Planners prefer face-to-face events

J Spargo recently completed a pre-show survey of the members of  Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) that showed that the majority of their meeting planners felt that virtual meetings would never replace face-to-face meetings.

Here are the key elements of the physical experience they reported technology cannot replace:

1. Socializing and networking spontaneously
2. Helping attendees best put names with faces
3. Allowing more free and open dialogue between attendees and vendors/presenters
4. Training effectively via live and personal interaction
5. Paying greater attention to others when face-to-face
6. Engaging in real-time conversation that is not interrupted by technical glitches

What virtual events ARE good at is to cost-effectively extend an event’s reach to a much larger audience.

 

MPI experiments with a virtual event

Congratulations to Meeting Professionals International for the leadership shown in extending their July World Education Congress (WEC) with a virtual event. Not only did it allow MPI to distribute access to some content and exhibitors to those who did not attend, or continued access to those who did, but, as an event organization, it provided information and an example to their membership.

The decisions they made in how they did this exemplify the issues we all face in facing this new opportunity. What to charge for? How much to charge? Will it cannibalize existing attendance? What to put online and what not to?

Similar questions marketers face with every new technology.

There are no perfect answers, and we should not wait for them. We’ll only figure out best practice by diving in,  making the best judgments we can, and comparing notes.

Some of MPI’s decisions:

• The full $625 access pass for the physical event includes the virtual event. (Good call.)
• The Virtual Access Pass was $299. (About half price.  Logical.)
• The General Assembly alone was $19. (Hm.  I’d be inclined to make this one free.)
• The virtual event is open for six months.  (I bet this is partly to allow a down time between ‘events’ to build interest for the following year.

I don’t have their attendance figures.  Generally the combo physical and online events this year have seen similar attendance figures to what they expected without a virtual event (down slightly from 2008), but a much higher total combined audience.

Did it cannibalize attendance?  No way to prove it one way or the other, but it certainly did not create a major dip in physical attendance that hurt the event.

Every survey says that people prefer the physical event: and some simply can’t make it whether you offer the alternative or not.

 

When a virtual event isn’t an event

The case studies on meetingsnet.com got me thinking in another direction:

When content is moved to a new medium, it needs to adapt to the new medium. Remember when web sites used to look like a pdf of the print magazine?  Gradually we learned how best to use the new medium, and differences that appeared to be limitations turned out to be opportunities.

When a meeting is moved online the major change can be thought of in terms of time.

• As a limitation: attendees aren’t going to like sitting at their computers all day, and we can’t force them to when they aren’t onsite
• As an opportunity: we no longer have to force our content into 1 to 3-day increments

The entire notion of an event as a specific period of time is created by the demands of bringing hundreds of people to one place.

So lets re-think the purpose of our sales meeting: to educate our sales people about our new products, new marketing pieces, new opportunities.  So when it is online, why does it need to be an event?  Lets hold a series of webinars. Conference call discussion groups. Post videos.  Archive for future reference.

One hour per day for a week. One morning per week all year round. Hm…  The possibilities are endless and empowering.

Hey, we still need in-person events.  But online doesn’t have to perfectly mirror them.

 

Virtual event case studies

Nice piece in the May issue of Corporate Meetings & Incentives.  Also found on meetingsnet.com.

We can all learn from each other’s experience in working with virtual events.

My pet peeve: so often the discussion is framed as using virtual events to replace physical events. And we reach the same conclusion over and over: yes it was cheaper, and we reached more people, but people missed the face-to-face interaction.  To the point where the virtual event can’t be repeated consistently.

Instead lets think in terms of augmenting and extending.  The Golden Gate Software case study describes switching from two in-person sales meetings a year to one physical and one virtual.  Great idea.

Stratus Technologies converted their user conference to entirely online.  While it attracted twice as many attendees, and brought in an international audience, attendees missed the live interactions.  And the piece doesn’t discuss how much time and involvement the attendees devoted to the virtual event:  usually it is much less than they would have in-person.  Hopefully Stratus will look to a combined approach. Alternating if budgets require, or in conjunction with each other if possible.

Budget permitting, the ideal is a physical event supplemented by a simultaneous and archived online event. I’m looking forward to the case study that shows whether and how much in-person attendance drops off when given the choice of the full event in-person or the highlights online.  I’m betting it is minimal, with extensive incremental audience to the virtual version.

 

The Paperless Event: Onsite

Of course, an event producer cannot take the event paperless alone:  most of the paper is actually given out by the exhibitors. The question is:  do attendees really want to collect a bunch of handouts and carry them home?  And when they get home, do they read them?  Or throw the entire conference bag behind the door?

There are various ways to get the exhibitors’ information into attendees’ hands electronically:

1. Each exhibitor collects leads and sends the pdf collateral via email
2. The event producer creates an area of the event website for collateral–or links to it from the exhibitor directory. A sign-in screen can continue to collect leads for the exhibitor to follow up.  Now that the show directory online is further enhanced, lets keep it up all year as an ongoing resource.  Maybe even throw some content around it…
3. Give every attendee a memory stick on a lanyard, to have the desired exhibitors upload their content onto.
4. Packaged solutions include Prism Technologies–the guys with the touch screen kiosk, and BD Metrics, which continues to expand its social network capability to additional event needs.

Or do all four.

Bottom line, it is possible to include exhibitors in a paperless event.  More and more events are already doing just that.