On the future of events

On Tuesday, I shared a diagram I'd made to help me understand the virtual event landscape. I offered to run a free webinar about it. It starts at noon. I expected 50 people; so far 687 have registered.

While that image was pretty technical, the talk has a lot about event business and culture. Here are some key learnings I figured I'd share:

Beware Skeuomorphism:

Don't drag physical assumptions into the virtual world. Atoms have friction, bits are cheap and malleable. Start with what your event is for, and work out the tech from that perspective with fresh eyes. This is hard.

Time and space don't matter:

Why have three parallel tracks, instead of three separate days with one track each? Why are you doing only one event timezone when your audience is global?

Mobile/screen first:

Why would an audience watch a long talk from their workstation when they could be streaming to Chromecast on their couch and interacting on their phone (at least for keynotes.) You know, like they do the rest of the time.

Physical artifacts:

When something is scarce, it's valuable. Physical objects have emotional impacts. What can you send attendees before/after that builds community, engagement, and interest?

Timely and timeless:

Content's either timely (breaking news; the event happens live, artificial scarcity; audience helps shape it) or timeless (a recording.)

• Timely content is like a talk show. A host and a guest; the moderator matters as much as the expert, and may in fact be more famous.
• Timeless content can work, but it has to feel like the Rocky Horror Picture Show: The content may be familiar or available elsewhere, but seeing it live as part of a group adds significantly to the experience.

The century of the speaker is over:

Once, we did everything for the speaker's convenience, gathering in one place. Now, we do everything for the community, because speakers, sponsors, and the audience trust us to gather the best people.

Always in the shopping cart:

With digital events, the audience is one tap or click from a transaction. Buy a speaker's book; agree to a sales call; back them on patreon. We may even see a revolution in pay-what-you-will events. This has huge consequences for both sponsors (who will get better accountability and demand it in future) and speakers (who have new business models, and may, in fact, be in competition with event organizers now.)

Onboarding is everything:

Even with a decent platform, out of 670 registrants, 5 mailed me with problems registering. Two of them were CTOs. You need to own, test, and debug the conversion flow to registration and attendance as if you'd built a software product. BECAUSE YOU HAVE.

I have a lot more observations, and I'll get into these. I hope you can join me in around 2.5 hours. It's free, and hopefully fun.