The age of conversation: 10 ways to add conversation into your virtual event portfolio

You may remember my predictions on the phases of events reopening. I have similar thoughts on the phases that virtual events will go through for your company. Different companies are at different phases right now. It's not right or wrong, it's just where you are on the virtual event maturity scale.

Level 1: Webinars QUICK! Take your event content that was supposed to be at your conference and turn it into a series of webinars!

Level 2: Experiences Webinars are boring. Let's have some fun! How about a bourbon tasting or a cooking show?

Level 3: Conversation Experiences are fun, but we aren't getting any meaningful content across. We need to talk to our attendees.

Level 4: The Balanced Portfolio Understanding that there's a time a place for each event type and are using each one appropriately. Webinars for lead gen and training. Experiences for retention and development of current customers. Conversation for building community and collaboratively solving problems.

I listened to a podcast yesterday featuring my friend David Nour (who Nicole and I met at the Fast Company Impact Council last year), and he mentioned that he spent two weeks joining 128 webcasts. Some were okay. Most were not great. A few were horrible. From presenters who didn't care about their screen presence, to an onslaught of slides with a talking head in the top right corner and no chat interaction at all. But my favorite key takeaway, as he wrote in his blog, was this:

You’re not the hero of the journey. Few people care what you know; they only care about what they’ll know from investing the time, effort, and resources to join you online. Stop making online sessions about you, your book, your brilliant advice, or insights. The session should be 100% about their challenges and opportunities.

Your audience is joining your webcast or event because they are hoping to learn something and meet someone who can help them. If your virtual conference, summit, or event is just a series of broadcasts, you're missing out on (and keeping participants from) the main element of events that attracts them in the first place: Conversation.

But here's the secret to conversation that you might not know: It's not hard. You don't have to be a virtual event expert or have a complicated $100k event platform to inject conversation into your events. It can be 1:1 or a group of 20. It can be pre-planned or spontaneous. It can be speed networking or blocks of time. So today I thought I'd walk you through my top 10 ways to inject conversation into your digital events.

1. The Prescribed Roundtable

This is set up much like a panel discussion where you pick your topic du jour in advance, but rather than broadcasting a couple of people talking to each other, the entire group gets to talk and share. These work best with fewer than 50 people in each breakout so that you can see everyone who has joined. Your panel of experts may kick off the conversation by explaining the topic and sharing their experience with it, then you invite the participants to join in the conversation. This can be offered as a single one-hour session, or bring everyone together and break them out into multiple breakout rooms with concurrent roundtable sessions taking place. You need a host/facilitator of the session to keep the conversation moving, call on people, monitor the chat and make sure everyone who wants to contribute gets a chance to do so, and monitor the time.

2. The Crowdsourced Roundtable

The format of this roundtable is just like #1, however the content is crowdsourced in advance by the participants. Whether they submit their topic ideas to you, volunteer to lead a session, or vote on a selection of ideas you present to them, the content comes from the crowd, but you still pre-plan the facilitators and discussion leaders in advance of the event taking place.

3. The Spontaneously-Crowdsourced Think Tank with Subject Matter Experts

Leveraging the wisdom of the crowds, a spontaneous think tank crowdsources the conversations your participants want to have while they are with you at the event (i.e. in the online session with you). You can use tools like Mural, Miro, Note.ly, or have them vote on the topics with polls, annotations, or even in the chat. But the discussion leaders in this scenario are subject matter experts from your company. The idea for this one is that you have your group of prospects or customers joining you at your event, and your team facilitates the discussion. This works best when your SMEs kick off their roundtable session with the topic that was selected, a little about their expertise on the topic, and then facilitates a conversation or Q&A with everyone in the session. This is relatively easy to do on your own, or the Haute Dokimazo team can facilitate this process for you, administer the Zoom meeting, take notes in the sessions, and provide engagement reports back to you.

4. The Haute Dokimazo Spontaneous Think Tank with Peer-led Sessions

The Haute Dokimazo way adds a little spunk to a roundtable by bringing in energy, music, and an inclusive and welcoming vibe. We crowdsource the topics of conversations like #3 above, with an eye toward problem solving. We ask participants to share a problem that they've solved and can help someone else with, and problems they are currently trying to solve, and within 30 minutes, we curate the discussion topics, identify who can lead the sessions among the participants, and build the agenda for the sessions.

Our team facilitates getting the participants into their breakout rooms, administers the rooms, tracks engagement of the participants, and logistically manages all aspects of the experience for you. We then bring everyone together for a group retrospective to get a readout on the sessions and hear how their experience went. It's your turn-key roundtable solution... with pizzazz.

5. The Speed Networking

If you're using a tool with breakout rooms like Zoom meetings or Webex Training, you can move people around in breakout rooms easily. Consider adding a session into your event where you randomly distribute participants in groups of 3 into rooms to meet and greet. Give them no more than 10 minutes together and have them introduce themselves and answer 3 questions. You can time the rooms to automatically close after 10 minutes, or you can manually control the timing. You can bring everyone back to the main session and reassign them, or you can zap them from room to room while the breakout rooms are open. You might consider using Adrian Segar's Three Questions during this speed networking time: 1) How did I get here? 2) What would I like to have happen? 3) What experience or expertise do I have that others might find useful?

6. The Drop-In Networking

Some online tools give you the ability to see the networking rooms (Airmeet, Social 27, Gatherly) and jump into them. But if you aren't using one of these, you can always set up an area on your event home page with timed drop-in sessions using Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, or any other small-group video conferencing. All you need is someone to host the room and the link to join!

7. The Innovator's Compass

Leveraging the free Innovator's Compass tool designed by design thinking firm IDEO, this 1-hour session brings together your group to get "unstuck." Whatever problem you're trying to solve, the Haute Dokimazo team can facilitate your group through the challenge and into the executable possibilities. How does this fit into the "conversations" category? It's a great session that you can run during an event, as a team-building exercise, or as the kick-off to a strategic planning session. You can run it yourself, or you can hire in the Haute Dokimazo team to facilitate it for you (sometimes it's nice to have an outside facilitator lead your team through a process). Every time we've run this session, the responses from participants have been over the moon with excitement and positivity!

8. The Haute Dokimazo Strategy Session

Building on an Innovator's Compass session, a Haute Dokimazo Strategy Session uses our award-winning framework to focus on a problem that needs to be solved or a set of priorities that need to be defined, and carries that through to having the team create the plan of action to execute on the tactics. Ranging from 3 hours to multiple days, a strategy session is the ultimate format for team conversation, team-building, and team alignment. It's not just a slide-fest of people reading off business unit priorities. And it's not a training session where we make up fake scenarios or do role-playing games. It's a collaborative, co-created session that gets team members working together and using their own wisdom and creativity to solve a real business problem. This is a real planning session where team members will identify the problem, agree on next steps, and create action plans to accomplish the goals.

9. The Conference Call

Remember that time, like 12 weeks ago, when we used to have conference calls and we didn't have to be on screen? We'd start each sentence with, "This is Bob speaking. I think that..." "You're right Bob. This is Mary and we're totally doing..." Nostalgia is the antidote to digital fatigue, and a well-planned conversation via conference call might just be the thing your target audience needs. Run pretty much just like a roundtable, you have a host and your initial conversation starters/case study subjects. They share a bit about their story, then you open up the line for questions, ideas, and conversation. The added bonus here is that participants can actually step away from their computer and get something else done while contributing and participating!

10. The Phone Call

What ever happened to phone calls? For me, when the phone rings, I usually dismiss the call because I'm on a web conference or doing something else. The drop-in phone call has become inconvenient because it's a "push" notification. Someone is "pushing" their time on me. But sometimes... oh sometimes... we look at who's calling and we WANT to answer the phone. Why? Because we haven't talked to them in a while. Or because we need something they have. Or because we have something they need. Or because we love them (hi mom!). So what about adding into your event the ability to set up 1:1 meetings that are actually phone calls? You can use a scheduling tool like Jifflenow, or just a Calendly kind of experience to connect attendees with your subject matter experts or executives, but either way, it brings back the old warm feeling of a great phone conversation that actually allows you make lunch for the kids or enjoy the conversation while going for a walk!

Liz Lathan, CMP is co-founder and CEO of Haute Dokimazo, a "spontaneous think tank” company that empowers participants to solve their business challenges through the wisdom of peers. Haute Dokimazo is part of Haute Companies, a family of companies anchored in human connection, from events to media (podcasts, videos, and more) to direct mail to swag to entertainment talent management to strategy session facilitation.