Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a few tips on how to turn your tradeshow experience into a word of mouth marketing success.

When most B2B Marketers think of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing, they think of online/viral campaigns or customer referral programs. But, tradeshows can be the perfect setting for some of the best WOM marketing campaigns. Where else can you get so many people of like mind together in one place, short of Internet forums.

There’s nothing like a good stunt to get everyone at an event talking about your organization which contributes to both brand awareness and demand generation if you handle the lead capture and nurturing process appropriately. The guys over at GamePlan Marketing have been praised for their stroke of genius, “Operation Blueshock¸ a guerilla stunt that involved sending 150 male and 150 female models dressed to the nines onto the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show floor to talk up the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. For video of the stunt, visit http://www.gpexperience.com/work.php.

The results were staggering: on the day the models showed up at CES, the Bluetooth website had 18,500 hits– a 42-percent spike. In the post-show survey, 60 percent of respondents said they knew more about Bluetooth than just two days before.

So called “guerilla stunts” need not be one-hit wonders, however. A successful WOM event orchestrated by NetQoS has now become an increasingly successful yearly tradition. In an effort to catch the eye of Cisco and get a very target-rich environment to talk about the company, NetQoS marketers executed a WOM “stunt” at Cisco Networkers a couple of years ago. The company sent out invitations to an exclusive party at The MIX lounge in Vegas for an after-hours party starting at 11:00 pm. This generated a great deal of buzz on the show floor with attendees clamoring for an invite. Those lucky enough to attend were given shirts to wear the next day. This resulted in more than 200 NetQoS-clad advocates in sessions and on the show floor which helped to increase lead generation by 120% from the previous year. The next year, we expanded our presence further, booked the House of Blues and increased lead capture by more than 300%. We also gave out Flipcams to encourage attendees to spread the word via YouTube and the blogosphere.

How have you used WOM to improve your trade show experience?