Cool New Marketing Technologies: Caught and Served

Archive for February, 2010

Speaking at Virtual Edge Summit 2010: Steve Gogolak & Darren Ross

By Steve Gogolak

Throwing out a quick, informational post about some upcoming speaking engagements that a few of Cramer’s own have out a the Virtual Edge Summit next week.  For those of you who don’t know, Michael Doyle founded The Virtual Edge Institute as an organization “devoted to helping you plan and produce successful virtual events and meetings that attendees rave about.”  In that spirit, he’s hosting us at the annual Virtual Edge Summit next Monday and Tuesday in Santa Clara, CA!  Aside from being excited to catch up with industry luminaries like Ben Chodor at Stream57 (recently acquired by Intercall), Brent Arslaner and the rest of the Unisfair team, I’ll be speaking Tuesday afternoon in a session titled “Virtual Event Platforms are not Virtual Events.”

Why the title, you ask?  I’ll be covering how you cannot rely exclusively on the features of any particular platform to drive event engagement.  Kind of how you can’t rely on a sweet hotel venue to just magically make your face to face event great.  Same idea.

Darren Ross, will also be speaking in a virtual session at 1:15pm PT (4:15pm ET) on Wednesday, Feb 23rd about event engagement within specific webcasts titled, “Add ‘Live Event Sizzle’ to Your Virtual Event.”  In it he will teach attendees how to create a webcast program that is inspiring, engaging and ultimately impactful.  Ok – so impactful isn’t really a word, but we marketers make up words all the time.

Check out the full event program on the Virtual Edge Summit site and please let us me know if you’re going to be there by sending me a DM @sgogolak on twitter or commenting below!

See you in sunny San Fran!

PS – Online registration is free if you participate in a survey!

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Posted in Virtual Events, Webcasting | Comments Off

Virtual vs. Face to Face: 3 factors you can’t forget

By Steve Gogolak

Forbes recently released a report about the importance of face to face meetings that details results of a survey of more than 750 business executives.  Keeping the audience in mind, note that executives feel that meeting face to face is still critically important to build relationships.  No argument here, but not every meeting is for executive level attendees.  (check out a quick summary of the report here if you’re pressed for time).

When making the decision between face to face and virtual, consider the following:

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Posted in Event Solutions, Virtual Events | 1 Comment »

Will having a virtual event hurt my face to face event attendance?

By Steve Gogolak

Do Not Enter

I’ll be perfectly honest with you, there is very little data available about online events hurting or helping face to face attendance.  I get asked this question all the time and, based on the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, it seems like virtual events either have either no impact or a positive impact on face to face attendance.  Here are a few things to consider:

  1. If your company’s travel budget has been restricted and you can no longer travel to the annual *whatever* event, you simply can’t go.  Period.   This is still a reality, even as we pull out of the recession.
  2. To the participants, virtual events still don’t demonstrate an equivalent value to a face to face event.  They come darn close if you really invest yourself, but if you’re authorized to travel, chances are you’re going to rather than sit in front of the computer.

To sum up those two points: if you can go, you will; if you can’t go, you hope there is an online alternative.

Looking for further evidence, I decided to ask both my Twitter and LinkedIn network what they all thought.  Silence on twitter, as expected of a complex question.  LinkedIn had some insight to share, however.  Here are a few highlights:

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, Virtual Events | 8 Comments »