Cool New Marketing Technologies: Caught and Served

Posts Tagged ‘virtual event’

Virtual Event Evolution – what will happen next

By Steve Gogolak

Fellow Virtual Event blogger Dennis Shiao has taken a fantastic step toward innovation by suggesting in a recent post that the community come together to develop a “wish list” of sorts for what virtual event platform companies should consider on their product road maps.   After Dennis twisted my arm (not really), I jumped in and contributed to the thoughts already laid out by he and Miguel Arias over at Imaste.  Check out our thoughts on the wiki Dennis created.

So here’s a good chance for you to weigh in down in the comments.  Perhaps consider answering one of these questions:

  • What do you hate most about virtual event technology?
  • What one current feature, if removed, would cause the world to end?
  • What is the one piece of technology you want inside virtual event platforms that isn’t there yet?

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Posted in Virtual Events, Webcasting | Comments Off

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 »

Do people really stay online all day for a virtual event?

By Steve Gogolak

asleep at the computer

Good question! Unfortunately, the answer is no, but they stick around for a lot longer than you would think.  Perhaps we should rephrase to, “How long do people stay online at a virtual event?”  Much better.   Recent data coming from events run by Unisfair show that users will stick around for between two and three hours at a time.  I’ve seen this first hand with the events we’ve run, too.  That said, there are a lot of variables baked into that generic number.

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Posted in User Experience, Virtual Events, Webcasting | 4 Comments »