GM tests kiosks for trade shows

Craig Keefner posted a great article on GM's use of interactive kiosks for lead collection during trade shows. Ever hate filling out those paper forms for companies so that they can send you their marketing info? Well, the solution that GM came to involves touch screen kiosks and wireless data transfer to streamline that whole process. But as the article notes, there's more to a kiosk program than just strapping a display to a podium:

Susan Walker, GM's CRM Enterprise Data Enablement Manager, mitigated risk [associated with running an untested kiosk environment at her trade shows] by first running a quick pilot test that month, putting kiosks in five dealerships. The promotion was for an end-of-year contest.

"It got us hooked. Consumers were not scared to walk up to them. So, we made a leap of faith to go wireless. We crossed our fingers."

With just three weeks left until the first big autoshow of the new year, Walker and her team, including a kiosk vendor and GM's ad agency (links to both below), scrambled to get the program up and running in time for all events in 2005. The team carefully based their tests and tactics on seven lessons learned by other kiosk users.

Read on for the list of lessons learned. There are some good ones in there :)