Visiting the IITF2011- first impressions

I visited the IITF after many years: eight to be precise and I thought of listing my thoughts and impressions of IITF2011, especially what has changed in the interim.

Who is this trade-fair IITF 2011 for?

We walked through hall after hall, moved from one stall to another and my overwhelming impressions were:

1. The IITF 2011 is no longer aimed at the business visitor- not overtly like it used to be when I used to participate.

In those times we used to look forward in dread to the general public days- where you would be shouting at the top of your voice to make yourself hard- and yet not make any sense. Your “target audience” would be muscled out by aunties and uncles, with babies in arms in many cases.

The information maturity model

I have always advocated a consultative and collaborative approach internally as the best approach for CRM adoption. As the CRM processes mature and confidence in and familiarity with the tool grows, you can consider adding more functionality and more importantly collect more information using the tool.

Whistling in the wind?

It is customers and not your product, per se that will create your product, get it adopted, have it talked about.
It was brought home to me personally, rather forcefully as I watched the relative successes of two of my recent posts on my personal blog.

The first one, an account of a recent trip back to my engineering college, IT-BHU, went viral on Facebook and LinkedIn. It had 410 FB likes and 10 LI shares. It had 70 comments on the blog, triggered discussions on FB and LinkedIn groups. Even today, it pulls in tonnes of visitors. As someone, who blogs infrequently and writes on no particular topic in general, this was huge. On a few days, the visitor count was more than 500.

Interacting with budding entrepreneurs in ITBHU

I was in my alma mater, the Institute of Technology, BHU a few days back. They have recently mooted this great concept of Innoventure where students desirous of turning entrepreneurs get a chance to pitch their ideas to “more seasoned” entrepreneurs and VCs. The organisers were kind enough to call me to help judge the entries and jumping at this chance to go back to my campus, I said “yes”.