More Event Cancellations + Something to Share with the Corporate Office

by Allan Rubin, Vice President, Marketing

First, here’s some news on continued government event cancellations. Word on the street is thatGFIRST 2013 will not take place this year “due to all of the budgetary/travel restrictions.” Scheduled from August 25 to 30, the Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) “is a group of technical and tactical practitioners from incident response and security response teams responsible for securing government information technology systems and providing private sector support.” There’s no official posting yet, but expect one soon. That’s too bad, as this has been a successful event for many of our clients in the past. Hopefully it will be again in the future.

Even Fredericksburg can’t escape the bloodbath. According to the event manager, “due to the severity of the fiscal climate within DoD and the associated policies that now govern and constrain professional events such as XC4, the 2013 Expeditionary C4 Users’ Conference scheduled to occur from August 6 to 8 at the Fredericksburg Expo and Convention Center in Fredericksburg, Virginia is cancelled.”

Mark Amtower asked me if I’m keeping a list of cancellations. Unfortunately I can’t type that fast.

On a brighter note, my last blog post covered the Top 10 Tips we’ve encountered at immixGroup as we’ve dealt with changes in the federal event marketing landscape. Our friends at Market Connections responded with a greatinfographic that summarizes the current government event landscape. Even though I added that to my last article after-the-fact, I thought it was useful enough to warrant a new post so it wouldn’t get missed.

Many of our clients share their concerns (OK, frustrations) that the “folks back at corporate” don’t always understand the inner workings of the federal government and the unique marketing challenges that come with it. It occurred to me that this is a great tool to share with them. In a minute or less you can communicate some of the issues you have to deal with as you plan your government marketing strategies, budgets, media spend, and more.

So here it is:

In fact, we’ve heard from many clients that they use our Government Sales Insider blog, our Public Sector Business Alert newsletter, and our market intelligence briefings to help keep corporate up to date on information that affects their federal sales and marketing plans (and, yes, budgets). I hope you’re taking advantage of these free resources to do the same.