THE FUTURE OF
VIRTUAL AND LIVE EVENTS
The Strife and Prosperity of the 5G Promise
Event managers and event marketers need to think like digital marketers.
Bringing every element that you have in-person into virtual doesn’t work. Think about how businesses like Amazon, hook us with their products — they don’t try to reproduce the in-person shopping experience. Think about how Netflix put the customer first and completely changed the business model.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-019-00009-7
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/the-5g-economic-impact/2020/03/
https://skift.com/2018/11/28/what-5g-will-mean-for-hotels-and-events/
https://helloendless.com/5g-at-events/
https://www.pcma.org/5g-in-the-event-space-what-strategists-can-expect/
https://blog.glisser.com/5g-a-new-horizon-for-events
https://varioproductions.com/2020/03/20/what-effect-will-5g-have-on-events/
https://www.exponents.com/our-blog/your-guide-to-in-booth-technology/
https://www.corbinball.com/article/36-mobile-and-wireless-technology/262-how-5g-will-revolutionize-the-event-industry
https://helmtickets.com/blog/how-the-arrival-of-5g-will-affect-the-events-industry/
https://www.mci-group.com/en/news-and-insights/news/global/5g-for-events-3-benefits-for-venues-and-planning
https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/5g/what-is-5g?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIo7j63ubK6wIVFBLnCh2SUwVNEAMYAyAAEgKJgfD_BwE
https://mciexperience.com/how-5g-connectivity-will-affect-events/
https://www.futurithmic.com/2019/09/10/how-5g-will-transform-live-events/
https://www.cvent.com/en/blog/hospitality/5g-will-impact-future-meetings-events
That’s what your brand have to do: focus on the value it can deliver to the customers.
Think about your virtual event as the engine to drive your brand growth. They having the capacity of engaging your audience long after the event is over. This means that your virtual event has the potential to drive engagement 365 days/24hour. This means that event marketers who can integrate the 2 stacks of systems — the system of record (a CRM like Hubspot) and a system of engagement (digital experience apps and websites), will have the potential to maximize attendance rates, minimize drop-off, and constructively engage attendees.
These tools are converging toward a marketing stack that’s going to bypass the traditional events stack.
WITHOUT RECIPROCITY AND INTERACTIVITY, YOUR EVENT DOES NOT
HAVE THE POTENCY TO DELIVER SUCCESS
This is where the power and the magic of event platforms come in. Event platforms are really what powers engagement, allowing attendees to connect, chat, compete in gamification, and interact with virtual content in real time as well as following the event. Also, have a professional Master of Ceremonies or host is an essential attribute in managing a successful virtual event. The MC/host become the event guide, leading attendees from moment to moment and keeping their attention.
Empowering Tools of Engagement for Brand Immersion —
Presentations Can Be Bewitching or Simply Tedious
“Is it events that are boring or those who facilitate them? I've seen people captivate audiences with a piece of written text … I've also seen a lot of technological gizmos that are utterly tedious. Most conferences fail because the gist of the content that underpins them is weak, uninteresting and uninspiring.” — Yann Gourvennec, CEO at Visionary Marketing
If you rely on “whiz-bang tech” to cover up for monotonous speakers and their boring presentations, you will soon find people leaving your virtual event. Make sure you know your audience and what they’re expecting to learn. Then give them what they came for … and more.
Bottom line: “Don’t embrace mediocrity; it’s main charm is to make you fall in love with failure.”
As you embrace excellence, keep in mind people like to see human moments — pauses, stumbles, a little raw emotion. If you edit all of that spontaneity out, you might as well just share a YouTube video, instead.
Empowering Tools of Engagement for Brand Immersion —
Presentations Can Be Bewitching or Simply Tedious
“Is it events that are boring or those who facilitate them? I've seen people captivate audiences with a piece of written text … I've also seen a lot of technological gizmos that are utterly tedious. Most conferences fail because the gist of the content that underpins them is weak, uninteresting and uninspiring.” — Yann Gourvennec, CEO at Visionary Marketing
If you rely on “whiz-bang tech” to cover up for monotonous speakers and their boring presentations, you will soon find people leaving your virtual event. Make sure you know your audience and what they’re expecting to learn. Then give them what they came for … and more.
Bottom line: “Don’t embrace mediocrity; it’s main charm is to make you fall in love with failure.”
As you embrace excellence, keep in mind people like to see human moments — pauses, stumbles, a little raw emotion. If you edit all of that spontaneity out, you might as well just share a YouTube video, instead.
YOUR OPPORTUNITY LIES IN INTELLIGENTLY ENGAGING THE 90%.
INTEGRATE YOUR VIRTUAL EVENTS WITH AI DRIVEN MARKETING PLATFORM
Factor in Furious Feed-Back Loop
For a moment imagine what happens in a real-life conference setting.
You have few hundred people gathered around — all excited and united by a common interest or background, with the purposes of allowing them to meet one another and to learn about and discuss issues, ideas and work that focus on a topic of mutual concern. Listening to and participating in lively discussions (feedback loop) at conferences can give you new ideas, help refine your existing concepts, and maybe even change your mind about some key issues in your field.
“Feedback is constantly flowing between speaker and audience, in the form of body language, clapping and applause, even the occasional boo. That needs to be replicated in some form virtually — whether that’s a comment stream, emojis or even virtual clapping apps — otherwise you may as well be watching a movie.”
Granted, it is close to impossible to mimic the setting of a real life conference, but “virtual events need to be more interactive or user-led to draw the participant into the screen and the event. That’s why successful virtual events draw a large number of comments, part of which keeps the entertainment going and draws people in. The immediate feedback loop for the organizers is also crucial and useful.” — Hanna Peltonen, Business manager, strategic sourcing and CSR
Some of the technology platforms like On24 and Intrado do have chat built into the solution, but it does get overwhelmed at times by high volumes of interaction. Interaction in an element that is still evolving in the digital event experience.
Bottom line: Interaction is a broad term.
Define what type of interaction will be measured for your Key Performance Indicators. “Is interaction posting something on social media or commenting on a session with an emoji, or is it a meaningful two-way exchange?”
“A great virtual event feature I experienced was a networking tab that connected you at random with another event attendee. You were provided three minutes to chat about a topic before it ended. It was lots of fun.” — Jon Erskine, Director of Sales at Influitive
THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR IMMEDIATE GROWTH LIES IN CREATING A
ROBUST PIPELINE FROM THE 37% — { 3% (ACTIVE BUYERS) + 7%(INTEND TO
CHANGE) + 30% (HAVE A NEED, BUT ARE NOT READY TO ACT)}
Superior Production Value Could Be the Answer to Lack-Lustre Interactivity
Adobe decided to do just that.
In their recent virtual event gathering, Summit, Adobe decided to forgo live streaming and decided to go the pre-recorded route instead. While live streaming is an effective way to replace in-person presentations and sessions, pre-recorded sessions gives you the ability to edit and enhance your video production. No doubt, this can also improve certain speakers' performances.
Pre-recorded sessions also eliminate many known challenges of virtual events, such as planning around different time zones and connectivity issues during the event. Adobe uploaded the event's content to their custom web platform on the day of the event, and from there, viewers were — and still are — able to choose to watch whatever sessions they wanted, whenever they wanted.
AI-Generated Recommendations is yet Another Power Tool in the Virtual Event Tool Kit
Taking a page out of the YouTube playbook, Adobe incorporated custom content recommendations based on attendees's behavior on the platform using Adobe's Sensei AI engine.
Many of us are used to receiving personalized suggestions when consuming both content and products in Amazon and Netflix. It is a natural progression that personalizing content delivery in a virtual format will appealing to a broader base and is in alignment to an evolving trend in events in general.
Moreover, these event sessions are available online completely free of charge, which deletes any friction and allows for maximum viewing. However, if you choose to charge for your event, you could also follow a similar format while implementing a paywall or registration page before granting attendees access to the content.
Bottom line: If you can pull if off, post-production videos, as a content contributor might be your sweet spot.
However, this comes with a caveat. Since people will be viewing the content on their own time, you’ll want to create discussion forums or schedule specific times for Q&As and networking sessions where people can connect about the topic and continue the dialogue. Of course, you can do this via Twitter Live, FaceBook Live or YouTube Live.
YOUR LATITUDE LIES IN BUILDING YOUR BRAND ALLURE AND ALIGNING IT
WITH PERSONA MARKETING. IT WILL SUB-CONSCIOUSLY LEAD THEM
TOWARDS YOU!
.
Imagine When Exhibitors Compete for Attendee Votes
Battle of the Apps was the theme for the reimagined version of Salesforce’s World Tour Sydney Reimagined virtual event — AppExchange Demo Jam.
During this event, the exhibitors (Salesforce AppExchange partners) were given three minutes each to do a live demo demonstrating their apps. “The audience was then asked to vote for their favorite using a dedicated link that was accessible for 24 hours following the session, and the winner was announced on Twitter the next day.”
Exhibitors competing for audience votes demands higher level of presentation and provides engaging demos while keeping the audience hyper-involved. Moreover, this kind of activity will have people hooked on to the sponsor's social media page as the attendees will be ever so curious to see who won.
Bottom line: Competition inherently promotes curiosity, conflict, and cognizance.
Competition my be rude, nonetheless, it is an effective motivating engagement nugget.
Imagine When Exhibitors Compete for Attendee Votes
Battle of the Apps was the theme for the reimagined version of Salesforce’s World Tour Sydney Reimagined virtual event — AppExchange Demo Jam.
During this event, the exhibitors (Salesforce AppExchange partners) were given three minutes each to do a live demo demonstrating their apps. “The audience was then asked to vote for their favorite using a dedicated link that was accessible for 24 hours following the session, and the winner was announced on Twitter the next day.”
Exhibitors competing for audience votes demands higher level of presentation and provides engaging demos while keeping the audience hyper-involved. Moreover, this kind of activity will have people hooked on to the sponsor's social media page as the attendees will be ever so curious to see who won.
Bottom line: Competition inherently promotes curiosity, conflict, and cognizance.
Competition my be rude, nonetheless, it is an effective motivating engagement nugget.
How To Deliver Creative Cooperation as Your Brand Signature
When all Global Meetings Industry Day (GMID) events were cancelled this year, eventprofs rallied together to create a virtual event instead and aimed to break the world record for the most people in a virtual meeting. Although they didn't quite succeed, they were able to get 12,500 people to join for the live webcast, which is still a major feat.
Cooperation and camaraderie are strong engagement enhancers.
Digital live scribing is another creative and unifying force that enriches engagement. Of course, all this is true provided your internet connection can handle it.
What is digital live scribing?
Talented illustrators create artwork live as panel discussions go on, providing a graphical representation of the speakers and takeaways that are entertaining, informative, and contagiously sharable in the social channels.
Digital live scribing makes it easy to glean key insights from the sessions as the we are mostly visual learners.
- The information presented is accompanied by stylized illustration, which can easily reside in our memory palace.
- Information-based content is created live, which helps increase attendee participation during an event and adds a FOMO (fear of missing out) component.
- Later, this visual information can be sliced, diced and might add conspicuous nuggets in your content follow up.
- The audience is able to watch scribing happening live via the event app or the virtual Social Wall.
- Visually rich summaries help the speakers to market themselves in their future speaking gigs.
- Visually rich summaries, when done right, can highlight the interaction between speaker and audience, making the audience a key participatory element in the virtual event
Image Credit - www.youtube.com
Bottom Line: Digital live scribing can be a effective tool for band memorability.
According to Visual Teaching Alliance over 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Furthermore, visual learning is the dominant style and 65% of people are visual learners, which means they are much more likely to remember what they see than what they hear.
Another study conducted by the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University elaborates that people tend to remember only 10% of what they hear and 30% of what they read. However, when it comes to visual content, data shows that the retention of information is much greater since people can recall up to 80% of what they see and do.
Smartup Visuals provide event organizers with a digital scribing app, transform events by engaging the audience in real-time and turn a lot of content into a visually appealing summary ready to be shared and enjoyed.
According to Visual Teaching Alliance over 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Furthermore, visual learning is the dominant style and 65% of people are visual learners, which means they are much more likely to remember what they see than what they hear.
Another study conducted by the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University elaborates that people tend to remember only 10% of what they hear and 30% of what they read. However, when it comes to visual content, data shows that the retention of information is much greater since people can recall up to 80% of what they see and do.
Smartup Visuals provide event organizers with a digital scribing app, transform events by engaging the audience in real-time and turn a lot of content into a visually appealing summary ready to be shared and enjoyed.
DELIBERATE CONTENT MARKETING TO DISTINGUISH YOUR BRAND FLAVOR.
81% OF B2B MARKETERS USE E-MAIL NEWSLETTERS TO DELIVER BRAND
DIFFERENTIATIONS
The Seduction of Giveaways and The Empowering Attribute of Education
Giveaways are proven ways to kick start engagement and inspire inquisitiveness. No doubt, it can be a fun factor to your virtual event.
Although it's not quite as simple as handing an attendee their prize, there are virtual goodies you can offer, and there's still the option of mailing physical incentives to attendees following the event.
“As part of their event, Google SheetsCon hosted an incredibly popular contest to win one of 25 swag bags that they had put together with branded event shirts and stickers. In order to win, participants had to share something about the event on social media using the dedicated event hashtag, or visit at least 5 of the sponsor booth pages during the event.”
Useful giveaways promotes brand awareness and escalates attendee participation.
Another idea, to add a bit of fun to your virtual event, is to incorporate some sort of creative performance. It could be a magic show or any type of concerts that will help the attendees to spread your brand message.
Giveaways are proven ways to kick start engagement and inspire inquisitiveness. No doubt, it can be a fun factor to your virtual event.
Although it's not quite as simple as handing an attendee their prize, there are virtual goodies you can offer, and there's still the option of mailing physical incentives to attendees following the event.
“As part of their event, Google SheetsCon hosted an incredibly popular contest to win one of 25 swag bags that they had put together with branded event shirts and stickers. In order to win, participants had to share something about the event on social media using the dedicated event hashtag, or visit at least 5 of the sponsor booth pages during the event.”
Useful giveaways promotes brand awareness and escalates attendee participation.
Another idea, to add a bit of fun to your virtual event, is to incorporate some sort of creative performance. It could be a magic show or any type of concerts that will help the attendees to spread your brand message.
Keep in mind your attendee are not familiar with the working of your event platform.
Help them out by putting together a PDF file or doing a short video (if you have the bandwidth) and send it to the registered attendees before the event. This will help them to get acclimated to the inner workings of your platform and will put their mind at ease before the real deal.
Again, “Google SheetsCon, which was hosted on a custom event platform, addressed this by including a short intro video for people to watch as they logged into the platform. This video acted as a brief tutorial that introduced attendees to the platform’s different features and instructed them on how to interact with the various pages.”
Making sure everyone is comfortable with the platform and familiar with how the event will work is an important step in ensuring attendees take advantage of everything you’ve implemented and get the most value out of it.
Bottom Line: Pay attention to the needs of your attendees. Make them feel special and wanted.
“Most of us live in a semi-somnambulistic state: we do our daily tasks and the days fly by. The two exceptions to this are childhood and those moments when we are in love. In both cases, our emotions are more engaged, more open and active. And we equate feeling emotional with feeling more alive.”
Think about how you can bring in the emotional factor in the mix.
Help them out by putting together a PDF file or doing a short video (if you have the bandwidth) and send it to the registered attendees before the event. This will help them to get acclimated to the inner workings of your platform and will put their mind at ease before the real deal.
Again, “Google SheetsCon, which was hosted on a custom event platform, addressed this by including a short intro video for people to watch as they logged into the platform. This video acted as a brief tutorial that introduced attendees to the platform’s different features and instructed them on how to interact with the various pages.”
Making sure everyone is comfortable with the platform and familiar with how the event will work is an important step in ensuring attendees take advantage of everything you’ve implemented and get the most value out of it.
Bottom Line: Pay attention to the needs of your attendees. Make them feel special and wanted.
“Most of us live in a semi-somnambulistic state: we do our daily tasks and the days fly by. The two exceptions to this are childhood and those moments when we are in love. In both cases, our emotions are more engaged, more open and active. And we equate feeling emotional with feeling more alive.”
Think about how you can bring in the emotional factor in the mix.
NOTHING CAN REPLACE THE THROBBING PULSE OF LIVE EVENTS
Yes, it is true that events are suffering an immediate set back due to Coronavirus.
“Live events are going to come back, and they’re going to come back in a big way. If I could personalize it a minute and look at my own reaction to where we are, I see myself craving human interaction, being social, experiencing something in a group setting. That’s a craving, and it’s a craving that I don’t normally have . . . If this is how I’m feeling, I think I can multiply this by a thousand for people that do, on the reg, want to participate on large-scale in live events.”
Ali Rubinstein, chief creative officer and co-CEO of Meow Wolf.
Right now, the essential factor is to keep going with vitality and determination.
Never allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
Vitality came into play when the 2020 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition was cancelled, and no alternative was determined. The community created its own replacement event, Virtual Health Conference 20. Grassroots events organization also emerged after the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the Tech Spirit Barcelona event rose up in its place.
By contrast, Salesforce planned ahead for a virtual replacement for their World Tour Sydney event in March and simply announced that the format of the event would be changing. The event's live-stream drew over 80,000 attendees, so it was clearly successful in maintaining its audience through the transition.
Virus or no-virus, the market place is a dynamic organism.
In an informal survey held during April's Global Meeting Industry Day, 62% of event planners said their events will be a hybrid-style moving forward, while 18% said there will be a greater demand for virtual-only events.
Perhaps, going 'hybrid' is the next evolution.
One thing is clear, no event will be 100% offline — that is the definitely the defining trend for the foreseeable future.
“Live events are going to come back, and they’re going to come back in a big way. If I could personalize it a minute and look at my own reaction to where we are, I see myself craving human interaction, being social, experiencing something in a group setting. That’s a craving, and it’s a craving that I don’t normally have . . . If this is how I’m feeling, I think I can multiply this by a thousand for people that do, on the reg, want to participate on large-scale in live events.”
Ali Rubinstein, chief creative officer and co-CEO of Meow Wolf.
Right now, the essential factor is to keep going with vitality and determination.
Never allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
Vitality came into play when the 2020 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition was cancelled, and no alternative was determined. The community created its own replacement event, Virtual Health Conference 20. Grassroots events organization also emerged after the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the Tech Spirit Barcelona event rose up in its place.
By contrast, Salesforce planned ahead for a virtual replacement for their World Tour Sydney event in March and simply announced that the format of the event would be changing. The event's live-stream drew over 80,000 attendees, so it was clearly successful in maintaining its audience through the transition.
Virus or no-virus, the market place is a dynamic organism.
In an informal survey held during April's Global Meeting Industry Day, 62% of event planners said their events will be a hybrid-style moving forward, while 18% said there will be a greater demand for virtual-only events.
Perhaps, going 'hybrid' is the next evolution.
One thing is clear, no event will be 100% offline — that is the definitely the defining trend for the foreseeable future.
