Conferences are tricky. Here's a counter-example. We went to MYGOSSCON (Malaysian Government Open Source Software Convention) and nailed it. Walked away with

Conferences are tricky. Here's a counter-example. We went to MYGOSSCON (Malaysian Government Open Source Software Convention) and nailed it. Walked away with about 32 business cards, many were interesting, two solid leads (one turned into a sale), and a great deal of confidence that we were pushing for a great market. Gave away 50 business cards. This was despite the fact that we had an extremely simple booth (two banners, nothing on the walls, a desk and some marketing material). But you don't just go to a convention or conference and expect to succeed. There is little in the way of prizes for just showing up. You have to put in legwork and you have to think through and plan your presence. The first thing we recognized was that we had no real way to draw people to our booth with our main product (LedgerSMB). Nobody was going to come by and see what we could offer. So we decided to reinvent ourselves a bit and turn the tables a bit-- our primary exhibit was PostgreSQL (since PostgreSQL as an org wasn't going to be there and generally when PostgreSQL is going to be at a conference, we have tended to volunteer at their booth, so the arrangement wasn't unusual except that we paid for the booth) and our secondary one was LedgerSMB. We knew it was government-centric so we planned our marketing materials to be government-centric, including a case study of the use of PostgreSQL at CNAF in the French Government. We gave away probably 100 of those. Once folks came in to talk with us about databases we'd also talk about accounting and ERP software. While others (Hitachi) were offering a raffle for a free iPad, we got folks to come by, simply offering them something that was interesting to them, and being able to talk about it. Also we blogged about our presence in advance, and gave a report after, ensuring that people would know that we were there. The moral of the story is this: with conferences what you get out depends a lot on what you put in. Time and attention to detail goes a long way towards success.