Marketplace

There are a lot of industry folks blogging, tweeting and posting messages on Facebook. Here’s part of an interesting post from Charlie Hall, the Ellison Chair in International Floriculture at Texas A&M. Find his blog here: http://ellisonchair.tamu.edu.

Are face-to-face meetings the new dinosaurs?
With the announcement of the cancellation of the Southeast Color Connection (the meeting formerly known as the Southeast Greenhouse Conference), it begs the question of “What is the future of person-to-person meetings in our industry?” It seems the attendance at all green-industry meetings is either barely holding steady or declining.

So why is this happening? Is it purely economics and the cost of attending such meetings is simply too high of a hurdle for some firms?  Have person-to-person meetings outlived their usefulness in terms of generating sales and/or qualified leads (at trade shows) or disseminating pertinent and useful information (at educational events)? Has information technology (e.g. Google and other search engines; real-time and archived webcasts and webinars; websites, blogs and electronic magazines/newspapers; social media like Facebook & Twitter; etc.) replaced the need to meet face-to-face?

I think the answer is “all of the above” and more. The real question is what do we do about it? Or maybe the better question is should we do anything about it?  I mean, after all, I myself am guilty. I also relish the fact that webinars have become so popular because they save time and money for all involved. But even webinars are undergoing some structural changes. I have seen that attention spans drop off considerably after 37 minutes. Now that YouTube, Vimeo, etc., are on the scene, we now devour information in 3- to 5-minute chunks (which is about the same amount of time we spend reading the e-news blasts from industry media moguls as well). This all points to the trend of time becoming more scarce and alternative ways of getting information and establishing/maintaining relationships are getting more plentiful.

We’ve got exciting changes for our loyal NMPro readers.
With the new year, we promise to have better, more in-depth, and more multimedia coverage of the nursery industry than ever before.

Secondly, with the January issue you’ll see a complete redesign. We’re launching new regular features sure to engage readers and delivering content in a more vibrant fashion than we’ve done in the past.

People don’t read magazines like they used to. Our new layouts are designed to capture and keep their attention, delivering them the industry coverage they need. – Todd Davis, publisher.

Tell us what you think – tdavis@gie.net; krodda@gie.net.