At the 2009 Frankfurter Buchmesse, trade visitors at Hall 3’s ‘Digital Welt’ PC workstations. Image: FBM, Alexander Heimann
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Oestreicher: ‘Always in Our DNA’
Organizers at Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20) say they’re putting together a new online offering called “Frankfurt Connect” to make more of the trade show’s B2B services and features digitally available year-round. One contact refers to it as “a LinkedIn for publishing” and stresses the social-medium potential of the development.
Ann-Kristin Oestreicher, a senior marketing manager for the company, says the name of the service reflects the central context of the show as a connections-maker, the facilitation of business acquaintances and meetings that the world’s largest international book-publishing industry show produces on the ground at Messe Frankfurt each year.
“That’s always been in our DNA,” Oestreicher says. “It’s the core of our business model. But now we’re developing this more extensively. We’ll be bringing what makes our trade fair unique into the digital space during the days of the fair and beyond October to the rest of the year.
“With Frankfurt Connect, we’ll enable chance encounters that our customers are familiar with from their everyday trade fair experience,” she says, “and we’ll be taking those encounters to the next digital level. With ‘Badge Scan,’ we’ll be able to scan a new contact’s book fair pass,” for example.
Ann-Kristin Oestreicher
“Using the Frankfurt Connect app, exhibitors will be able to receive further information about that new contact,” which might lead, of course, to a personalized partnership going forward.
Not unlike the now-familiar capabilities of the digital Frankfurt Rights program, Frankfurt Connect is also expected to enable the uploading of marketing materials about a new
contact’s company. The system is also outlooked to allow for appointments to be made, either on-site or in video calls.
An events calendar is to be part of the offering, of course, Oestreicher says—going well beyond, of course, the 3,000 or more events that transpire during Frankfurt Week itself. Such scheduling information will encompass not only the main fair’s activities but Frankfurt’s international outreach programming in venues from Mexico City to Jakarta.
Full functionality is expected to be available both on the platform’s site and its mobile app.
As is customary in rollouts of such programs, the team behind Frankfurt Connect, Oestreicher says, plans to see its initial activation as a kind of soft launch with updates and upgrades following, based on user interaction and reaction.
“We already have a good platform in place for our customers for the trade fair days in October,” Oestreicher says, “but that won’t be the final version. We’re working on other services in parallel and will release them after the fair, taking feedback from our users directly after the launch and using that input to further develop the functionalities. We’ll be working on Frankfurt Connect using the ‘agile’ working method in interdisciplinary teams.”
‘Beyond the Week of the Fair’
Using computers at Frankfurter Buchmesse, 2010. Image: FBM, Peter Hirth
Needless to say, many organizations, companies, and initiatives today carry with them lessons learned and opportunities discovered during the pandemic’s flight-to-the-ether.
Frankfurter Buchmesse’s experience in producing digital programming during the coronavirus COVID-19 emergency still informs the now-hybrid Frankfurt Rights Meeting, which is operated in a series of online events that culminate “in real life,” as we once said often, in a reception at Frankfurt am Main.
As Oestreicher puts it, the goal of the Frankfurt Connect development is to provide a centralized arena that capitalizes, as many such commercial and nonprofit facilities do, on the networking and cooperative elements of the physical fair experience.
“People from the industry will come together there” on Frankfurt Connect “to work on joint projects,” she says, “and we’ll see a publishing community that revitalizes our industry well beyond the week of the fair.”
Publishing Perspectives understands that more detailed information about Frankfurt Connect should be available in June.
At the 2012 StoryDrive Conference in Hall 4 at Frankfurter Buchmesse with, from left, Kritine Fratz, Gregor Sedlag, and Andreas Wichmann. Image: FBM: Bernd Hartung
More from Publishing Perspectives on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on trade shows and book fairs in world publishing is here, and more on publishing and digital constructs is here.
About the Author
