Fork In The Road Blog

Events: Technology. Design. Strategy.

The Virtual Rescue Plan for Face-to-Face Events

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If I had a dollar for every time I heard or read the phrase “nothing will replace face-to-face meetings,” I would be rich (er). The sad truth is that in some cases they’ve already been replaced. The recession, green movement, costs to exhibit, travel hassles, generation Y’s social networking predilections (pick one) have opened the door to virtual events with good reason—they save money and environmental resources while attracting a new audience of exhibitors and attendees. Rather than run towards the exits with brains on fire fearing the cannibalization or elimination of live events by virtual platforms, it’s time to take stock of the real opportunities that virtual event platforms offer to stimulate live attendance and grow face-to-face events.

The bad news

At the same time virtual events are on the rise, face-to-face trade show producers are experiencing their share of challenges. Many organizers are struggling to get a handle on how to grow their events in the face of increased competition from new media channels, continued economic volatility, and rising costs. Exhibitors remain irritated by labor practices and the ever-increasing costs to exhibit. The recent uptick in attendance numbers at some shows doesn’t change the general lack of industry growth overall.

The good news

When done well, virtual experiences stimulate immersion, flow, and presence—the primary reasons why virtual games like World of Warcraft (WOW) are so addictive. To a lesser extent, virtual trade shows and conferences perform in the same way. Like every great concert, sporting event, or cocktail party next door, watching and listening to the action from a distance only makes you crave being there when the opportunity comes along. Incidently, BLIZZCON, the live conference for WOW gamers, sells out almost immediately after the dates are announced every year.

The plan

To prevent the further shrinkage of live events, producers must develop a strategy that allows each of the two mediums—face-to-face and virtual events—do what they uniquely do best and treats virtual platforms like any other content strategy that adapts to address the various stages of the sales funnel:

Stage I: Webinars. Bring in live subject matter experts to deliver regularly scheduled, FREE, and interactive presentations to an audience that is both familiar with the live event (jazzed from attending the year before) and entirely new. Content delivered virtually at this stage should create brand awareness, pique the interest of newcomers and reinforce the loyalty of your customer base.

Stage II:  The Virtual Preview. Use your live event speakers and keynote presenters to offer a glimpse of what’s in store at the face-to-face event. However, lest you think you can get away with something brief, commercial-like, and only at 50% power, think again.  This is the point at which you MUST go after potential live attendees with both barrels, offering original content for FREE with the understanding that the virtual attendees are in a buying mode.

Stage III:  The Hybrid Event. Stream content live from the physical trade show and conference to the virtual audience. This is an opportunity to appeal to serious potential participants—remote attendees, exhibitors, and even sponsors—who want to learn about the event with the intention of participating the following year. This is your opportunity to showcase your product in a three-dimensional way. The best way to do that is to not treat the virtual audience as voyeurs or second-class citizens. You have to engage them, give them a voice, allow them to participate, and frustrate them (in a good way) so that they regret not having attended the live event.

Stage IV:  The Live Trade Show and Conference. Reward loyalists who have made the shift from virtual attendee to live attendee with an experience that emulates the online environment but cannot be duplicated online—rich human interaction, unlimited opportunities to engage in small groups and intimate settings, information on demand, and plenty of tactile experiences. The content and engagement delivered by the live event must be so compelling and actionable that it pushes live attendees back into the post-event virtual stream to form the live event’s virtual community.

The Takeaway: This virtual rescue plan forces live events to differentiate themselves from virtual platforms by offering a level of engagement that virtual events cannot deliver. The richness of the live experience drives attendance. The online content (unique information delivered by live speakers, not archived presentations) recognizes where virtual attendees are in the buying (attending) cycle and delivers content commensurate with that stage of the sales funnel. It allows potential participants—attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors—to jump into and out of the content stream all year long. Yes, this is a long-term approach. Yes, it requires deviation from conventional growth strategies and a level of investment on the part of the event organizer. But, some would argue, the only way forward for the live event industry is not to look back.

Selling at a Virtual Event is Just Like/is Not at All Like Selling at a Physical Event

Whether you are an exhibitor trying to navigate the new medium of virtual trade shows or a corporation using virtual platforms to enlarge the opening to your sales funnel, Dennis Shiao’s new book, “Generate Sales Leads with Virtual Events” and his upcoming presentation at the Virtual Edge Summit can help. As with any new environment—the Antarctic, third world countries, and the Moon—you have to take the surroundings into account. Much of what Shiao advocates is straightforward advice that will work in any scenario. However, paying respect, as he does, to the disruption in normalcy that occurs in a virtual setting is the key to having success with it.

In the book, Shiao, director of product marketing at INXPO, outlines a five-step plan (hint: if you just skim the subtitles, it sounds like selling in any other environment, so read on):

1.     Define your mission statement—get your entire team on the same page by quantifying exactly what it is you want to get out of the virtual event. Because of the rich metrics available, your mission statement can be highly targeted such as, “100 leads from a specific vertical,” Shiao says.

2.     Assemble an all-star team—select a diverse mix of people from sales to product experts to staff the virtual booth or corporate meeting. This is where virtual might even trump physical events. Folks from all over the organization can chime in to address customer needs. You don’t have to rely on the people in the room. Nevertheless, you will need to assess their online fluency and train them on how to behave in a virtual world.

3.     Build and promote your presence—get out the online bullhorn and let customers, prospects, and ordinary citizens know about your virtual booth or meeting. That’s the beauty of all things digital. The audience can grow itself and they can attend with little effort. Plus, those on social channels will be the most comfortable in a virtual setting. “Use all the tools at your disposal to generate awareness and attract visitors,” Shiao advises.

4.     Engage with prospects—Have your engagement protocols ready to go.  The window of engagement is both a tremendous weakness in the virtual environment and an exhibitor’s greatest opportunity.  If you have 60 seconds to make eye contact and acknowledge someone who has entered your physical booth (or meeting room), how much time do you have in a virtual booth when you can’t see his or her eyes?  Shiao advises exhibitors and meeting hosts to develop a set of tactics from immediate responses and V cards to rich media that let visitors know you are there and keep them engaged longer.

5.     Qualify and follow up with prospects—go back to the rich virtual metrics (which you don’t often obtain from a physical trade show or meeting), drill down to determine what stage of the buying process the visitors are in, and follow up accordingly. “Virtual events have built-in RFID. You have access to the entire trail of activity and you have the benefit of a pile of data you don’t have with face-to-face events,” Shiao explains. In other words, don’t treat prospects like you don’t know what they want when their virtual behavior offers so many clues.

Much of the misunderstanding and even fear of virtual platforms comes from tossing virtual and physical events into the same features and benefits bucket. In reality, virtual events emulate physical events—a clear attempt on the part of platform providers to aid comprehension—but the value propositions are different. During this exploration and experimentation phase, Shiao is on target with his book and his advice. For the moment, exhibitors and meeting hosts can still aim for the low-hanging fruit by tweaking their existing sales processes to accommodate the virtual differences until the platform reaches its full potential and an entirely new way of selling emerges.

Using Hybrid Events to (Try to) Please All of the People All of the Time

It’s true.  If you’re a professional membership association, your best bet in the pleasure dispensing department is to try to please most of the people at least some of the time. Kevin Novak is working hard to do better than that by using hybrid events to hit the educational and member benefit sweet spot that most association executives dream about. At the Virtual Edge Summit next week in Las Vegas, Novak, vice president integrated web strategy and technology of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), will talk about how a false sense of security led to a “shellacking” in his virtual attendance numbers and how his team regrouped after the dip.

Two years ago when the economy took a turn for the worse, AIA took a very hard look at how to bolster its live national convention in anticipation of the coming storm. The event typically generated 24,000 attendees (including exhibitors) and generated $8.5 million in revenue for the association. An analysis of the attendee demographics indicated that most visitors came from within a 300-mile radius of the host city.  Further, the meeting was being held in San Francisco—one of the more expensive host cities—and the financial burden on members who were either struggling to keep their jobs or keep their projects moving was expected to be too much for a good portion of the attendee base.

Enter Novak, his AIA team, Blue Sky Broadcast, INXPO, and Freeman. In six weeks, a virtual conference and trade show was born to complement the live event and extend some of the highly valuable education (some of it a requirement for AIA’s certification programs). The results were impressive. AIA’s online event featured 75 exhibitors, 12 conference sessions, and 17,000 virtual attendees. After the fact, 40,000 people viewed the on demand content. “There were times when we had 50-1,000 people [physically] in a room and 2,000 online in the companion virtual session,” Novak says.

In 2010, the annual convention was held in Miami. “Because of the size of our convention, few cities are large enough,” Novak explains. On the heels of the prior year’s hybrid success and the assumption that live attendance would again be anemic, AIA tripled the online offerings. Hoping to cover the cost of the virtual platform, they trimmed down the size of the online trade show and charged a $165 fee for virtual access to the conference programming. The outcome was less than stellar compared to the year before.

Virtual attendance at the 2010 hybrid conference dropped to 1,000 paid individuals. Post-event feedback indicated that although the content was high quality, the price point was too high especially in light of the $500 to $1,000 membership dues to join the association and the ongoing turmoil on the job front. “We tried to get feedback on the fee structure and looked into some other models. We realized that we should have been in the $125 range,” Novak admits.

Going forward, Novak anticipates changes in the hybrid event they have developed over the past two years.  Realizing that the educational benefits to members who are unable to attend the live event are critical to their professional development, the archived material from 2009 and 2010 is online and accessible as a member benefit. The convention budget and the virtual event budget have been separated. “We started with idea that [the virtual event] was convention-related, but now looking back, we see that there is more to it and it is better to mature the hybrid event as a separate objective,” he says. AIA is also planning to extend its 2010 experiment of simultaneously streaming content to multiple cities where chapter members are gathered offline.

Pleasing all of the people all of the time is a noble objective for an association. Next week, Kevin Novak will tell his organization’s story to online and offline listeners in a panel discussion titled, “Virtual Event Models That Work: Delivering Revenue, Reach and Repeat Participation.” For him, the logistics of launching a hybrid conference and trade show is the easy part. It’s helping his members find their happy place—value, education, and networking—that keeps him up at night.

Got Free Milk? Virtual Events that Won’t Kill The Cash Cow

Despite their brave faces, the producers of live events are still frightened about the impact of virtual events to erode their attendee base and diminish their profit margins. After all, if you can get the milk for free, why buy the cow? There’s been talk about employees at some associations fearing they might lose their jobs and the subject has been on the agenda of more than a few executive meetings. Apparently the “There’s no substitute for face-to-face meetings” mantra hasn’t convinced everyone.

Next week’s Virtual Edge Summit will help attendees (both virtual and live) parse through the pros and cons of virtual and hybrid meetings (and trade shows). As part of a PCMA VES Joint Plenary Session on “Using Virtual and Hybrid Meetings to Develop More Value,” Chris Price, vice president, Graphic Arts Show Company, will help the audience understand the benefits, outcomes, and learning curve associated with using virtual events to drive attendance at live trade shows and conferences. When he’s finished, there won’t be a dry udder in the room.

Chris Price and his team are among the few brave souls to go down the virtual path despite producing the hugely successful Graph Expo live exhibition and conference. Over a year ago, after attending the ConnexLive Meeting where he was exposed to virtual technology, he decided to experiment a little and develop a virtual show using the INXPO platform prior to his live event. The main purpose was to provide visitors with a juicy preview of the live event and entice them to attend in person. He arranged for a three-phase virtual roll-out of content: the virtual preview to highlight the benefits of the live event, an archive of the preview which was shut down immediately prior to the live show, and a post-show wrap-up.

While there were lots of takeaways from his experience, Chris will discuss some of the main “lessons” learned from the experience, which he says earned him 182 attendees—people who attended the virtual preview and subsequently attended Graph Expo in real life:

  • Using virtual events as part of the mix of product offerings requires new metrics and new ways of looking at return on investment.
  • One of the highlights of a virtual platform is the richness of the metrics and the ability to use them as sales tools for future forays into the virtual realm.
  • The success of virtual exhibitors is dependent upon a number of factors: their own familiarity with the platform, use of video and other engagement techniques besides chat, and the speed with which visitors are engaged by exhibitors upon entering the booth.
  • The results of the virtual event—especially the availability of the metrics—have huge implications for refinements in the face-to-face event.

Price came away from his first virtual experience having invested “a painful amount of time,” but with insights about the next generation of attendees, the value of networking online vs. offline, and the agony and ecstasy of being the first to try a new technology. Next week at the Virtual Edge Summit, he will dish about those topics, plus how to use virtual platforms as sales engines, costs, partnering, and what he will never do again. Drink up!

Say it Loud and Proud: Top Tips for Hybrid Event Speakers

Hybrid events—conferences and corporate events that include both live and virtual audiences—have prompted speakers accustomed to presenting in front of a live audience to adopt some new practices to bring the virtual audience into the conversation. Speakers aren’t the only ones interested in appealing to a virtual audience. Savvy hybrid event organizers are looking for speakers with the skill sets to wow both types of attendees.

Bringing the virtual audience into the conversation

Robert Swanwick, founder of SpeakerInteractive.com, believes there is no “best” way to bring a virtual audience into the conversation. “Each audience, speaker, and the content of each speech is different,” he says. That said, he offers some good practices:

–Treat the virtual and live audiences equally.

–During the Q&A, address a good portion of the questions from the virtual audience.

–Display the avatars of the online audience on a slide visible to the live participants.

–Invite both the virtual and live audience to continue the conversation in another online location after the presentation.

–Participate in social networking with the virtual audience before hand to understand some of the issues.

–Keep the virtual audience engaged with activities such as voting, chatting, and reading additional information.

Midori Connolly, Chief AV Girl at Pulse Staging and Events, has some additional tips for hybrid event speakers. “Avoid walking too fast or too much. The camera sometimes translates that movement into a jerky or choppy image onscreen,” she says. “When referring to handouts, make sure the virtual audience has them also and if you have any hands on activities, encourage the remote audience to participate,” she adds.

Putting Twitter feeds into the mix

A Twitter feed presents yet another challenge for hybrid event speakers. Hybrid presenters have to multitask even more to bring Tweeters into the conversation seamlessly. Emilie Barta, Virtual Event Host/Emcee a.k.a. “Social Me-Jay,” explains how speakers can facilitate this interaction:

–Have a Twitter moderator constantly responding to the Twitter feed and alerting the speaker when a question, comment, or experience worthy of sharing is tweeted.

–Speakers should occasionally refer to the Twitter stream, repeat the hash tag, and thank tweeters for their contributions.

–Presenters should encourage tweeters to converse among themselves.

–If speakers are unable to address all of the tweets during the presentation, they should do so privately after the session.

What hybrid event organizers need to know

When choosing a speaker for a hybrid event, organizers should take a number of factors into consideration according to Emilie Barta:

–Speakers must be dynamic and interesting because the camera tends to “flatten them out.” Those that appear dull or monotonous will be unable to keep an easily distracted virtual audience engaged.

–Speakers must have excellent microphone technique to appear engaged and inclusive of the virtual audience.

–Speakers must be 100% comfortable in a hybrid setting because the camera will amplify their discomfort.

The Takeaway: The blending of live and virtual audiences is a challenge for speakers and event organizers. If you’re a speaker, supercharging your presentation won’t hurt and may help prevent the virtual participants from checking their email or Facebook accounts too often during your session. If you’re a hybrid event organizer, make sure you work with speakers that are experienced in front of a camera, able to multitask, and willing to keep the remote audience in the loop. When you think about it, why have a hybrid event if the virtual audience feels like second-class citizens?

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