Pivot Point In The Hobby , This May And June 2016 .

What I meant was that the outreach/promotion to media channels needs to be SOP. The attempt is what there needs to be more of; there's no guaranteeing the result. While the major national shows usually have a plan in place, many smaller shows/bourses do not. You'd be surprised at just how many regular/recurring shows have ZERO web presence at all, relying on word of mouth for publicity or sending fliers out to the same 80-year-olds that have been going for decades. That's a strategy doomed to failure in the long term.

There is no excuse for any show not having a web page. The costs are nominal and there are so many automated "build your web site in 20 minutes" tools that you no longer have to know HTML or CSS to create web pages.

Still, there are FAR too many "don't need no dang interwebz, it'll never catch on!" mindsets still out there...

For example, COMPEX, being held this weekend, is a large show in Chicagoland. Up until last year, the show had absolutely NO web presence at all. If you googled it nothing came up. Unless you knew who to call or you subscribed to Linn's, you would never even know there was a show. Utterly inexcusable for the last decade.

Representatives of shows/clubs should be making the rounds to philatelic message boards and posting about their upcoming shows. I post every year about COMPEX, CHICAGOPEX, and CUPEX (my local show), and I'm only formally a member of the last. That should be SOP for a show organizer. It's free advertising.

Too many collectors, and yes even dealers, shun the Internet, social media, and all new technology. One of my favorite dealers has no online presence of any kind, not even an email address. If I want to communicate, I have to pick up the phone or send him requests by snail mail. That business model cannot succeed long-term.

If I can't find something online, it might as well not even exist, as far as I'm concerned. I'm 46 and this thinking is probably even more pronounced among younger people.

For a major show not to have a website is inexcusable. In the IT business, where I make my living, they even have "virtual trade shows" for those that can't attend in person, offering 360-degree views of all the exhibits, ways to contact exhibitors (i.e. vendors) at the show, etc.

There's a ton of stuff you could do with a website for the show. For example, you could set up an email box where collectors could email a want list and an agent at the show could find dealers that have those items, put them all together and send them out, etc. Photos/scans of the exhibits would be another thing they could put on the site. To make this easier, supplying scans or photos of their exhibits could be made a condition of exhibiting. The seminars at the show could be available via webcast (for a fee, if need be) for remote users to participate. The live auctions could be streamed, etc. Only a small fraction of North American collectors are going to make it to the show in person, it would be a huge plus to the hobby if they could make the experience more accessible to those that can't actually be there.

Both Revenue and Artful bring up important points - particulaly about todays (younger) adults won't find you if you're not online.

From that perspective I project out, parallel to their non-stamp collecting environments, that somewhere there needs to be a version of online collecting. At least at the start.

Perhaps younger genrerations could be interested in filing away on their handhelds photos of stamps depicting someting they're interested in or that might impress them.

From that point, the next step is to ecnourage them to collect the real thing (the stamp) and others similar in interest.

Out of the box here - but Big 5 and Sports Authority could offer a small set of inexpensive stamps from around the world whose topic might be basketball, weight lifting, running, Olympics, renown sports figures, coaches, teams and so forth. The packet might encourage the sports enthusiast to screen save one from the set they particularly like for their phone or computer, or just keep photo copies on their phone.

Yeah - I know these are disjointed ideas, impractical in ways, costly, complex or labor intensive - but there needs to be some way to connect to the newer generations if our hobby expects to continue in any meaningful way.

My apologies for taking this thread out in a different direction.


Waazwi - IMHO
Your humble opinion may differ. Do not make more than two humble opinions a day. If your humble opinion always differs from everyone else's, please see your doctor. Results may vary.

Or, you could read & post to:

https://goscf.com/t/46963 ... Join Our Team to Promote Kids Stamping

https://goscf.com/t/46924 ... Could creative marketing concept click with KIDS?

https://goscf.com/t/39947 ... Five Reasons Why Your Kid Should Collect Stamps

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

This seems to be an extension that the current group running things do not consider the internet is essential. It is still mostly an after thought with modest incremental efforts and proud them (emailings, a facebook page).

It is more that you have to go to them rather than they coming to you. Shows are still aimed at certain active elements (dealers, exhibitors).

Al

I don't where people get these ideas. Advanced buyers, sellers and collectors are very much into the Internet space. I'm 72 and have had an email address for 35 years.

The exception that disproves the rule?

Seriously though, you are in the minority with respect to your age demographic. Just looking at my local club, there are quite a few older collectors that are either computer-illiterate or technology-phobic. More than a few shows are run by people that fit that description.

Email in 1981 ????? , only 100 persons have emails in 1981, you have to wait to 1989 to see email like we have today

Wrong. Email was FAR more widespread than that in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

When I started working, we used a host based system with email and instant messaging (1980) but you could only exchange with people in the company. They call it cloud computing today. It was done on IBM 3270 terminals running off IBM 360's - legendary hardware.

...er...both cloud storage a cloud computing take place at a site and location removed from users. In house remote locations became popular a number of years ago, and still is for the larger companies.

"Email" terminology came about after messages that were made available to employees on a separate server. You had to log into the server to retrieve and messages. External messaging eventually came about which was the start of what we call email today.

Was there, done that, and glad we progressed far far away from there. (and administrating and maintaining the monstrosity was pure hell!

Oh yikies, and I recall teething on the IBM 1130's, paper punch teletype, punch cards and paper tape.

And today we're all about what color our cell phone cases come in....

Did we sort of get away from the topic? Looks like a bunch of old geezers ( I am one of them ) remembering the good old days. Please. let us go back on track.

Peter

In the old days, the user workstation was called a "dumb terminal" because that's basically all it was - it was a display only for operations that were taking place somewhere else. PCs (and Macs) became popular because you could do so much more with them than you could with a mainframe and dumb terminals. Now we're coming full circle again with true cloud computing, although they call the terminals "thin clients" these days. The capabilities are a far cry from the dumb terminal days as today's thin clients run full featured desktop apps like MS Office, etc. The laptop versions of the thin clients basically are indistinguishable from regular laptops, and a user may not even know the difference if you didn't tell him. And administration is a snap. If you want everyone to have the newest version of Office, you just need to update the copy on the server and that's it.

The only inflection point the "blockbuster" philatelic auctions being held around WSE will show is whether the 1% economic elite in the West will use stamps as an "investment" to protect (hide?) their wealth in an age of increasing populistic politics that is turning against the continued socioeconomic and political dominance the economic elite had had over much of the West since the era of the Reagan-Thatcher "Revolutions" of the 1980s in the UK and USA launched the world down the merry path of neoliberal, supply-side based economic development.

My guess is that it won't, and those collectors at the top will bemoan the "death of philately" because of the lack of demand for high-end rarities in their collections. Won't really affect the vast majority of mainstream work-a-day collectors who have limited disposable incomes and see the hobby as just that, a hobby to enjoy and be educated by, not as a vehicle for asset protection.