Setting up booths, shipping materials to a trade show site and trying to engage conventioneers to get them interested in your products may soon be a thing of the past.

Last week I shared my experience at the eComXpo (www.ecomxpo.com) said Larry Tyler of Total Advertising Marketing Solutions (www.tamslv.com). "And we're making sales to the leads. I have been to a lot of trade shows, and never walked away with 900 leads."

Tyler's company specializes in wholesaling customer incentive packages to online players such as Vonage and America Online. His products include a wide range of vacation trips from Get Up And Go (www.getupandgo.com).

Setting up booths, shipping materials to a trade show site and trying to engage conventioneers to get them interested in your products may soon be a thing of the past.

Last week I shared my experience at the eComXpo (www.ecomxpo.com) virtual trade show. This week I'll give you the perspective from a convention exhibitor, who is even more pleased with the results.

"I had a booth called Sales Incentives, and would you believe that we collected 900 qualified leads?" said Larry Tyler of Total Advertising Marketing Solutions (www.tamslv.com). "And we're making sales to the leads. I have been to a lot of trade shows, and never walked away with 900 leads."

Tyler's company specializes in wholesaling customer incentive packages to online players such as Vonage and America Online. His products include a wide range of vacation trips from Get Up And Go (www.getupandgo.com) and movie tickets from Fandango, used as customer rewards.

Tyler also did the marketing for the eComXpo, which attracted more than 7,000 online attendees.

"This was the fourth eComXpo we did. They keep getting better and better," he said. "As I have been following up on the leads, the people I talk to are so nice. It's funny, When I do a regular trade show people run from you. They don't even want to come your way.

"You can go to bathroom and when you come back you don't know who has been to your booth, and they take all your stuff."

That's not the case with the virtual trade show, as exhibitors have access to the contact information of every booth visitor along with the number of visits and total time spent exploring the contents of the virtual booth.

"Out of the 902 visitors, I picked out 75 companies that were in the booth 10 minutes or longer. We had one guy visit the booth 12 times," these are the people we'll be calling," he said.

Virtual conventions aren't for everyone, Tyler said, but for a business like his that specializes in eCommerce, they are ideal.

"The key thing in order for this type of trade show to work is you have to have a product with an online delivery system and you have get clients.

"We're not trying to replace the regular conventions. We think there's a place for them. But to make it more economical, the virtual conventions will increase the attendee rate," Tyler said. "At the end of the day you're not spending all that money to set up the booth and get there."

The virtual wave is spreading, as the VNU Business Media Incentive Show, usually held at the Javits Center in New York, is going virtual in 2007.

"Our research shows that buyers have limited time to attend trade shows, and we now have the capability to bring the trade show to their desks," said Jackie Augustine, group publisher.

Share your Internet story with me at agibes@reviewjournal.com.