Marketing to Engineers - Are Games the Play?

Came across B2Blog this morning.  Unlike many of the other marketing/biz blogs I link to, it appears the author of B2Blog is less concerned with the whiz-bang Web 2.0 stuff and more concerned on management basics, with an emphasis on using more common management applications.  In scanning previous posts, the blog's author attends and speaks at numerous events and often comments on them.

Having marketed engineering shows for Reed for many years, I found yesterday's post interesting - what do engineers respond to.  The post cites a Marketing Sherpa white paper on using games as honey to attract engineers to your site. 

It's a subject that I experienced back in the pre-web days.  At the National Design Engineering Show circa late-80s, we had an on-site contest where engineers would build model race cars out of parts we supplied.  There were time trials on a track that featured an overhang where the cars had to drive upside down.  We used to promote the heck out of it and award serious prize money. 

While we'd get a respectable amount of curious passers-by each year, at the end of the day, what we really had were a handful of hard-core engineers who it seemed never set foot on the exhibit floor or in the conference, spending all their time in Chicago trying to assemble the winning entry.  It was a lot of work for an uncertain payoff - there was no known benefit to either branding or attendance.  And the show stopped offering that competition several years back.

Times change.  In the online version that Sherpa mentions, some half a million engineers have played the game.  And its viral legs are being provided by bloggers, not by "email to a friend" (a tactic engineers typically loathe).

Still, while the site traffic picked up due to the games, the white paper doesn't indicate whether site use beyond the game increased and whether there were any tangible benefits beyond generating traffic to the game.

While doing a game sounds like a fun and engaging idea, I'd caution spending too much time on such a diversion unless you can first accurately measure the financial impact of employing such a tactic for your show.

The B2Blog post also mentions Bob Bly.  As three of Reed's cash cow events in 1990 were engineering-related, they hired Bob to speak in-house back then on copywriting to engineers.  As much as things have changed post-web, there is some comfort in knowing certain things don't change.

P.S. A couple of months ago B2Blog generated some interesting comments on a post about BDMetrics.  We'll be adding B2Blog to our feeds as it appears we're operating in a parallel universe.