Want to promote your services? Don’t litter a WordCamp with promotional flyers and leaflets.

A lot of people turn up at WordCamps, such as London or Europe, hoping to gain new business contacts or customers. But they don’t talk to people, sponsor, or hand out business cards. Instead they place promotional flyers and leaflets in shared areas, near sponsor tables, or hand it out at after parties and contributor days.

This is rude, and counter productive.

Aside from making a mess for volunteers to clean up, WordCamps rely on sponsorships for funds, and unsolicited leafleting devalues that. Worse, it looks bad to attendees.

Most WordCamps are eager for sponsorship, and for the money spent on leaflets that get binned, your company could easily be a micro-sponsor highlighted on the website, and mentioned in a keynote.

Talk to attendees, talk to organisers! Get their permission if you must! But don’t thrust unsolicited promotional material on attendees, and don’t leave surprise leaflet spam in their communal areas. If you wanted to sponsor, you should have sponsored,