Let's Do Business - Eastbourne 2011

On Thursday 23rd June 2011, we made our annual pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens in Eastbourne for Let's do Business. It was our third year at the exhibition, it's always one of the highlights of the year.

In order to get the most out of a show like this, it's essential to make detailed plans, and then execute them. Our goal this year was to educate visitors to our stand on how using cloud technology can help businesses to save time, money and increase productivity. From this initial idea, grew the rest of the plan. After much discussion we decided that we needed the following:

• A striking background to the stand, to attract attention
• A minimalist stand, to encourage people to come and and talk to us, to see what we were offering
• Leaflets, for people to take away with them
• Some examples as to how our services can help businesses

Christian designed the background, and we sent it to Identity to be printed. The final result was fantastic, we were exceptionally pleased with how it came out. We're looking forward to it going up on the wall in our offices!

Christian also designed the cloud shaped leaflets, which Mark from Printstation printed for us, again, we were very happy with the finished product.

As a way of promoting the event, we embarked on a Twitter campaign to generate interest. We also create a Let's do Business hub on our website. We were particularly pleased with this hub as it included a Twitter feed that grabbed all tweets relating to Let's do Business, and automatically refreshed every two minutes.

So that was us ready for the show, we went over to set up on the Wednesday evening and struck a deal with Lorna from Borough Means Business that we could put our drinks and bags under her table, to enable us to preserve the minimalist approach on the table. Thanks Lorna!

We arrived on Thursday morning ready for action, with 5 of us there, the plan was to employ a rotation system on the stand to give everyone a chance to have a good look around the show. We wanted to get to know as many businesses as we could in the day, and of course enter as many competitions as we could (more on that later!).

Doors opened at 10:00, and by 11:00 it was starting to get very busy. Jonathan and the rest of the Let's do Business team had kindly allowed us to put our live stream of the day onto one of the screens, we were uploading pictures of the day, and the Twitter feed was going into overdrive!

At 11:30, Vanessa and Michael headed off to the social media seminar hosted by PRG, returning with some interesting points.

We continued to have a steady stream of visitors to the stand throughout the day, and have some good leads to follow up on. The visitors to our stand embraced our competition to think of a cloud pun. Here are some example puns:

• "You cannot be cirrus"
• "Keep you feet on the ground, and your head in the clouds"
• "The Turin Cloud"
• All good examples, but the winner is...
• "Two's company, three's a cloud"

The winning pun coming courtesy of Darren Hall from Moody Sewage.

It was a great day all round, in terms of business, and having a good time. Other highlights included:

Stephen Lloyd paying a visit to our stand

Larry and Serge surviving a kidnapping attempt by Kelly and Penny from Chalvington Communications

Our good luck from last year's show continuing as I won a bottle of wine, and Vanessa won £100 of high street vouchers for getting the highest roll of the dice on the Reid Briggs stand!

So, a great day, and we're already looking forward to next year.