These photos were taken at the Long Beach/Seal Beach Chocolate Blues and Business Networking Festival; which was held at the Seaport Marina Hotel on June 27. As the name suggests, there was a lot of chocolate there. There was no “Blues” and there was some business networking. I have to be honest; I am not really sure what the target demographic was. While we had been invited to run the “Blogger’s Circle” which was to answer questions people had on how to improve their business and generate income and traffic through blogging the only person that came up had one question, “what is a blog?” I am not convinced she understood even after it was explained to her.
The vendors that had booths appeared to be primarily involved in multi-level marketing (MLM) although there was a business networking group or two along with some insurance agents. Most of the attendees that we spoke to were either unemployed or MLMers that said they only used word of mouth as their business model. Although the event was six hours long, I would be surprised if the number of total attendees surpassed the number of vendors. Perhaps it was due to it being the first Chocolate Blues event to be held in the area or maybe it was the venue but the number of attendees was not very impressive. We gave away free SEO reports to any vendor there, but I suspect there were only a few that even understood what SEO was much less what to do with the report.
As I have done the trade show circuit for 10+ years I have learned to not count my chickens before they are hatched, so only time will tell if the connections we did make turn into anything. There were a few that did appreciate that relying on the Yellow Pages might have worked 15 years ago but it will not fly today; so we shall see. Would I come again if given the opportunity? Probably, but I think more time would have to be spent researching what the true demographic of this marketing event is.
Any vendors that see their photo here and would like to be tagged with your name and company name, please Like my Facebook page and send me a message. I will get it up for you.
