Blended Events 101: A Primer for Webcasting Your Physical Conference to an Online Audience

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Now available on-demand

There's been a lot of talk about online conferences, web-based expos and virtual meetings replacing face-to-face events. But many meeting planners don't necessarily see it as an either/or proposition. They are doing both: complementing their live conferences with viewing over the web - either in real-time or on-demand.

The result is a blended event that serves two audiences - those who could not attend the actual meeting and those who attended but want to review sessions again or tune in to ones they missed.

Curious about turning your physical event into a blended conference but don't know where to start? Take heart. In this webinar, Erica St. Angel breaks the process down into bite-sized pieces.

She'll cover:

Definitions of different meeting technology, and what's best to use when
Top reasons meeting planners choose to meet and webcast vs. purely going virtual
How to repurpose your existing conference approach for online audiences, rather than reinventing the wheel
Common pitfalls in planning blended events and how to avoid them
Real-world examples to use as a road map for your organization

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to today's webinar titled blended events

101, a primer for web casting your physical conference to an

online audience.

I'm Shane Tracy, director of training and event services.

I'm joined by Erica St. Angel, vice president of marketing.

Before we get started, I would like to invite you all to ask

questions throughout this presentation by clicking on

the speech bubble located in the Mediasite player. there is

also a poll question to take today by clicking on the pie

chart icon within your player.

I think that's it, I think that covers it.

It's all about you now.

We have a lot to cover, so we're just going to dive in.

And at any time use that asked button.

There's also a links tab if you're watching in Silverlight

Player, there's an i, if you click on that, you'll find

links in there.

Or if you're watching in classic player, there's a

little links button, it looks like a chain of links. and

I'll be referencing those throughout.

And all this will be available on demand so you can go back

and watch it later.

And so we're here to talk about blended events 101.

You're curious about, how do I take what I'm already doing in

terms my event and putting it online.

Where people can watch onsite and online.

So we're going to dive in to the ABCs or ABCDs, if you'll

allow me one, more of blended events.

Why meet and webcast versus purely just going virtual.

How do we define it a blended event?

And then what are the different types of technology

that are out there that you could use?

And what's good to use when.

How do you read purpose your existing conference without

reinventing the wheel, to take what you're already doing and

create a virtual conference.

And how do you avoid common pitfalls.

And so hopefully in the next 20, 25 minutes you'll be able

to do all of that.

So first up, is why meet and webcast versus

purely going virtual.

And every time we do these webinars, we do a poll.

And the ones that we've been asking most recently is,

what's your number one reason for wanting to put your

conference online.

And over half of the responses always come back, I need to

take the meeting to those who can't attend.

So it's not about necessarily trying to just

attract a new audience.

It's about people who you know who come year after year.

Or have every intention of being there but for whatever

reason, be it budget or travel restrictions, they're not able

to come this year.

And it's crushing, and they want the information.

And so you're looking for a way to get that to them.

As a subset of that though, we're starting to hear more

and more where people realize web casting or a blended or

online conference is a way to reach a wider audience.

And to entice people who maybe have been on the fence about

attending in the past, and are now looking for maybe a sneak

peek into what you offer.

And might come in a subsequent year.

The second reason is that the face to face networking is

just never going to go away.

And there are debates raging in all over the web, in the

blogosphere about is virtual going to upset face to face.

For the time being, there are still valid reasons for people

to get together.

And while it may be 50% percent of the reason why you

come to a conference is the content, the other half of

that is the networking side.

Where you're interacting with other attendees, or with the

organization itself.

Or with the exhibitors or the sponsors.

So face to screen is always going to be a part of, and

should be part of your pre-meeting and even

post-meeting strategy.

And some during the meeting.

But that face to face networking on site is still

what many conference goers are going to say that that's where

they get the most value.

And then the third reason isn't necessarily something

that we're seeing coming out of the meeting planning

community yet, but I do think it's important to point out.

By creating a blended event, it's a way to keep your

conference content alive.

For more than just the three to five

days that you're meeting.

So those other 360 days, this is a reason to

bring people back.

I'll give you some examples of that later.

So next up, is how do you define a blended event what

are the technology options.

We define a blended event as your complementing the live

event with viewing over the web.

You can see here we've got a guy on the stage, she's behind

a podium, he's making a presentation, he has a

PowerPoint.

And their people in the audience watching.

And at the same time, just like you are today, there are

people watching at home.

And so for the online attendees, this is an

opportunity to view the conference content.

For your onsite attendees, it's an opportunity review.

And I'll run through now some different types of technology

and why they are great and what they're good.

And also what some of the challenges are with them once

you try to go into the blended conference space.

So first up in his audio video and PowerPoint or maybe PDF

slides and links on a conference website.

And this is great if you just want to have something out

there that says, hey look this is what happened at the

conference.

The challenges with that is it's a lot of words, it's a

lot of links.

It's not really engaging.

You're not going to--

it doesn't make you want to dive in.

And there's some usability issues too, if you haven't

synchronized those.

If you're not pushing the slides with the

audio or the video.

Then the person viewing it is going to have to go through

and move forward.

If you have some really intensive slides, sometimes

that can be trying.

And you don't want to do anything that's going to get

in the way of having people consume the content.

It's also tough to create a live online experience when

you're just posting the stuff after the event.

Obviously it's going to be post-conference.

Next up is produced video.

You probably have experience with this.

Where you you've hired a video production crew and they come

in with the lighting, and they shoot.

Somebody probably should have brought a steamer to this one

because I just noticed that the curtain behind him is a

little bit crinkly.

But you're creating a bunch of video, you're

capturing what happened.

And then you're going back.

You're going to take the time to probably digitize or encode

that somehow.

You've got to edit it, you've got to render it.

And then sometimes people will put that on a DVD or CD and

then host that on their website.

And again, it's fabulous for like a highlight reel or for

content where you want super production values.

It's not so great that sometimes it can be expensive.

And there's always that delay of editing.

So it's tough to give live access to that type of video

you're editing after the fact or obviously

putting it on a CD.

And then there are other virtual worlds.

And then you probably all heard about them.

And they're great when you have an

avatar-friendly audience.

Which I mean people who are really excited about new

technology.

And are looking for new ways to engage online.

If you have an audience that maybe isn't really into the

whole idea of building an avatar, and interacting with

people in virtual space.

It's going to be tough to get the same kind of adoption as

you might with some of the other things I'll recommend.

The other challenge with this is that it is only online.

So if you are doing just an online event where the people

aren't coming together, this might be something you

want to look at.

And you can still stream the audio video and PowerPoint

into that space.

But if you're looking to create a blended environment

where you have people onsite and people online, it's tough

to do that in a virtual world.

The other thing too is that there are people who are

technophobic.

Who have not bought in 100% to technology.

And to get them to go in and to start interacting,

especially when you don't have a closed environment, you

might have other people coming in.

Videoconferencing, and as you can see here, this is where

you've got two endpoints or two rooms. Both set up with

technology and that can interface with each other.

Normally that's a closed meeting.

You just have the two sides talking to each other.

Sometimes that can be streamed out live.

It's great when you're doing interactive group meetings, or

you have board members that are in different countries or

opposite sides of the country.

Or for different time zones that need interface.

It's harder when you have say, a conference panel and you're

trying to get people in the room engaged and

people online engaged.

So it's really not so good for one to many.

And to have interactivity, to take advantage of why that

technology exists, you need to have attendees onsite at both

end points.

And that makes it difficult if you've got people sitting-- a

guy, a girl, on their laptop on a couch trying to tune in.

Web conferencing is also a really great for

collaboration.

So you might have video conferencing where you have a

video feed and audio.

Or you might just have audio where you can dial into a

phone bridge and watch a PowerPoint move forward.

It's perfect for small working groups.

It's a little bit of a challenge when you do one to

many, or when you have attendees onsite.

Because again, you're not necessarily working

collaboratively.

You're pushing content from one podium

out to a larger audience.

And there can be significant bridge cost for audio where--

if you have people dialing into a phone line.

For YouTube, I think it's a great way to make content

publicly available after the conference.

It's also great for marketing purposes.

Again if you're going to pay to have a video production

crew in then you can upload that to YouTube.

I do think there's some limitations about how long the

length of those videos can be.

But it's tough to do it live.

It's tough to have people feel like they're engaged online

and onsite.

There's also not any security about it's.

So once it's up on YouTube, other people can embed that in

their blog, they can write around it and make comments.

So you lose a lot of control of your presentation.

And if you want to include PowerPoint with that video,

you'll either have to edit it before it goes in, or include

a link to it in the description

on the YouTube page.

So the question remains-- how you get all these people--

these lovely people wearing 3D glasses watching your

conference interacting with these people who

are sitting at home.

Seeing what these people do.

Your presenters, your moderators in real time.

And that's where blended events comes in.

And that's why we believe that webcasting is the

best way to do this.

And as you see in this image, you've got a

presenter at the podium.

You have their PowerPoint slides, or whatever their

graphic material might be.

You have an audience watching them, and you have someone in

the back of the room who's capturing what's happening and

streaming it to you in the way that you are

watching me right now.

That's the reason why we think blended events--

event webcasting is the perfect way to get your

conference online and onsite at the same time.

Let's walk through some of the features of this technology.

It's capturing what happens in the room.

The guy on the stage or the panelists and the people

watching them, all of that gets synchronized just like

you're watching right now.

It's in real time, so the people that are watching from

home are seeing exactly what's happening in the room at the

same time that it's happening for the onsite audience.

And you can watch on demand, so both groups can go back and

see it later.

There's interactivity between the onsite and online.

You can use the ask button just like

you've got right now.

The opportunity to click on a speech

bubble to ask us a question.

And you can build networking around it.

Where if you have Facebook pages or a forum on your

website you can have people interacting around the

content that way.

You can also create a registration module so that

you can tie it into your existing registration for your

conference.

Or if you work with a provider that offers this, it can be a

totally separate track.

But it gives you more options than just links on a page, or

some of the other technology that I talked about.

You've also got security.

If a presentation for some reason-- the content should

change, or something gets mentioned that you wish

wouldn't have been mentioned, you can pull that presentation

down so that people can't see it.

You can also preclude people from sharing the links if it's

only available for people who have paid for access.

There are tons recording tools.

I think after you've done this a couple times it becomes

something that it's like crack.

Because you want to get in and you want to see how many

people watched that presentation.

How long did they watch for, who were my most popular

presenters that year.

It can really cost effective because you're capturing

what's happening in real time, putting it

online as it happens.

So there's really no editing, no post production.

But you still have good quality content that people

can see immediately afterwards.

Again, you can go that e-Commerce functionality

around it, where you are charging either for an entire

conference pass or for individual presentations.

It's very easy to use, you just click on a link

like you did today.

And in terms of your company's perspective, you're working

with a provider who is going to set up a

catalog ahead of time.

It's a very easy to use technology from the viewer's

perspective.

And for the presenter, nothing really changes.

They walk in, they put on a microphone, plug in their

laptop, and that's it.

And lastly, the integration piece.

I mentioned this little bit earlier.

But if you have a conference site that has a Twitter feed

and has forums and has people setting up meetings.

All of these presentations can be embedded within that space.

So it creates a very sticky environment, because there's

no reason to go elsewhere.

You don't have to go YouTube and then come back, or go to

another website and then come back.

It's all within your conference.

So here's an example of presentation style that you

might be watching today.

You have the audio, the video, and the PowerPoint slides.

And here's another version of that with the branding of the

conference at the top.

Just to point out some of the interactive features, you

could have polls, you could have links.

All of this is available in real time then to the people

who are watching online.

Which means they have the same ability to ask questions of

the presenter as the people onsite do.

And that's really key for creating this

experience that immersive.

And it feels like the two sides

are part of one audience.

This is an example of a catalog looks like.

Where you have all different presentations.

They can be set up ahead of time so that as a virtual

attendee, you're just going in and using this as your agenda.

There are other ways to do this.

Here is another version.

And I'm going to blow through these really quick, but if you

go back in on demand, you can actually navigate these

individual slides if you want to check them

out a little longer.

And here's an example where they've embedded that content.

So you can see there's the labelicious presentation at

the lower left.

Where you can actually embed that content after the fact.

And this is one more version of the catalog.

And you can see here that they're showing you the

different kinds of material that they have

and also the ratings.

So the next question is, how do you repurpose the existing

conference approach for online without reinventing the wheel.

And the key thing here is to just capture what's already

happening in the room, Program is a huge undertaking to try

to get all of these sessions slotted, and all of the

presenters briefed.

And come up with content that's going to attract a

great audience.

And so I wanted to walk through some of the main

buckets of--

these are the things you're going to probably already be

doing for your onsite event.

How do I create my online event?

How much more work is this going to mean?

How many more staff?

So, pricing.

It's really no different than the same pricing discussion

you're going to have for your conference.

It's just now you're going to put some of some or all of our

presentations online, what's the value of that.

And there is no right answer.

I get asked this all the time.

Sometimes people leave it at the early bird level for the

online version.

Sometimes it's just $100 less.

Sometimes it's by individual presentation.

It's a smaller dollar figure, something like $20 for

individual presentations that they're buying access to.

Again all live, not necessarily just on demand.

But the key thing is for you, as an organization, whoever

the right people are, to have them in the room and have a

conversation about it.

There are debates raging about whether or not people should

charge for this.

And the power of free.

I've included in the links tab a couple of links to some blog

posts that I think provide both sides.

Many of the comments in those helping you get a real quick

one on one briefing on what's happening right now with

meetings and paying for content online.

But generally speaking, it's just the same conversation

that you had before.

It's just for your virtual audience.

The content, that's an easy one.

It's exactly the same.

I'd recommend just capturing everything

you're already doing.

If you want to get started with just your keynotes and

see how that goes, that's great.

More and more, we're seeing people who say, if I'm going

to sell a virtual pass, I want them to have the same

experience as my onsite attendees.

So I'm going to capture everything.

In terms of your facilities, the key thing is just that

internet connection.

anyone make sure that everybody there all your IT

and AV providers understand that you are web casting, and

that you want to introduced the sides, all

the different groups.

So that they know what's happening, and so that they

know what to expect from each other.

Both on the day of the event and when you go live.

So it's really discussions ahead of time and then

briefing the partners.

The same thing with your speakers.

You want to let them know that you're web casting.

If anybody has an issue being recorded, you want to know

that ahead of time.

And you're probably already doing this right now.

Maybe when you share their PowerPoint slides or whatever

it might be.

And we've actually got some templates that you can use.

A key thing that we've seen more and more is that when you

submit your call for speakers, or put your speaker's

submission in, there is a little check box at the bottom

that says, yes it's fine for me to be captured.

Your materials and handouts.

So this is my sneaky tip.

You can actually use the player experience like the one

you're watching right now to house all of that content.

And this keeps you from having to create that page of text

with all the different links.

It gets people into the presentation experience.

They're probably going to watch and click around a

little bit once they're in there.

And then they can just click on all of those links within

that player.

It's a nice content management system.

It's a very polished waited to present all of that content.

It gives you the control where you know whether those links

are live or not live.

It's the same kind of thing that you do on your website,

it's just a little bit easier to manage.

For your registration, you are really just adding a field

that says, yes I would like to register for the virtual

conference, or the blended event.

You could also ask your partner if they offer a

registration module.

And that might make it easier to keep the audiences

separate, but still the same messaging going out.

But it really should not be that much more hassle.

Instead of getting confirmation link that just

says, yes we charged your credit card, they'll probably

get a confirmation link that says we charged your credit

card and here's a link for the day of.

And then you can hit them again with those links to the

presentation or the login information as you get closer.

Staffing is probably the area where you are going to see the

biggest change with taking your onsite event online.

That's because best practice is to have a moderator in the

room for each presentation, if you want to take questions

from the online audience.

And that's really key.

It's huge to making that online group feel

like they're there.

It's just a matter of having somebody at a laptop watching

a web interface like Shane's doing for me right now.

It could be somebody who's attending the conference who

is actually just a volunteer.

It could be your presenter itself.

It could be the moderator for the panel.

It could just be a staff person.

We've seen it work many different ways.

If you want to make sure that the online attendees feel part

of everything, that's the number one tip to take away.

And also for tech support, it's not necessarily that you

have to have staff that are doing this.

But you just want to broach the topic early on.

If something happens, if you someone in Ohio, and we're in

Vegas, is not able to login, who's going to

contact that person.

And how are you going to help them troubleshoot.

Nine times out of ten, it's just some little configuration

thing on their computer.

But you want to make sure that you've identified staff who

are either at command central, or within your provider's

organization who are going to manage all of those.

Particularly now with things like Twitter, you've probably

been a part of a conference where maybe something's gone a

little bit wrong.

You want to make sure that you're proactive in getting

messages out to people.

Let's look at some marketing.

This is one really where, it's just about tweaking the

message slightly.

And then segmenting.

So you're not necessarily going to have everybody moving

through the same pipeline of your marketing campaign for

the conference.

You're going to have them getting all the same messages,

but they're going to be tweaked to say, go here to

catalog, go here to network.

Again, it should all be pointing

back to the same place.

Just keep in mind that those online attendees are going to

need to hear from you a little bit more

than your onsite attendees.

They're not physically going to be there at the conference

and can't walk up to the desk to ask you a question.

Sway is something that not everybody thinks about.

We've seen it work really well.

If you're coming to the physical conference, chances

are you are going to walk away with a bag, or a mug, or a t

shirt pr whatever it might be.

For your online attendees, consider giving

them something similar.

If it's not a huge conference, you might decide just to mail

it to them.

Or maybe there's some other virtual thing that you can

send through Facebook or something.

It's not like front and center, but it's just one of

those little touches that really makes them feel like,

wow I attended a real conference.

And they're probably going to talk about it.

They're going to have the t-shirt, have the mug on their

desk, whatever it might be.

And they can say, I attended this virtual conference and I

got the tshirt.

And for networking, you're probably

already doing this, too.

With social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, in those

types of groups before and after the event.

There are also some really amazing social networking

tools that are highly event based in the links tab.

You'll see a link to a presentation we did recently

with one of these solutions.

It's a very immersive way to harness all social media

actions that are happening under your

social media umbrella.

So chances are, it's not going to be anything different for

your online attendees than your onsite.

It's something to think about, leveraging your tools.

And for evaluation, you're probably using some kind of

digital evaluation tool.

I'ts been a long time since I've to a conference and seen

paper polling.

So think about just how you're going to have those surveys

filled out for either each session or the

conference in general.

Again leverage the player.

Use the links tab, or use the polling function.

We do have a poll in there right that you can see.

Ask the same types of questions of your onsite and

your online attendees.

It's great to go back and do some segmentation to see how

the evaluation might be different

for those two audiences.

Use that learning in future planning.

So now we're to the final stage.

The common pitfalls.

This is where we see the most trouble, and all of it is easy

to overcome, you've just got to know to think about it

ahead of time.

So before the conference, one of the things we see is maybe

side-load conversations.

Where you've get your events people talking to events,

maybe IT talking to the AV folks, but maybe not.

And then your marketing group over in another corner.

Once you get all those people into a room, then you're

really going to get a 360 of what bringing the conference

to a blended environment is going to mean.

The way to overcome that is just--

talk early, talk often.

Make sure that everybody knows and is coming at the online

event from the same perspective.

One size fits all pricing can be challenging.

I've seen people do it, and do it well.

Be introspective, think about your user group, your

organization, your association what's right for them.

Presenting as usual.

While physically, the present coming into the room doesn't

have to do anything different, it is a good idea to let them

know that people are watching at home.

And if you can do a nod to the camera, that's really going to

bring those people in.

Especially if you have half and half, where half of the

people are onsite and half are online.

There's really nothing else they need to change.

But if they're comfortable doing a nod to the camera,

it's a good idea.

And also reminding them that when questions are asked, if

you don't have a microphone there for the moderator, or

for each person asking questions, to repeat those

questions into the microphone before they're answered.

It's never a good idea to wing it when it comes to

technology.

We always recommend a preflight check.

And we'll sometimes get to events two days in advance to

do lots of testing.

That's the key thing.

The internet is great, but it's not

always a 100% reliable.

So you want to make sure that you're configured optimally.

That just means planning ahead.

Don't ignore social media.

There's all this hype about social media and events.

I think it all goes back to who you are as an organization

and what's right for you.

But don't ignore it.

Especially in the blended environment because this is

where you're going to have an opportunity to get those two

groups interacting with each other and feeling like they're

part of one unit going to this event.

Here's a great example of someone who's done a fabulous

job with incorporating social media.

Just one example of what they've done is with twitter.

This is their registration page.

So the event hasn't even happened yet, and they're

already finding people with the hashtag that they're going

to be using.

And this is who you can follow for conference updates.

People are already beginning to follow each other in

advance of the event.

That helps bring those two sides the audience together.

I thought this was a great tip in the the

don't wing it category--

the preflight check.

One of the conferences that we've worked with is the Sloan

Consortium.

They did a technology bootcamp.

Where a week prior to the actual conference they did a

live webcast, and you've seen yours truly talking about how

do you interact with the player experience, just to get

people's comfort level up.

What's interesting is that they had twice as many people

watching this presentation as were actually registered for

the virtual event.

It wasn't about cannibalizing attendance, it was more about

the understanding the technology that was

going to be in use.

Because the onsite attendees wanted to be able to go back

and review the sessions after the conference.

Next up, during the conference, some

pitfalls that we see.

No dedicated technology, or tech support, or social needs

support those online attendees.

Ignoring the people who are watching, not looking to the

camera, not paying attention to the questions

that are coming in.

And not having an ambassador in the room.

Somebody who's there, thinking about the experience of the

online attendees.

That's probably going to be your conference organizer or

the moderator for the room or one of your staff people.

And I thought this was a great example I

happened to find it recently.

September 17, where somebody had tweeted about a conference

that they were at, and they didn't put the conference name

so it's great for my purposes because I wasn't calling

anybody out.

It's too bad so many recordings of conferences

talks do not properly capture the questions of the audience.

That goes back to reading those questions again so that

the people who watch online can hear things in real time.

If you take nothing away from this 30 minutes, that's the

key thing to remember.

You want them to have the same experience, hear the same

content at the same moment.

And lastly, after the conference.

You're probably going to want to move on to the next thing.

Yes we do begin planning the next year.

Think about what you've just recorded,

what you've just captured.

And how you might leverage that as the upswell for

marketing the next conference.

And here are some examples.

This is real life, this is what we did with our user

conference.

The conference was April 27 and 28.

This is from Google analytics on our website.

As you can see, on the days of the conference the website

traffic was quadruple or ten times what it had been

previously.

You've probably seen similar statistics

from that point forward.

Not a lot activity on the site.

I'd recommend this.

You can either do this automatically through the

system, or you can customize it for yourself.

We sent a post-show or post-conference email saying,

here's what the catalog is, we hope you'll watch it again,

review those sessions and catch anything you missed.

Often people want to be in two rooms at one time.

This gives them an opportunity to watch

that concurrent session.

So we hit it there, and that was the week after in May.

And we also featured it a couple months later in our

newsletter.

This is our July news.

And in this case we chose one presentation that had been

fairly popular onsite where we had a packed room.

So we said, hey, if you missed it at our user conference,

here you can watch it again.

And I thought I'd show you the activity report then.

This kind of reporting you can get from someone webcasting

platforms, ours included.

Where during the conference our online viewership was

somewhere between 17 and 20 people, somewhere in there.

When we sent the post-show a week later, we had almost 50

people watching.

This is all online.

And that only went to people who were registered attendees

either onsite or virtually.

And then nothing happened in June.

I'm not surprised people are going on vacation.

And then July comes back and we use we do our newsletter,

and again we have another hit.

But if you look at it, we basically quadrupled the

number of viewership that we had for the online model only

by sending two emails.

That content was a great presentation.

So it was great for the presenter, so we can feed that

information back to him and he knows that what

he said had an impact.

Those two email blasts actually raised this to be the

top five presentation up out of all of the ones that we

captured that conference.

Just because you're done capturing doesn't mean that

the work is done.

There's really tons of marketing

opportunity after that.

I wanted to point out before we go to questions, hopefully

I haven't talked too fast, and we've covered a lot of ground

in enough time.

I want to point out our webcasting tool kit.

This an overview of-- once you've decided to webcast,

what are some of the options.

Should I do live or on demand?

Should I create CDs or just stream?

Lots of different scenarios that will help you frame the

dialogue in your organization about how you want to take

your conference to be a blended event.

What to look for a provider, some checklists before,

during, and after.

And then a template of four presenter release forms. So

that you can now that we're going to record, this says

yes, I approve that.

And some presentation best practices.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Shane.

Well thank you very much Erica.

We have a couple of questions here.

One, I was almost going to interrupt you because it was