A Night of Business and Technology

      The Business & Technology Expo

April 19, 2011

    Well I guess I will just jump right in with this one.  Jonathan and I were put in charge of creating, decorating and manning the civic center booth this year at the business and technology expo. This was a challenging task seeing as I had never even seen a biz & tech expo before.  Obviously I wanted to impress the staff and any spectators aka GM’s and directors that would walk by our booth, so I racked my brain trying to think of some unique ideas.  I’m not going to necessarily admit that I lost sleep over this…buuuut I DID! 

    I decided that I would keep things simple so I just found items around our building and in the marketing closet to build the display.  As you can see there are four rather large banners.  These banners are to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Roanoke Civic Center.  Each banner has a list of every artist that came to the RCC for each year of that decade.  They are actually really sweet.  Along with the banners I made a powerpoint presentation, set on a continuous loop, which showed some of our upcoming events like WWE, Cirque Du Soleil “Alegria, and Max and Ruby.   After 4 hours I’m pretty positive I can recite those tv spots word for word. So…I’ve got that going for me. We also had a register to win box that guests signed so they could be in the running to win tickets to either WWE or Cirque du Soleil “Alegria”.  The rest of the table was filled with “Stuff We All Get”, which was a bunch of pens, pencils, flyers and these really cool post-it booklets that just happened to arrive in the mail about an hour before the start of the expo.  All in all I feel like everyone was pleased with the design and just the overall positive vibe of our table.  

   The scene at the Expo was real laid back.  Jonathan and I were able to meet a bunch of interesting people.  We definitely had our share of unique conversations.  I was real happy with how nice and what great moods everyone was in.  Then to my surprise I saw Ovations Catering Service bust through the door with carts and carts of Hors d’œuvres, and slowly trailing behind that cart was the bar.  I would say that this was the point when the party really got started.  Luckily for me, people were distracted by the alcohol line so I was able to high tail it to the meatballs. I must say, Ovations knows how to cook a meatball.  Once the wine and beer started flowing Jonathan and I were really able to have some fun conversations with all the business exec’s circling our booth. 

    I think that whether you are a vendor or just someone looking for a place to network, these events are great that every professional should experience.  This was my first one and I can say that I will be at next year’s.  For those of you that are interested, Smith Mountain Lake is having a biz & tech expo this week (Friday, April 29,2011 @ 11am).  Send me a comment if you need some more information about it.  This should be a really great time.

 

(A vendor literally handing out screwdrivers in a cocktail glass)