Oracle trade show gets suitcased

Fans of my suitcasing thread will be interested to know that I encountered a live example in the wild at the giant Oracle Open World show…. and even (unintentionally) participated in the hijinks.

I was collecting info for a post on Oracle’s use of social media when a gentleman handed me a flyer advertising a “social media meetup” which sounded like a great opportunity to get together with other social media gurus and talk about how Oracle does it. Little did I know he had a prison uniform under the poncho (it was raining hard) and was involved in an elaborate guerrilla marketing scheme for somebody called ActiveVOS.

Oracle, as mentioned in my other post (coming shortly), has a long reach and an iron grip when it comes to exacting loyalty from its users. ActiveVOS offers a BPM (Business Process Management) solution that can be used with Oracle… or, without! So rather than buying booth space they decided to position a bunch of people in prison uniforms outside the convention area, to make the point that you need to break free of Oracle’s chains by using products like theirs. It got good press, picked up by PC World and IDG.

SO, I asked marketing VP Alex Neihaus at the meetup, this really isn’t about social media at all, is it? Sure it is, he said. He used Twitter and Facebook to get the word out, and indeed I saw tweets advertising the meetup embedded in the stream of happy chirps from Oracle loyalists on the Open World Live site. Alex says this is “authentic” and it is a reality of social media marketing that, for better or for worse, once you buy into it you don’t have a lot of control over who says what.

The link to the ActiveVOS website was oddly missing from the invite to the meetup (maybe they were worried that Larry Ellison would mount a DoS attack?) so here it is.