Network World did a good job getting people in, especially since it was about negative 20 degrees out with the considerable wind-chill. The exhibit hall of about fifty vendors was bustling, and Dan and I spoke with easily two hundreds people from tire-kickers looking for free t-shirts to customers dropping by to say hello or ask a tech question, to network professionals who had heard Ennio's talk and wanted to learn more.

The validation came in two ways - first, so many customers dropped by, some to give kudos, some to give grief, but most just to say hi and ask about what's next - when's the new version coming out, any new products in the pipeline, stuff like that. We do in fact have a fan club. The second thing that was encouraging for a marketer was that so many people came by who were not customers - either not yet customers, or people who had been customers at prior jobs or even some who had evaluated our products but went with other solutions. Awareness does work, and it does generate goodwill that might not pay off right away or in any traceable manner.

Maybe you read Roger's post a month or so ago about the WhatsUp Gold name. Well, that was definitely shown by the traffic and the comments we had with our big green "WhatsUp Gold" sign. In fact, we recently opened up a new site at www.whatsupgold.com to try out some new ideas in Web marketing that we've been kicking around.

I said that I was going to talk more about Ennio's presentation at Network World, but I've decided that I'm going to leave that to him in his next Daily Network Monitor post, but to when your appetite and pique your curiosity, I will reveal that the title was, "Using Vulcan Logic to Navigate the Network of Change." Stay tuned...