More than 41.6 percent of people identified technology in work and life to be very influential in the future of the meetings business. In fact, as we all know, event technology is a rapidly growing field.
Indeed, a new trend in the Event Industry is borned from this technology evolution: the “Online Meetings” instead of “Onsite Meetings”.
Few companies already use this kind of meetings and managed it for a long time through conference calls, for instance. However, this kind of events called “hybrid events” seems to be more and more usual and extend to leisure events too.
This type of conference definitly has a lot of avantages, for companies and for the audience. First of all, it allows to reduce the production costs. By consequent, as the actual economic climate is not very good, online meetings are well welcomed; Online Meetings are cheaper than Onsite Meetings. Various costs can be cut as accomodation, meals, transports, or venue rental. It also allows more flexibility; for the women, for example, who need to manage their time between their job and their family. With the online meetings, they don’t need to leave the house for long periods. More over, the audience can be larger thanks to Online Meetings : it allows to share the meeting content with more people. For example, nowadays people can watch and listen to an Opera show, a ballet or a concert in a cinema with a high quality of images and sound. This example shows really well how online events allows to reach more people; first, the price to watch an opera in a cinema is a lot less expansive than watch the opera in the opera and secondly, there is no limitations (or less) regarding the space.
The bigger problem of this kind of events is to keep the audience engaged and participating.
Few studies show that the audience of a leisure event is generaly more involved and engaged in the online event because they are interested on the topic that they choose. This is easier to motivated people and make them participate even if it’s online event.
Social network, particularly Facebook or Twitter and hashtag, are some important key tools in hybrid evenst: it allows to make the meeting more interactive between speakers/organizers and the audience. This offers the possibility to ask questions, share opinions and exchange with other attendees in live; this aims to engage people in the event and to make them part of it, as if they were attending an onsite meeting.
Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite Events is a company specialized in those hybrid events. They identify 5 ways to engage online conference attendees to make the hybrid event really sucessful.
First of all, as event manager, you need to check that the hybrid technology is working well in the venue. In order to be ready, some tests are essentials. Every venue is different and doesn’t react the same way to connections and bandwidth.
The second advice is to give to the online audience special attentions. To reach this goal, you have to pay attention to them, to their needs, questions or issues encountered and to make them feel supported.
Thirdly, make sure that your presenters are comfortable; they need to see the camera as a person when they are speaking. Thank to this behavior, the audience will feel really connected to the event.
The fourth way to engage online conference attendees is to open few sessions for free to promote it. The goal is to develop engagement and interest in this kind of events.
Finally, it’s a good thing to offer a few in-person perks to the online audience. To make them engage, it could be a good source of motivation to send them occasionaly the bag gifts of the event or even remote the “most engaged attendee”.
If you want more informations about this company, watch this video :
Sources:
www.freedigitalphotos.net
Camille Gallet and Clémence Fazilleau
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