Enough time has elapsed since the start of the pandemic (and the temporary end of in-person events) that we can make some early observations about trends – and mistakes – we’re seeing in the event space. In this episode we provide some cautions about the current market and offer thoughts about your own events through the end of 2020 and beyond. We are in a time of both uncertainty and opportunity, and only a smart strategy and creativity will prevail as businesses fight to gain your attention and participation.

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Welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt. This is going to be an event-focused episode again, since we’re starting to see some trends develop and this is a good time for a check-in on that.

We’re now 4 months into the pandemic. The country is largely trying to reopen in fits and starts. We’re in that in-between stage where we’re all anxious to get out and reestablish some normalcy, but still reluctant and apprehensive about sitting in a restaurant or getting a haircut. I’m no prognosticator, although I have my suspicions about how this will play out over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, politics is the lens through which so many decisions are being made, and that worries me, so my hope is still that you’re taking precautions and staying safe.

As I said, I want to talk about some of the events trends we’re starting to see emerge, some good, some not so good, and a few that will take more time to be able to evaluate.

I’m old enough to remember the first time I saw the internet. I don’t mean as a kid. I mean as an adult seeing a Mosiac browser showing actual web pages. It was fairly mind blowing to me, but not to my boss at the time who couldn’t understand how it had any advantages over a fax. He wasn’t what you would call visionary. I’m not sure I was either, but I sure as hell knew this was a sea change for our agency’s clients.

What I found interesting was how so much of the early internet was made up of two elements. First, access to information. A lot of it was academic-focused, but companies quickly started jumping in to create their own pages. I remember radio ads—remember listening through those?—where they’d end with “Find us on the internet at HTTP://blahblahblah.com. Man, what a world. The second were the entrepreneurs, trying to create new business models. Everyone knows Amazon was already selling books online, and so that’s what we tend to imagine. But there were plenty of efforts to try to replicate the real world on the internet. The best (or worst) example I can think of were virtual malls. Think for a moment about a mall. A huge building with every kind of store under the roof. Virtual malls were websites that you’d go to and hit a landing page that would in essence be the entrance to a mall. And on that page you’d see a ton of little banner ads for stores at the mall. Shoe stores. Book stores. Clothing. Jewelry. The idea, in as much as it ever could be called an idea, was that you’d go to the mall online just like you would in the real world, then choose your store, and each store was paid for by a merchant who had their store “AT” that mall.  Let’s think for a moment about what a terrible idea that was. A 10-year-old would have asked the same question as an adult…if you want to go to a shoe store on the internet, wouldn’t you just visit the shoe store website directly? You certainly don’t go to a website that has within it a hundred stores and see if they have a shoe store.

I struggle to really convey just how dumb this idea was. And it lasted for the blink of an eye because of course no one thought that way, even in the very earliest days of the internet.

So that’s a good transition to the talk about the first trend we’re seeing with online events, and what we think is turning out to be the first mistake. It’s trying to replicate an in-person experience online, note for note. Now, I don’t want to be wholly dismissive of what’s being attempted here, except to lend a note of caution. Because there are companies that have created online platforms designed largely around the idea of doing just this. They have live video with presenters and keynote speakers. They have virtual booths, and those virtual booths are staffed in real time by companies who know when you’re taking a look, and can start a dialog with you instantly. There are sophisticated tracking metrics and tools for follow up. There’s a large effort to try to create something that has immediacy and a reason to attend. But I remain a bit dubious about how effective these efforts will be long term. I agree that attending these events to hear a speaker or seminar is appealing. But I wonder how much time is being spent in the booths. We have a client who recently participated in one and thought the speaking opportunity was worthwhile. But their fairly expensive virtual booth languished with no real engagement and no leads. The reason I don’t want to be dismissive is because it will take more time to understand the larger metrics, and one client’s experience is too anecdotal for me to reach a conclusion.

Let’s call me cautiously pessimistic, but willing to be swayed. The larger lesson is that just like the virtual malls, you need to carefully consider whether what works in person is a natural fit for online. And I’d suggest that until real numbers start to come in that you tread lightly and use common sense. Zoom parties are a fun way to interact with friends and useful for work, but we’ll quickly hit fatigue that makes me reluctant to think it will replace in-person networking, for instance.

Another reason I’m cautious about this approach is that the pandemic world we’re in feels like (hopefully) a moment in time. It could be a year, or more, we just don’t know. But most businesses are looking toward a return to some of the approaches we are missing now like tradeshows. I don’t’ think for a moment that if a vaccine came out in a year that we’d suddenly say ‘great! But I sure don’t want to travel to another tradeshow now that I can do it online!”

Tradeshow floors in the virtual world are especially fraught. Walking a show floor is where you see the sales stars shine. The people who actively engage passersby. When given a choice, many people—even those with an interest in a product or service—are reluctant to engage at a show, whether out of shyness, or not wanting to be sold, or not really being sure what’s offered. Great salespeople put them at ease and get the conversation rolling, which often ends as a new lead. In the virtual world, it’s simply too easy to ignore a chat window. We think some of these event efforts will shift over to more traditional lead generation campaigns designed not to farm huge numbers like you hope for at a show, but to target one-on-one engagement and conversation that has a stronger link to measurable ROI.

Let’s move on.

I talked last time about production values, and the idea that quality matters. I think we’re all familiar with the challenges of zoom meetings, or webex and its relative struggle to stream content in real time. We recently sat in on a webinar where the presenter couldn’t get the slides to advance, and literally sat with dead air for 3 minutes as they waited for the next slide. It was, um, awkward. For as advanced as technology has become, we are still often constrained by bandwidth and the little gremlins none of us can identify in real time that cause issues. So you have a couple of alternatives.

First, you have to get better at being comfortable being uncomfortable. The conference connection may crap out altogether, or you may find your content stuck like the situation I just mentioned. In those times you should obviously be prepared to vamp a bit. The truth is—and here I am putting back on my presentation hat—that if your presentation relies on the audience being able to see the slides, you’re likely presenting wrong. Slides are reinforcement, they shouldn’t BE the story for the audience. But I’ll wager you still see dozens of bullet points and 12 point type. Your audience is there for your expertise. So offer it in a conversational way and keep moving. Promise to send everyone a link to the slides as soon as you finish, and keep talking.

Second, there’s a better way, and it’s the one we’re recommending for our event presenters. The term is simulive, and the idea is to reduce the number of variables to as few failure points as possible. We are producing as much content as we can in advance, including recording the presenters giving their presentations. If your meeting starts at 1pm, and your first presenter starts at 1:05 after a short intro from the host, at 1:05 we press play, and presentation number one, all prerecorded, is off and running. As for questions, we encourage Q&A in the chat window, and announce in advance we’ll address questions at the end. That way we don’t have separate video and audio to fool with. It’s all together and completely ready to go. Yes, things can go wrong, but they’re less likely to, and the presenter gets their best take as the final product. The moment that presentation ends, the presenter is right there, ready to respond to questions live, usually only on audio. It’s seamless to the audience, and results in a smoother event all around. I mentioned on the last podcast that this is the approach we used for two of the main presentations at a Microsoft summit, where we were able to create those great production values along with custom graphics, and it worked great. But it can work quite well for a presentation with just slides on a screen and a presenter voice over.

We’ll have more to say about statistics for virtual events in the future. Right now we only have a few to measure, and while we’re seeing good engagement and attendance rates, I don’t want to put too much stock into so few data points. I’m encouraged that there are ways to navigate this new world and do so effectively.

I want to wrap up with a final topic for consideration, and how these trends lead me to make a recommendation for how you think about going forward. and it ties directly back to how we started, and the mistake of trying to recreate traditional events. If your company relies on a single event each year, whether it’s a customer event or an employee event, you need to remember what made that event special and memorable. It’s not just content. It’s also tied strongly to place and time. If people traveled in, they had an experience along the way. They took days off of their normal work week to be in Philly, or San Diego, or St. Paul or wherever you held that gathering. If I ask you remember the last time you went to the Consumer Electronics Show, your memory is tied strongly to Las Vegas as well as everything you saw on the show floor. If you had a company retreat, your memory of content is tied to meals, or hotels, all of the visceral things that just don’t exist right now.

So what does that mean? It means don’t try to replicate it. Sitting in a home office will never substitute for that trip. We recently had a client suggest they wanted to host a 3-day online conference, just like the one they did live. It’s highly unlikely I can get 1,000 people to sit at their computers for 3 straight days, focused on a screen and engaged. Period. We’re good at what we do, but that’s a tall order for 99% of businesses to pull off, and for 99% of participants to sign onto.

We’re helping clients rethink what they’re trying to accomplish with their events. If it’s customer engagement that happened during an annual 2-day summit, what can we create throughout the year that most closely accomplishes that engagement. Rather than having Continuing Education credits, along with keynote speakers, booths, networking, lunches, etc., we’re breaking those components into smaller chunks so that—for instance—training is a standalone effort. Hearing from industry leaders and visionaries is its own effort. Networking and traditional booths are shifting to new campaigns approaches that don’t try to replicate the booth, but take the look of more traditional marketing practices. Some things, for the time being, are going to be lost until we get back to whatever normal looks like. Think hard about what you want the outcome to be for your efforts. Is it leads? Maintaining mindshare? Being seen as the thought leader? Build your efforts anew around how they can help you accomplish that very focused goal. Your likely to find it looks very different from what you would accomplish in 3 days in Louisville at the big show. A series of ongoing interactions, perhaps attracting a smaller audience to each, can most definitely be a viable replacement for the big show, because you’ll be bringing real value to that audience. And remember that when you accomplish that, chances are you’ll be doing something your competition is not. Being innovative now can help you emerge from this time stronger and more closely aligned to your customers.

That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening.