-fledged communication between the seller and the potential customer. Personal contact is very important in business, as is the opportunity to “feel” the product. Besides that, an informal conversation in the evening, after the fair has already closed, often turns out to be of more importance in making a business decision than visiting exhibition halls. A virtual stand just cannot offer anything like this.

The next drawback: the overwhelming majority of virtual presentations turn out to be simply a collection of links to company websites. And while web fairs were at first regarded as a competitive threat by organizers of traditional fairs, they now significantly enhance their range of online services. The majority of entrepreneurs now consider virtual fairs to be more an addition than an alternative to traditional ways of promoting products.

The companies most interested in virtual presentations are small and medium-sized enterprises. These companies often can’t afford to take part in traditional fairs. In Russia, for example, you can buy a virtual stand or acquire the right to place your address in an online catalog for 100 to 200 Euros a year. Yet one should not expect a breakthrough from such services. Rather, it is comparable to buying a line in the Yellow Pages. And what about the much acclaimed Web 2.0? Users don’t upload any special content — interactivity is practically zero.

Matrix: reloaded

The high interest shown in virtual fairs has recently declined due to a lack of feedback. By way of example, the German website Shall-Virtuell.de comprises a mere 15 industries, and big companies such as Epson and Adobe Systems are only represented by their addresses, not their products. Only nine companies have so far registered on virtuellemesse.com, which in its present form has existed since 2002. On the web portal virtuelle-branchenmesse.de, which offers all kinds of services for developing virtual stands, the “freshest” news goes back to 2006.

And how are things going in Russia? The largest virtual fair www.rushambler.com was created by the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2005, whereas Germany, Russia’s second most important trading partner after China, is only represented here by seven companies. As we were told by the Moscow representation of one of them, Alligno Maschinenbau GmgH, which delivers equipment for the Russian timber industry, its virtual stand has not led to a single contract being concluded with customers so far. And how about Russia’s biggest trading partner? It’s the same story. Only seven Chinese companies have opened virtual stands on this portal.

Fair business stands at the crossroads — the importance of the Internet is obvious to everyone, but not everyone has learned to use all its potential capacities. The main mistake is that creators of virtual fairs try to copy the real world, without taking into account that the virtual world develops according to different rules. This is the reason why business-related social networks such as linkedin.com (where, by the way, Bill Gates himself registered last year) or xing.com have become much more successful. But those are communication environments, not fairs.

We have to “reload” the concept of virtual fairs, which are intended to play an auxiliary role in the trade fair industry, both for organizers and business representatives.