The Comeback Of Conferences And Meetings

Prior to COVID-19, in-person conferences, meetings, conventions and tradeshows comprised the largest slice of the B2B marketing pie, averaging 12% of the budget, according to a Forrester report. This is where buyers make major purchasing decisions, executives discuss strategy, sales teams set goals and make plans, customers attend “user conferences” to learn how to best use a company’s products and more. The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on highly attended events. One day, the meetings and events will return to the normal levels of the past. The question isn’t a matter of if they will. (They will.) The question is when, and until that happens, what are we to do?

The short answer is to go digital. Remote or virtual meetings can be as small as a few people coming together as if they were in a conference room or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, an event with as many as 10,000 plus attendees. Do virtual gatherings work? If done well, yes. Are they as effective? In some ways, yes. On the content side, they can be extremely effective—maybe even more so than in-person meetings. The biggest drawback is the need for human-to-human interaction. The ability to meet people and network can be fostered in a virtual environment, but event organizers need to make a deliberate effort to ensure this aspect is not lost.

While the near-term solution is to go virtual, the long-term solution isn’t to go back to face-to-face events. Long-term, we will have both. For now, the world has turned to digital options.

If you look back at the history of video conferencing, it actually started almost a century ago in the 1930s and was known as videotelephony. It wasn’t until 1970 that AT&T developed a product that was something like a “rough draft” of what we have today. On top of that it was expensive, and the quality terrible by today’s standards. Skype was released in 2003, but was originally more about one-on-one communication. The Cisco Webex product came about in 2007, and its focus was on demonstrations (as in webinars) rather than true virtual interactions. Zoom, which has proved a popular virtual tool, didn’t come around until 2011. In short, if the COVID-19 pandemic had happened 15 years ago, we wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable with the concept of remote or digital meetings.

There is no replacement for the ability to network with peers, meet with friends and make new connections. Speakers and demonstrations in the general keynote sessions, breakouts and workshops are part of the experience of an in-person meeting, but it is often the side conversations in the halls and at meals that are some of the biggest benefits of the events. These will be back soon enough. In the meantime, we must consider the alternative, which is the digital or virtual meeting.

I had a chance to connect with Lisa Riley, VP and global head of events at Forrester, and she shared some insights to help us understand how to deliver a successful virtual event. Every year, Forrester has its annual SiriusDecisions summit where sales, marketing and product leaders meet in person. This year, when most organizations were canceling their events due to COVID-19, Forrester took a bold stand by pivoting and offering their event as a fully paid digital event. It might surprise many to learn that attendance at the 2020 summit was virtually (get it?) the same as it had been in-person the year before. This proves that a virtual event still allows an organization to bring people together en masse, and there are specific reasons for that success.

First, many organizations have opted to make their virtual conferences free to their attendees. Forrester bucked the trend and charged for attendance. The firm was confident in its ability to deliver the same experience that its attendees have come to expect from the event. To date, the paid event has had more than 100,000-plus content views and more than 80,000 visits to the virtual exhibition show floor, which included nearly 50 sponsors showcasing their offerings. There were more than 175 total presentations, which included 18 concurrent tracks featuring over 20 external client case studies. This was topped off by a keynote address from Brené Brown and a live, private concert from Adam Levine.

To honor its commitment to its strong community of sales, marketing and product professionals, Riley decided to go virtual just six weeks in advance of the live event. Her strategy was simple; she said, “Our customers need us more than ever. This is our 15th year running this event and we need to keep our brand alive.” To do this, Riley and her team at Forrester had three main objectives:

1.      Deliver on thought leadership through their analysts, which they are known for. In addition to the keynote speeches, they bookended each day with recognizable speakers and entertainment.

2.      Recreate the community. Through chat and social media, “attendees” were able to interact, leave comments and ask questions. The organizers added gamification to further engage the attendees. Participants were actually taking screenshots and sharing them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

3.      Have a marketplace where buyers could virtually visit the exhibition/tradeshow floor and talk to sponsors. This is always one of the highlights of any major conference.

What Riley and her team learned was that you start with strategy and objectives first. Build out your program. Then work on delivering it via a virtual platform.

There are a number of concerns anyone planning a virtual meeting should think about. As Riley noted, “We had contingency plans A, B and C.” What happens if the platform crashes? What if the Internet goes down? What if the guest’s Internet drops? There are plenty of things that could go wrong. That’s why it’s important to align with the right company to produce the virtual event, just as you would a live event. Also look for alternative solutions, such as not doing everything live. Good production value that integrates slides, music and other visuals can help keep an audience engaged.

The goal of any virtual conference is to simulate the in-person experience. But the attention span of someone watching a computer screen is far different than one watching a speaker in front of them on a stage with lights, slides, a booming sound system, walk-on and walk-off music and more. The answer, according to Riley, is for “speakers to cut down on their presentation times. Condensing the day, instead of offering a full day of content, with breaks and content curation is key.” Carefully select which speaker goes where to help keep attendees engaged throughout the entire day and, ultimately, the entire conference.

What will happen when life returns to some sense of the pre-pandemic days and we can go back to having live events? Riley thinks “we will have a hybrid approach—a combination of both virtual and live.”

Riley’s final words of advice are as follows. “People who want to produce a virtual event are paralyzed by the virtual platform. That’s the final step. First focus on what you want to deliver. What do your customers want? What key benefits do you want to drive? After that, choose the technology. It’s not a technology decision. It’s a strategic decision about content and client focus.”

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and the host of Amazing Business Radio.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.