Just returned from Las Vegas where our second launch just took place - The Forex Trading Expo. The conference is for foreign currency traders and it was a great success. I’m not sure what it is about the shows my company has produced, but almost always I’ve had to deal with security issues with both attendees and exhibitors. Perhaps it is because every trade show I’ve ever produced has been a hybrid event, where corporate attendees and “prosumers” attend sessions together. While anyone can register for the shows we produce, we only market to a very specific niche, i.e. podcasters or currency traders - never using general newspaper ads, billboards, etc. Although technically open to the public, we run them like true B2B tradeshows. Everyone is badged and demographic information is collected.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to security issues because of my law enforcement background (I was LAPD for seven years before starting my company and I am still an LAPD Reserve Officer, working the streets several times a month to remain a police officer in the State of California).

At the first tradeshow I ever produced (in 1999), I had to hire friends to work undercover on the show floor because one of our exhibiting company CEOs had been receiving death threats from a former employee who they feared would register under a false name. The show after that, I had to have security toss a man who threw a stack of directories at a temp working the registration desk and threatened to beat her up. At the event after that, security called police when several young exhibitor staff members showed up at the doors of the exhibit hall at 2:00am after a night of drinking and demanded entrance to the hall to get into their booth where they could check their email. After threatening the security card, they tried to kick the door in. That was an especially fun call to get at 2:00am in my hotel room because the geniuses were employees of our platinum sponsor - both of whom where fired by their President at the doors of my exhibit hall at 3:00am.

At the event I just returned from, during the first morning keynote address, the speaker was talking about interest rates and Alan Greenspan. A woman near the back apparently found this aggravating and yelled, “Bullshit!” at the top of her lungs several times. After the speaker finished, she approached him and began screaming something about US government corruption (our speaker worked for the Bank of Montreal so not sure how she made the correlation other than being just plain crazy). She was getting closer and closer to our speaker who was obviously becoming very uncomfortable, until I stepped in and told her to leave immediately. She then ran (literally ran) out of the ballroom.

I don’t know if I’m just lucky, or if these types of things are standard fare at tradeshows. However, the Portable Media Expo was about as “public” a show as I’ve ever done and we didn’t have a single incident.

I’d love to hear your tradeshow “security issue” stories. Needless to say, my budget line item for security is one I’ll never be able to reduce….