s can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Ea

Trade shows and conferences are lively bazaars for competitive intelligence gathering, with less law and order than any Silk Road outpost. Venues are often selected for nightlife or posh location, giving attendees a sense of comfort and security; both false, of course. With caution down, expense accounts high, and everyone in deal heat, the environment is target-rich for "information transfer."

Professional intelligence collectors, usually the same people you deal with between shows, are trained, focused and dedicated to capturing as much useful information about your future plans as possible. Since the whole purpose of trade shows is to put information out, it is a rare exception that management has prepared employees for approaches by intelligence collectors. Yet the CEO will have a very tough time convincing a court or his board they did not put their plans and intellectual property in harm's way without preparation at least as thorough as what the opposition does.

And what are "they" doing? Here is how it happens.

You have been studied: If they did it right, the competitor's intelligence team, and their contract collectors, studied your company for as much as three months prior to a major event. Professional librarians scoured your Web site, speeches, presentations, and publications. They have interviewed your local business reporters and former employees identified from resume sites, blogs, and chats. They have built a detailed shopping list around your company for intelligence available only by direct contact with people who know you, or a look at your actual product on exhibit. The cost of this preparation is a pittance compared to what you have invested in a new product launch.

You have been tasked: Each person on the competition's trade show team is assigned specific items to work, people to meet(including your employees and customers,)exhibits to visit, panel sessions to attend and social events to drop in on. They will especially target your obvious first timers, engineers, technicians and administrative assistants. All have a different piece of your whole story to share. And share it they will, because trade shows are the place to talk about your company, aren’t they? What's more, if your secret plans can be derived from non-proprietary information, guess what. The plans can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Eac

s as possible. Since the whole purpose of trade shows is to put information out, it is a rare exception that management has prepared employees for approaches by intelligence collectors. Yet the CEO will have a very tough time convincing a court or his board they did not put their plans and intellectual property in harm's way without preparation at least as thorough as what the opposition does.

And what are "they" doing? Here is how it happens.

You have been studied: If they did it right, the competitor's intelligence team, and their contract collectors, studied your company for as much as three months prior to a major event. Professional librarians scoured your Web site, speeches, presentations, and publications. They have interviewed your local business reporters and former employees identified from resume sites, blogs, and chats. They have built a detailed shopping list around your company for intelligence available only by direct contact with people who know you, or a look at your actual product on exhibit. The cost of this preparation is a pittance compared to what you have invested in a new product launch.

You have been tasked: Each person on the competition's trade show team is assigned specific items to work, people to meet(including your employees and customers,)exhibits to visit, panel sessions to attend and social events to drop in on. They will especially target your obvious first timers, engineers, technicians and administrative assistants. All have a different piece of your whole story to share. And share it they will, because trade shows are the place to talk about your company, aren’t they? What's more, if your secret plans can be derived from non-proprietary information, guess what. The plans can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Ea

ied your company for as much as three months prior to a major event. Professional librarians scoured your Web site, speeches, presentations, and publications. They have interviewed your local business reporters and former employees identified from resume sites, blogs, and chats. They have built a detailed shopping list around your company for intelligence available only by direct contact with people who know you, or a look at your actual product on exhibit. The cost of this preparation is a pittance compared to what you have invested in a new product launch.

You have been tasked: Each person on the competition's trade show team is assigned specific items to work, people to meet(including your employees and customers,)exhibits to visit, panel sessions to attend and social events to drop in on. They will especially target your obvious first timers, engineers, technicians and administrative assistants. All have a different piece of your whole story to share. And share it they will, because trade shows are the place to talk about your company, aren’t they? What's more, if your secret plans can be derived from non-proprietary information, guess what. The plans can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Ea

ed: Each person on the competition's trade show team is assigned specific items to work, people to meet(including your employees and customers,)exhibits to visit, panel sessions to attend and social events to drop in on. They will especially target your obvious first timers, engineers, technicians and administrative assistants. All have a different piece of your whole story to share. And share it they will, because trade shows are the place to talk about your company, aren’t they? What's more, if your secret plans can be derived from non-proprietary information, guess what. The plans can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Ea

s can't be protected as secret.

You have been scouted. The intelligence team got to the venue a day ahead of you. They know which hotel your company stays at, where the bars and restaurants are, where your exhibit is, the room at the convention center where your officials will be holding a talk or press conference or meeting, and probably where your offsite activities are going to be. Competitor employees with former colleagues who went to work for you have been brought in to entertain their friends, and "catch up."

You have been sliced, diced and collated. Each evening after exhibits close the opposition's intelligence team meets in a hotel suite and discusses the days' information take. An onsite analyst is preparing the intelligence report in real time and re-tasks the collectors at tomorrow morning's pre-show meeting. Meanwhile, the whole works is being uploaded into the competitor's database about you. If all goes according to plan, your new initiatives, customer strategy, product vulnerabilities, value statements, morale, and internal politics are known by your competitor nearly as well as by those within your own walls.

And yet, your competitor's mission failed.

Every one of your employees at the show knew their script and stuck to it. They never once tried to show off how smart, how connected, or how influential they were. They qualified each visitor at the exhibit and only answered appropriate questions, referring any inquiries about restricted information to someone assigned to deal with such questions. When they were talking business with the right people, they were aware of their surroundings and who else might be listening. They only wore badges or logo clothing where required in order to be invisible elsewhere. They didn't use wireless networks or cell phones for business critical conversations. They even resisted the convenience of wireless microphones for that closed meeting. Hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars of research, development, production, planning and customer good will were preserved while you picked up the clues needed for your next strategy, the one that would force competitors into reaction mode again.