, Author at - Page 4 of 6

The Benefit of Session Tracks

Many online event platforms attempt to copy in-person events, particularly when it comes to sessions. During an in-person event, there are a few rooms set up with perhaps a theme for each (or perhaps none at all). The sessions are presented in each of the rooms and there is typically a ten-fifteen minute break in between so attendees can check the schedule, look for the next presentation, grab a cup of coffee, and settle in before it begins.

Many platforms emulate this by having a session listing where the attendee will choose a particular session to watch and, like a webcast, when it is over, click back to the lobby to choose the next they want to watch.

As an attendee, if there is a theme to a room, typically, you want to watch all of the sessions. You find a table in the room, settle in your chair, and stay there until the sessions you’re interested in run out. If an in-person event were run the same way as many online events, the room would have to be cleared before the next session, forcing all attendees to stand outside before being let back in.

That idea seems so inconvenient and unnecessary that vConferenceOnline created session tracks. It’s very similar to a playlist – sessions are scheduled to present live or play pre-recorded content at a particular time, have a break in between, then continue with the next session. An attendee can simply stay in the “room” and have the sessions play seamlessly and conveniently.

How does that benefit you, as a conference host?

The time in-between the sessions can be used for any manner of things. You can play elevator music to entertain the attendees. You can host a trivia game. You can ask people to communicate with you via Twitter hashtags or Facebook. You can show commercials from you or your sponsors. Ten or fifteen minutes is a lot of air time – with no fewer options for how to use it!

Many options that make things easier for your attendees also make for great opportunities for you and your sponsors. Just think creatively!

Your Speakers are Your Biggest Assets

A conference relies heavily on its content to market the event – which makes a lot of sense. If you see a movie trailer and hate the concept behind it, you aren’t likely to pay money to go see it, let alone waste your time with it.

Therefore, it is extremely important to have talented, comfortable, knowledgeable speakers for your event. If they are well-known, active in whatever community you are a part of, this makes them an even bigger asset. How do you use their influence to your benefit?

Many virtual event coordinators create banners or badges for their speakers to put on their website or blog. These will say something like “I am a speaker at x event” and link to the event. If you want to track how many people use the links from your speakers’ sites/blogs, you can always use a VIP or discount code.

Most public speakers have active social media accounts as well – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a blog. These are another great opportunity for your speakers to proudly announce that they’ll be participating in the event and to encourage their peers and audience to join in on the event. With virtual events, this is even better – the followers are used to interacting with this person virtually, so communication during the event will be very effective.

Are your speakers running/part of their own companies outside of your event as well? That’s a great opportunity to set them up with a virtual event booth. They will be able to interact with attendees not only through their presentation and the chat you set up during/after, but in their booth as well. Curious attendees can learn more about the speaker’s company, which can be a huge selling point to get those popular speakers to participate in your event as well.

Make sure that your communication with your speakers is effective and frequent. This builds a relationship between you, ensuring that the speaker is having the best experience possible, encouraging them to participate in your events again in the future. Well-known speakers in your community often discuss with one another their experiences at events and if yours has been excellent, your speaker may have contacts that would be happy to participate in your future events as well!

Most of all – remember that without presenters, you would not have an event. Your speakers are very important and should be treated as such!

First Steps to a Virtual Event

In my company, we’re working on setting up our next virtual conference, so I figured I’d start writing some blogs about the whole process. I’ll go step by step as I personally start setting up our event, and you can see really what there is to do for it. At the end of it all, I’ll write up a quick bullet point post that shows all the points in order.

First step is making sure you really have an event. I’m positive you have the audience you need – all you have to do is to reach out to them – so that’s not even a step. You already know your goal with the event, you know you want to save money and time by doing it online – and reach more people.

You can watch the video below, or keep reading underneath it!

Truly, the first thing you should do is contact your speakers. What takes the most time during the setup for an event – especially a virtual event – is gathering your speakers, getting confirmation, contracts, session names, powerpoint slides, session abstracts, and of course the actual recording from your speaker.

You need to contact your hopeful speakers.

Contact more speakers than you’ll need, because there are bound to be some that will not be able to participate.
Have a date in mind – but do not set it in stone yet. If nearly all of your hopeful speakers can’t make the exact date you want, well, what’s the point?
Be flexible. Allow varied topics from the exact ones you’re looking for.
Make it relevant. The topics are actually more inviting than the speakers themselves to most attendees. If someone has never heard of Billy Bob but loves hearing about how to build your own spaceship, they won’t mind that they don’t know the speaker.
Get excited. Your speakers will reflect your energy. If you’re just going through the motions of another virtual event, if you’re already stressed, or you just plain don’t want to do it, you need to get into a better mindset and send more positive emails. If you sound excited, they’ll get excited too, and they’ll be more likely to participate.

Keep in mind – you won’t get all of your dream speakers – and that’s okay! You’ll get great people participating in your event, and you and your attendees will have a blast.

Everything tends to fall in place in the end – just keep your plans flexible.

Help Viewers Understand First

Many people approach a webcast or virtual conference session as an opportunity to sell. This ends up driving the content for the session, and it drives the focus and presentation style as well.

While it’s certainly possible to present a “pre-sales” type presentation with information about your product or service in hopes of driving the sale, you might want to consider a different approach, particularly if you don’t have a captive audience. A “captive audience” is one that can’t leave, that must watch your presentation. This might be the case if you’re presenting sales training or other required materials.

But, if you’re talking with potential customers, or trying to woo customers into upgrades and enhanced service offerings, presenting a sales pitch or making sure you cover your marketing bullet points might be the last thing you really want to present. You’ll probably find that this causes people to click away, to stop listening and to become disengaged with your message, brand and presentation.

It’s just too easy to click away, or become distracted with email or have a thousand other things that get in the way of the attendee’s attention. An online presentation is, by necessity, a different animal from an in-person presentation. You need to turn on the expertise, the creativity and answer the “what can you do for me” question that all of the attendees are struggling with in their own minds.

To do this, consider providing information. REAL information – lessons learned, best practices, etc. These are the things a viewer can watch, learn from, and apply to their own world. Talk about things you’ve run into. Talk about customers and situations that have come up that show you have both a sense of humor and a problem-solving approach.

When you provide real-world information and experience, and you provide take-away, actionable information, the viewer will appreciate it. You’ll be seen as the expert, the one to go to for more information, more services. With an online presentation, it’s much more like a conversation with a viewer than a presentation AT a viewer.

Here are some quick ideas to get you started:

Provide a quick 5 or 10 tip best practices sheet they can download.
Provide an idea sheet that gives unique ideas that can spur other ideas the viewer can use to be successful.
Provide a “common pitfalls, and how to avoid them” sheet
Give a checklist of things to cover or consider

By providing takeaways, and giving actionable items, your viewer will be engaged and care about what you’re presenting. It’s not enough to just have great slides. Give a worksheet or other item that can be put into play immediately. Make the viewer look good in the eyes of their boss and/or customers and you’ll immediately be seen as a benefit to their work, and you can show that you’re trustworthy.

Sure, you can show a slide or two about your product or service at the end, but first give the viewer something they can relate to and depend on. Then help them see how your offering can help.

One last thing – don’t handicap the information you provide. In other words, provide ALL fully-usable information in the sheets or takeaways you provide. Don’t give 3, then say “contact me for the other 10.” You’ll only make your viewer resent you and feel like the whole thing was a setup for sales.

People understand that sales are needed, they just don’t want to be sold. Help them understand first. The sales and marketing will follow.

Fundamental Choices: Live vs. Pre-Recorded or Pre-Produced

One thing we constantly work with clients on understanding is the use of pre-recorded, or pre-produced sessions vs. live, on-the-air content.

Generally speaking, the decision from a quality and control standpoint is extremely clear. You want to pre-record your sessions. Why is this? It comes down to quality of content and control of your event.

If you pre-produce your sessions, you have the opportunity to mix different media types (perhaps a recording from your phone, a recording from a camera, bits of PowerPoint, etc.), and then put these together to create a great session for your attendees. Of course you can switch between sources live, you can do your talk with your slides, present your materials, all live. But you are faced with issues that just don’t have to be there. This is especially true if it’s not just you presenting, but perhaps a whole group of speakers.

The logistics of managing schedules, getting speakers connected at exactly the right time, addressing bandwidth issues at their location, etc. – all of these come into play. Here are some examples that, frankly, didn’t need to happen.

A speaker showed up more than 15 minutes late. He jumped on the line, then started talking about why he was late, complaining about traffic and how he was having a bad day. Then he realized he had jumped on the live conference line and was talking about his woes to the world. Live. We had had to start without him and in joining late, gave the world a very unprofessional, very personal look at his troubles.
We had a speaker do their presentation over the top of dogs constantly barking. The speaker would do part of the presentation, then have to stop to try to quiet the dogs as they announced the arrival of the package delivery service. Then the mail carrier. Then a door-to-door salesperson. It went on and on in an amazing display of home activity that didn’t need to be part of the session.
Another presenter spent about 25% of their time scolding children who would not only be too noisy, but would come up and interrupt. Would knock on the door when closed for noise control. Would ask permission to use the restroom. All nicely broadcast out to the audience.
We’ve had presenters who attempted to do their sessions from hotels with such poor quality internet that they were unable to show their demonstration correctly. They would lose their connection, have poor quality images, etc. – all because they were presenting from a location they did not control. In one case, the presenter actually announced to the world that they apologized, but they were sitting in the hallway for the presentation and hoped it would sound OK.

These are all life and reality for many presenters that do their work from the road. But the fact is, you don’t need to be at the mercy of presenters. Using great tools, you can record segments, create a great session and play it out on a timed, pseudo-live basis. The presenter is then able to participate in chat from anywhere in the world in a clean, quality-controlled environment.

If you think about television, most shows (especially other than news programs and sporting-type events) are pre-produced. It’s about control. It’s about great quality and it’s about having excellent content for your attendees. Your attendees may not even realize it’s not live. It’s the best of all worlds.

Where Do I Begin?

Getting your first virtual conference or event up and running can be a daunting task – but it’s really not as big of a hill as it may seem initially. Remember the old adage, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time*.” It’s the same with an event.

(source)

The really great thing is that there are several areas you can focus on – and they typically happen sequentially. This can give you the time you need to put the effort into each area:

The public site – these are the micro-pages, the web site devoted to getting the word out about your event. Put this up as quickly as possible and begin taking registrations. Remember, you can update this page (or pages) as you go along, adding speakers and other information about your event. However, the most important thing is that you provide information about your event. As you talk with speakers and potential sponsors, they’ll want to see what your event is about and this will be the starting point.
Speakers – who is presenting the content? Whether you’re hosting a single webcast/webinar session or a full virtual conference event, you’ll need to have content and speakers. The speakers (and, more specifically their content) drive attendees. Attendees drive sponsors. Sponsors base their expected attendee counts on your content. Speakers and their topics are key.
One interesting thing we found in talking with attendees at various events is, while the speaker is important and big-name speakers can help an event, it’s really the topics that drive people to register for and attend your event. In nearly every survey we’ve conducted, we’ve found that attendees look at the content (the session title and abstract) to be presented, then the speaker to see if they are qualified to talk about it. If so, and it’s a topic they’re interested in, they’ll register. People don’t typically register solely based on the speaker’s name and reputation. There are clear exceptions to this for celebrities and such, but generally, it’s all about the content.
Sponsors – who will be sponsoring your event? Start talking with them early, but the real process of signing them up will get underway as you beef out your content and show your attendee interest. Create your packages, know what you’re offering, but talk with them as your event starts to fill out in terms of content, direction and the style of event you’ll be having.
The event platform – there will likely be things about the platform you need to set up. This includes getting the content into the system, doing housekeeping and making setup decisions that will impact attendees during the event. This can be done fairly late in the setup process as no one will be seeing this until the event is open. Know what you have to do, but save this to the last portions of your set up calendar.

By attacking the things you need to do in a serial way – instead of looking at all of it at once – you’ll be able to work through the steps and have a great virtual event, without losing your sanity.

* Of course I’m not saying you should actually eat an elephant. That’s just not a good idea on so many levels.

Do Virtual Events Hurt Your In-Person Events?

This question comes up quite a bit. The short answer… if you do it right, is…

No.

If you can market the virtual event in conjunction with the in-person event, you end up boosting the value of the in-person event. If you market one, then move to the other, then back again, the messaging can get very confusing to your audience. You need to work the shows together, then you can clearly show how your audience benefits from each venue.

One of the successful things that is done is using the online event as a promotional tool, but also as a pre-event tool. Using this approach, you can help your audience attend the in-person event in possibly a more prepared, informed way. Here are some ideas to help integrate the two types of events:

Hold pre-conference pre-sessions. These sessions are presented by your speakers and include information that will get the audience ready for the in-person event. Of course you don’t need (or want) to present the entire in-person session, but you can present the items that help people better understand what will be shown.

Consider pre- and post-conference classes or supporting sessions. You can offer these as an add-on to your in-person registration. These can be multi-session presentations and provide deep information for attendees. Then, when they come to the event, they can learn how to apply and further use the information from the pre-con. These can also be a way to get deeper involved in the materials presented, since the multiple sessions will be focused on a single topic whereas sessions in the in-person event typically are single sessions and stand alone.

Use pre-sessions to introduce topics and introduce homework to get people thinking along common lines.

Use virtual events to provide additional information about and by your vendors and sponsors. These virtual events are great ways to further leverage your relationships with your sponsors and provide additional opportunity for the sponsors to interact with and gain information from your audience. Keep in mind, you can keep the virtual event online after the in-person event, so your vendors can continue working with your audience in on-demand mode.

Consider adding “best of” type sessions after the in-person event has completed. You can add them to the virtual event and use it as an additional touch point to work with your audience. Simply capture the sessions at the in-person event, then announce that you’ll be adding the top 5 (or 10 or whatever works well for you) sessions to the virtual event in the weeks following the event.

Consider live-streaming your keynote presentations or key presentations from industry experts – this can further integrate your events (online and virtual) and show why people should attend both. They get to see the live session and they get to experience the online virtual event.

There are a whole host of ways you can leverage virtual conferences, webcasts and webinars and in-person events. From marketing to extending content to outreach to follow-up, the virtual event platform can significantly boost your in-person events.

As you write up your attendee and sponsor offerings, consider adding an option to add the virtual event items you’ll be offering. Do the inverse on the virtual event registration – adding options to include the in-person event. By integrating the two, you can leverage your audience, not split your messaging and gain additional ways people can take in your events, talk with sponsors and more.

Virtual events can be a powerful add-on and powerful marketing tool for your in-person events. So many people make the mistake of assuming it’s one or the other for their audience. Done right however, it allows you to extend your in-person event’s interaction with your audience in exciting ways.

Keep Virtual Event Attendees Engaged

Keeping attendees engaged is a tough battle with an online event. Let’s face it, distractions abound! Email arrives, instant messages beckon, heck just typing a new URL in the browser is a threat to their attention to your event.

What can you do to retain attendees – to keep their attention and make the event all it can be for them and for you and your stakeholders?

One thing that has worked repeatedly is the use of between-session messaging and content. As you move through your event, offer additional content between sessions. Rather than just showing “the next session starts in 5 minutes” type messages, consider putting additional content, tips and other elements in the space between sessions.

Here are some great examples that work very well, time after time:

Interview the speakers – talk to them about real-life, ask for advice, talk about their pets. Basically what you’re looking to do is to help your speakers be “real” to your audience, help your audience get to know the speaker. These are very powerful and can be relatively short. If you’re concerned about topics, pick a central 2 or 3 topics, then ask the same questions to each speaker. This can be things like “what’s your favorite board game” or “what movies have you seen recently” or “are you a dog or a cat person?” All of these are great ice-breakers and can can offer a bit of fun between sessions.
Add polls between sessions – ask questions of your attendees, see what you can learn, and then present, about your audience. Perhaps even ask the same questions as those above. Then you can get a feel for your audience and help them relate to the content presented.
Add contests – have treasure hunts in the virtual environment have treasure hunts in the sponsor’s and speaker’s web sites. This is a great way to get people involved and learning all that’s available. You can even score the activities (for every “X” you find, you gain 20 points) – then award a keychain or t-shirt to the winner by points.
Have chats on Twitter or in the chat tools – guide the chats to include materials just presented (the speaker may be able to provide interesting topics and questions) or on completely unrelated topics to help people get to know one-another.
Create news segments – talk about very recent headlines between sessions. Make sure the headlines are related to the event. Perhaps even just one or two headlines, then suggest people move to chat or social media you have integrated into the event to discuss the headline. Be sure to give them your opinion (or the opinion of the person presenting the headlines) on the items.
Have a fun mini-session – this could be an exercise session, a yoga session, stretching that you can lead. This can also be a completely spoof-based segment. Remember, it’s only a few minutes maximum. Have fun with it.

By doing these types of activities, attendee retention jumps by up to 80%. These are real benefits and can substantially impact your event, the attendees involvement in your show and their impression overall for the event.

Foolproof Marketing Strategy – Across All Channels

A question people are always asking is, “How do you profit from _____?” The entire point of marketing, digital or otherwise, is always trying to turn a profit. That’s the point of selling products or services, right?

Wrong.

I’m going to tell you a secret that I’ve learned from endlessly researching “how to market correctly.”

Focus on your content and how it will help people.

That sounds cheesy and it probably is. After all, we don’t give our services and products away; we sell them! Why wouldn’t we focus on the money we ought to be getting for what we sell?

Customers are more annoyed with marketers than ever. They fast-forward through commercials, ignore banner ads, and generally just scoff at any kind of advertising ploys we try. They’ve seen our tricks plenty of times and they’re tired of it. This is where content marketing, digital marketing, and so many other kinds of marketing become frustrating for all parties.

This is why you should focus on your content. If someone sees your content, understands that you’re trying to help them achieve some goal, they are much more likely to want to buy your product or service, because they know that you can really be an asset to them.

Stop trying to focus on your profits – though don’t sell yourself short. However, if you focus on helping people, they will see your intentions and like you more for it – and that is where the profit comes.

Virtual Conferences Are, Indeed, Underrated – Here’s a Look at WHY

Great article posted to Convince and Convert about virtual events, what it can do for your business, impact of the sessions, community and more.

Here’s a link to the article

It’s a great way to work with your community of customers, partners and contacts – it’s also an excellent tool to educate and generally get the word out! I think one of the key things (that you’ll see in the pictures people tweeted as well) is to have some fun with it too.

Check out the article – great information and review of the technology!