Читать книгу Transitioning to Virtual and Hybrid Events - Ben Chodor - Страница 9

A virtual event is a meeting or conference that either was originally held as a physical event and moved to be online or was created to exist only online. The only way that you can access and attend the event is via the internet from a computer, laptop, mobile device, or OTT (over the top) on a Smart TV.

Enterprise companies have been pushed to come up with new and innovative ways to connect with their customers, partners, and prospects. For years, large physical events have been a great way to network with these audiences and share new innovations, products, and services. Today, organizations have to turn to 100% virtual or hybrid events to extend the reach of their content, attract more interest in their company, and stay in touch with their investors, members, partners, and employees. The rapidly evolving event technology space has enabled companies to have thousands of additional people engage with a virtual event and keep them coming back to view on‐demand after the event has ended. So instead of being at a physical event they are now participating from their home or office from any corner of the world.

A major benefit of the hiatus from in‐person event delivery is that it has forced in‐person events teams to finally embrace virtual delivery in ways that would not have been possible if they'd been focused on the production cycle of in‐person events. Out of this hiatus has come an intense focus on how to integrate digital delivery of content: either as virtual‐only or (in the future) as a mix of staged in‐person and virtual delivery. The latter will be important because when in‐person events do return, social distancing measures will continue to heavily impact the way events are staged, requiring larger space footprints to stage them, which will impact revenue and margins and can only be offset by the thoughtful integration of virtual delivery to enhance reach and drive ROI for sponsors.

Like most of us who were forced by COVID‐19 to transition from in‐person events to virtual‐only and hybrid delivery models, you're going to learn a lot about this transition and the limitations of traditional program formats built around in‐person attendees. What works for an in‐person event does not necessarily translate to success online. You'll need to innovate and look at things differently, in terms of the types of content, the duration of sessions, and speaker and topic selection. Some considerations in this new virtual events world include:

 Pre‐Event Research: gather questions to help shape the programs, and leverage integrated channel marketing to foster meaningful audience engagement.

 Content Integration: work to align content produced at virtual events within your year‐round content strategy so you're able to continually nurture audiences.

 Value of Curation: analyze what is the best way to capture your content. You may find it's better to record sessions with certain speakers so you can spend the time after the content is recorded to edit and create a more dynamic presentation. However, other speakers may be better captured live.