Transitioning to Virtual and Hybrid Events. Ben Chodor

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.

      NOTE

      “As an information services company, we have recently invested significantly in our virtual events products and platform, because we understood the value and importance of the channel in distributing content to our most engaged audiences. An analysis of our audience data revealed that our virtual attendees are among our most loyal and engaged audiences, often spending hours consuming and interacting with our brands and branded content, all the while generating unique perspectives and insights on industry topics, products, or trends. In fact, most of our top customers have grown with us through deeper adoption of our virtual events platform.”

      —John Whelan, CEO of the Cyber Risk Alliance

      You can leverage the brand trust that you've established among your attendees and customers to migrate them to virtual delivery in lieu of in‐person delivery without impacting revenue.

Virtual event attendees are a rich source of data insight to build programs to deepen the relationship between your brand and customers. You can also use the insight to cultivate market and customer perspectives, which can allow you to significantly enhance the value of your marketing solutions.

      Having established the strategic value of your virtual event audience, you can make them the focal point of your content and audience growth strategy, seeking to expand the range of content and programming on your virtual event platform, and to position interaction as a core component of your customer's journeys.

OPTING FOR A HYBRID EVENT

      A hybrid event is a physical event that has a portion or the entire content program available online; bottom line, there is always a physical element to a hybrid event.

      The obvious and immediate appeal is the expanded reach you have to engage a larger audience that doesn't attend the physical event. We know for the foreseeable future, events will be virtual and even when we go back to physical events you will still see a virtual/hybrid portion of the program included; the world has changed forever. Think of the hybrid element of your event as your event insurance policy going forward. It is your continuity plan in this unpredictable world we now live in. When I first got into the world of streaming and virtual events, a lot of event organizers would be worried that if they offered their event and programming online, that they would have fewer people attend the physical event because attendees would decide to stay home and watch online and they would make less money from the event.

I used to tell clients, prospects, and anyone who could hear my voice, that virtual events do not cannibalize physical events. In fact a good virtual event will make the virtual attendee want to attend physically and it would give you the ability to grow your audience and keep your event going after the physical event ended, but a lot of event planners were still too scared about the risk of cannibalization of their event and could not see the value of bringing their events virtual. Well guess what: it's not that virtual events are cannibalizing your physical events, it's that the world has now cannibalized your physical event.

      Many forward‐thinking companies have and will use hybrid events to increase their audience across geographical divides and further their education and communication. Despite fears of dropping in‐person attendance, data suggests that physical face‐to‐face participation increases with hybrid events. Hybrid events also extend the reach and life of your content, allowing companies to tap into new markets, acquire new attendees/users, and open the doors to more business opportunities and engagements. As we think about going back to some sort of physical event, I believe you should add a virtual or hybrid element to any meeting or conference you are planning now or in the future; the technology is finally here to enable you to easily do it.

      As I look to the future, I believe we will start with smaller physical events, let's say audience sizes up to 100 or so people meeting simultaneously in various cities around the country or even around the world at the same time, and you will be streaming/broadcasting to and from each of the locations and to a virtual audience, all at the same time. I believe even when you plan meetings with thousands of attendees, you will have satellite/hybrid audiences at various physical locations and a virtual audience participating from home or their offices.

      LEVERAGING THE POWER OF VIDEO AT HYBRID EVENTS TO ENHANCE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT AND SATISFACTION

      I have had the honor of working on a lot of truly innovative and amazing virtual and hybrid events, so I asked a former client and collaborator to give an example of one of his hybrid events from the pharmaceutical industry. This is a hybrid event that I had the privilege of working on with Spiro Yulis, CEO and Founder of SkyArx, a pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing and event company.

A global top 10 pharmaceutical company was launching a new respiratory product and wanted to include virtual events as part of its promotional strategy for communicating with health‐care professionals. The marketing team had experienced limited success with traditional webcast programs for other product launches and was looking for a more innovative, engaging, and personal virtual solution.

      After consulting with the client on a variety of approaches, they decided on the delivery of a hybrid solution broadcasting to live and virtual audiences.

      The primary speaker for the series, an international thought leader in respiratory medicine, presented as part of a live dinner program in front of 75 physicians at a restaurant in a major market. His presentation was broadcast to audiences at 15 other live dinner programs across the U.S. as well as hundreds of at‐home viewers.

      We featured all these remote audiences across the country on‐camera as part of the broadcast to create a sense of connectedness among participants and foster a more personal and engaging question‐and‐answer session. We also enabled audiences from their homes or offices to participate and ask questions as well.

      Each live program site was staffed by a single‐camera broadcast crew to capture audience activity that was integrated into the broadcast. The show opening included a “round robin” of live introductions of each location, where the local pharmaceutical representative program host shared a greeting from their audience with some local flare. Live footage from the sites was peppered in throughout the broadcast, with a fun and lively second screen gamification activity mid‐program to keep the audience energized.

Participants from all sites were invited to ask the speaker questions live, on camera, at intervals during the broadcast, showing in split‐screen with the presenter. Offering a real‐time, on‐camera, verbal exchange with this national thought leader was a big draw for them, and a differentiator from typical webcasts where audiences are limited to typing their questions into the perceived “great abyss” of a webcast platform, only for them to go unaddressed during – and after – the program. The “1:1” live interaction with the speaker and the ability for each of the live sites to see each other on camera were definite keys to success.

      The final participant total (live and at‐home) was a record