NBAA 2011 Online Coverage October 19, 2011

A week ago today, the2011 edition of the annual NBAA convention came to an end in Las Vegas. Although the show was a great success “by every yardstick” with over 26000 registered attendees, many business aviation professionals also rely on online coverage to figure out what are the industry trends. So, as I have done in previous years, here is my take on how the show fared on the internet.

News Outlet Coverage

As always the main aviation news outlet were out in force to cover the show. There were no less than 4 production rooms at the convention center where teams from Aviation International News, Aviation Week, Flight Global and NBAA relayed important information online. The content numbers were impressive:

First of all, it was interesting see how NBAA stepped up in its own news coverage of the show with a team of freelance journalists and photographers. They produced quality material throughout the show and took advantage of their website and social media to distribute their content (some of it exclusive). Their website is a bit poor in potential interaction, but in my opinion, they did a better job than AviationWeek. AvWeek’s team continues to disappoint with the least amount of innovation, the smallest online content output and their ill-timed decision to part ways with their star reporter Benet Wilson (@AvQueenBenet) right before the show (although she did a very professional job covering the event for them from Washington).

For innovation, you had to look at AIN and Flight which both released a new version of their websites in time for NBAA. Both companies have recently invested heavily to upgrade their content management capabilities behind the scenes, which will allow them to grow the usability and features they can provide their online readers. At Flight, the changes were both cosmetic and premium user focused. It resulted in a redesign of the navigation features and (at last) in the introduction of a good comment function. As huge as these changes were internally, they left me and many other users underwhelmed by the new website. It is “OK”. I am sure the PRO users will get more for their money, but I did not get a chance to review that part of the site. For AIN however, the change in internal content management provided some much needed improvement to their old website. Because they switched to open platform Drupal, they were able to immediately take advantage of off-the-shelf widgets for twitter, Facebook and trending (showing the most popular article). It is definitely the most improved website of the four I reviewed and I really liked it. Because AIN continued to provide the most extensive content, in a well-designed new website, I think for the first time in my reviews, they have actually edged Flight Global for “best in show” (by the slimmest of margins).

With that said, all these news organizations continue to ignore the iPad as an important delivery platform at the show and off the show. These devices were everywhere in Vegas, and must be included in the content delivery plans of many aviation companies. Testing all websites for iPad compatibility is now a must. None of the four sites’ videos could be accessed directly (other than by jumping to the YouTube app). Furthermore, the daily magazines, available online on each respective websites, were not viewable on the iPad. And even though Flight Global and AIN have iPhone apps that work on iPad, but they have not been upgraded to take advantage of the content features of their new websites, nor do they feature conference specific filtering.

Social Media

Twitter was once again very active with over 2700 posts in the #NBAA11 during the show. The statistics from the archive show a healthy proportion of original content versus retweets as well as a crossover of users. Compared to last year the numbers are similar, but businesses were more directly involved with good interaction. A lot of companies took the opportunity to jump in for the first time, unfortunately most of them simply tweeted “Come see us at booth CXXXX”. Hopefully they have learned something by watching the event stream, joining others at the NBAA sponsored Tweet-up, or reading my advice (shameless plug!).

Amongst the companies most active in Social Media, Duncan Aviation continues to show exemplary behavior. They have been active on Twitter (@DuncanAviation) before and during the show, posted multiple blog entries, and deployed a show specific landing page that increased interactivity online as well as at the booth.

The Future

Technology continues to play a growing role in the world of aviation exhibitions. As mentioned before, the iPad was omnipresent both in delivering solutions, in marketing products and services, but also as an effective tool for attendees. The superior NBAA mobile app was also an interesting step towards changes that are upon us. For future shows, I think that the world of online and on site are headed for convergence with much activity taking place before the show online, while the actual onsite presence will become more efficient but will be shared online with others at the show and watching from afar.

Do you have any thoughts about NBAA or the future of this kind of show? Is there anything I missed online? Let me know what you think.