The Tale of Two Screens - how to enrich virtual experiences with more than one interface

Like most organizations, Zensar has an annual sales orientation and training event which is usually a pretty big and glitzy affair. Usually it involves many people flying to a location, and spending two to three days immersed in content designed to get them ready for the year ahead. While it took many people from many departments to put this together, it has been led by Marketing; EDGE (what it's called) is one of the "big ticket" items in our calendar.

This year of course, with most airplanes becoming expensive paperweights, EDGE was moved to a virtual platform - EDGE Live!. And the timing was perfect, as we had just launched our white-glove virtual experiences service offering - Everywhere Experiences. What a great success it was! There was tremendous learning, interactivity and engagement...much beyond the expectations of most participants. And while the content and the production was flawless...the entire experience was made special because of something unique we did. We had a "two screen" event.

Let me explain.

How often do you use your phone while watching something on TV? I use my phone very often to check game scores, player profiles, actor information, background stuff etc. on what I am watching on the main screen. It used to be distracting at first...but now it enriches my experience. Truth is, multi-screen interfaces are here to stay in our living rooms. So why should virtual events be any different?

The Power of Two Interfaces

For the main event we used Microsoft's excellent Teams Live - which we completely customized for the purposes of our event. We created the agenda, a landing page, FAQs, Surveys etc. on Teams itself.

So far so usual. We then augmented the main platform with ZenEDGE - our own custom built mobile-first knowledge-management & sales-engagement platform. And I use the word Augmented with care - because we made sure that the mobile platform, securely available to all participants of EDGE Live, added to the experience.

We made sure that event attendees were motivated to use the ZenEDGE mobile platform...and enhance their overall experience. Not only that we made sure that the second screen helped in ensuring they paid more attention to the first screen! Sounds intriguing? Well, read on and find out.

Mobile phones - a trusted ally for gamification

4 days and 24 hours of presentations can be an ordeal for any one. So we decided to have a 30 min "Fun Zone" every day in the agenda. Every day the Fun Zone had games like a Trivia Spinner, Know-your-Zensar quizzes, Photo-sharing contests, Winning-pitch contests etc. And the home for all these games was the mobile phone - specifically the ZenEdge app. While our trusted emcee was keeping the crowd active on the main screen, folks were busy gaming on their phones...and racking up points, which went straight to the leaderboard. And boy, was competition fierce. There was brief period of time our COO, Prameela Kalive was top gun! Fun Zone, provided event attendees with a nice reprieve from the intense learning, and also connect with their colleagues...on a platform everyone is supremely confident in using. Their mobile phone.

Augmented Reality (AR) enabled scavenger hunt

Sprinkled across 40+ presentations, were a few hidden-in-plain-sight Samurai warriors. Participants were encouraged to scan said warriors using their ZenEDGE app, which would automatically add points to their leaderboard tally. People with the most scans were awarded "Most Attentive Attendee"; and recognized for their diligence. So you see...the second screen motivates people to pay attention (and stay seated) on the first one! While we didn't have the time to do AR based content (scan a marker, and watch a contextual video, for example) - the platform definitely supports it!

Information at your fingertips

This one is probably the most obvious use of the second screen. In this age of "Meta" information, there is always more that you want to know about what is happening in front of you. Information about the Information being presented to you. (Sounds silly if you say it like that, but how many times have you checked out the profile of an actor on screen, or checked a more detailed article on a news item that you just saw on TV.) The ZenEDGE app was a trusted companion to the participants, offering all kinds of contextual information like speaker details, relevant video/multimedia content, further reading links etc. Technology has made us avid multitaskers... there is no reason for virtual events not to exploit that!

Social Interaction - check!

Humans are social animals. They like something, they want to talk about it. They dislike something, they want to talk about it even more! We enabled the ZenEDGE app with a social media "wall" for participants converse with one another, leave the comments of appreciation (Well done Marketing team!) or suggest improvements.

Post-event Archive

The content that was presented at the event was engaging, and enlightening. But it was also copious. How much of what was presented would be remembered a few days and weeks after the event? The ZenEDGE app provides ready access to the entire content archive, sorted and stored as per topic and place in agenda. This archive will be available for all participants until the next EDGE Live event happens.

These are just few of the benefits of a context-aware second screen. It is not a distraction, but an enrichment to the experience. I would even go further and say that if your virtual event or experience does not have a multi-screen strategy - you might be missing on a great opportunity to engage and enthrall your audience!

Do you want to know more about Everywhere Experiences? Click here and read all about it!