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Blogger: Kai Hattendorf, UFI Managing Director

When we meet at the UFI Global Congress in Shanghai, we will discuss the trends and developments that create ripples of change in our industry. One of these is the way that digital media and marketing channels impact the way we reach out and interact with our customers and business prospects.

The same is true, in many ways, for the way we at UFI are reaching out to you, our members. Technically a company, or an association, is signed up as a UFI member. But this membership also extends to employees from these companies, at the discretion of their leaders, opening up a wealth of UFI services to all staff members.

And, in the age where content is more important than ever, of course we make sure all UFI news and updates are easily accessible for everyone. To achieve this, over the past year we have reviewed, refined, and reshaped UFI’s communication channels – improving access for all of you, the more than 50,000 industry professionals directly employed by our members worldwide.

While you are reading this column here on the UFI Blog, its traditional home is UFI’s monthly newsletter “UFI Info“. And if you are reading this text in Portuguese, Mandarin, or another language that is not English, you may be with one of our media partners worldwide.

As a global association, we strive to make our content available everywhere where we serve the industry. You most likely receive “UFI Info“ every month (if not, you can sign up here). You can sign up to receive your personal copy of “Exhibition World“ magazine . And you can make sure you receive the exclusive weekly “m+a / UFI Exhibition Newsletter“, giving a rundown of developments in our industry from all around the world.

But beyond these there is much, much more: We are active on Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn, and of course on Twitter as well. Last month, as an example, we premiered a new global interactive format, a “UFI Twitter Chat“, a 45 minutes long real-time conversation among industry professionals. I joined the session at nine pm local time from Taipei, and found people on there from California (where it was six o’clock in the morning), and from Europe, where it was the middle of the day. If you want to see for yourself, the next chat is on 13 October 2016.

Also, this month, in the run-up to our Shanghai Congress, we are proud to share that we have now also added WeChat, Asia’s dominant digital mobile platform, to UFI’s communication outlets. There we share UFI news in Mandarin and English.

We are investing increasingly in these digital communication channels, as they allow you to get in touch very easily with the whole UFI team, and they allow us to share news and developments quickly with all of you. So I invite you to follow us, to connect and to “like“ us, to share, to be part of our industry’s global UFI community online – so that your job and your business can benefit from valuable news and exchanges.