B2B Presence » New Models

In the Times: This Year’s Take on Virtual Events. Comdex in the Ether.

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:38:45 +0000

Once or twice a year, one of the big media wags does a think piece on Virtual Events and this week it was the New York Times. Technology articles like this should include an index of previous articles on the same subject, like this one from 2007 I found in the Washington Post. Then we could have the fun of going back to read all the predictions that don’t pan out.

The Times article avoids the kind of hyperbole that we used to see back in the day, and the author was smart to speak with Michael Doyle at the Virtual Edge Institute, who wisely explains that virtual events need to be part of an ongoing (perpetual) social experience. The IBM example in the article is interesting, but these vendor-driven attempts at creating community often miss the mark. The drive is on now to build effective B2B communities and then produce events that bring those communities together. B2B media should be leading these efforts, but good examples are rare.

This article only briefly mentions hybrid events, but doesn’t cite any good existing models, as I suspect there aren’t any. As a B2B event producer, I’ve cast my lot with the hybrid model, which we’re currently building on top of a performance-based video archive platform. We’re using video and webcasting content to develop a sense of community among like-minded professionals and we plan to host regular “connected events” that enable face-to-face and teleconferenced interaction within that community.

Virtual events will always be with us. I’ve produced, and will continue to produce virtual events and webcasts. The economics of the model are simple, they’re easy to do, and they fill an important need. But at the level of human experience, virtual events are airless and isolating.

In the center of this Times article, I was surprised to see a mention of “Comdex Virtual,” which somehow escaped my notice last month. Real Comdex (1979-2003) used to consume the entire business media community annually and the people who attended have long-lasting, viceral memories of that massive industry gathering in Las Vegas. I haven’t been able to find anyone who “attended” Comdex Virtual, but I assume thousands signed in, signed out and went on with their lives.

Unconference: Room for Open Space

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:06:32 +0000

Conference and trade show organizers tend to be conservative in terms of content issues. I rarely see any major events breaking from the traditional model of pre-set agenda, presentations, 5 minutes q&a, maybe with an occasional “birds of a feather” session, or hospitality event. But I’ve tried to keep tabs on the Open Space Technology movement, commonly referred to as “unconference.” A couple of great sites are available to give you an overview on this meeting structure: Open Space World includes a great collection overview information and links about the Open Space community. Unconference.net is more of a first-person take on creating and facilitating unconference events. There’s must-read information here for anyone in the events business.

I have never organized nor participated in an event that was structured like this. I’ve spoken to people who have and they uniformly rave. However, these events are more closely associated with groups that have a specific purpose–like companies or tech standards groups. It would be hard to market an event that had no agenda, I think. We’re looking to incorporate an unconference approach into our hybrid event technology. If you’ve had experience with this format, I’d love to hear about it.

Professional Standards for Virtual Events

Bill Rutledge — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:47:07 +0000

I was interested to see that VirtualEdge announced the creation of a new Virtual Edge Institute education program, dedicated to “advancing the development and adoption of virtual event and meeting technology and best practices for collaboration and marketing.” Michael Doyle at VirtualEdge has a lot of great experience in this area. A great certification program could be created, which would allow us to add an acronym on a business card–maybe CVMP (Certified Virtual Meeting Professional)? It would be nice to see, eventually, established standards and best practices for a wide range of virtual and hybrid events. It would be nice just to see everyone using the same vocabulary.

The Big $ocial: Forrester Media Projections

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:01:15 +0000

This great post from Brian Solis gives a good breakdown of Forrester’s five year forecast on interactive advertising spending. While the bulk of this revenue comes from search, the highest compound annual growth rate is in social media, at 34% and increasing to over $3 billion by 2014. As we’ve argued frequently in these posts, event media is (or must become) social media. Thus we take a bit of warmth in this cold winter of our recession.
In terms of scale and innovation, B2C marketers are way out on the cutting edge of creating a social media marketing experience, and this Mashable post about the same Forrester study includes a useful list of marketing case studies. Try to look beyond the ridiculous memes of contests, point-earning, twitter clues, and self-made videos. How do these marketing efforts really drive user involvement? How does that deliver value to the marketer? I’m just asking.

What I’ve Been Working On

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:40:36 +0000

I‘ve tried hard to make B2BPresence at least a weekly part of my work. However, I’ve recently been very busy launching a new concept for business events at my company, Cnxtd Media Corp. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows of my fascination with all forms of “hybrid events.” Hybrid events combine both live and webcast components, occur in real time, and involve direct person-to-person contact.

I’ve felt, for a long time, that there are inefficiencies in the traditional trade show/conference model that can be remedied through a judicious use of technology (nothing cutting edge) and a business model that reduces participants risk, can scale rapidly, and accommodates user-generated content.

The platform, which we call “Connected Events,” was spec’d out last year and pushed into development. At the same time, we began developing partnerships with business media companies for the launch of new events. Then a funny thing happened: The Dow went from 12,000 to 7,000 and almost everyone we were speaking with was either sidelined or downsized.

We’re back on the path now, with two events scheduled. More announcements are forthcoming in a couple of months. I promise it will be very exciting. Stay tuned.

More Recession-Resistant B2B Opps: Appointment Events

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:57:50 +0000

A discussion about new models for B2B event would be incomplete without a look at appointment events. I’ve seen an up-trending in two appointment formats: 1. The pure play appointment event. At these events, sponsors pay for, and are guaranteed a certain number of one-on-one meetings with potential clients. 2. The speed-networking approach, where an attendee and sponsor are brought together at a pre-existing event by the organizers.
1. The pure play appointment event: Min’s B2B recently ran an interesting article on appointment events, featuring Questex’s Mclean Events. As with the executive roundtables, this format is well-suited for tough economic times. Once you develop sponsorship support, you begin the work of rounding up attendees. Exhibitors get what they pay for, everyone should be happy. I think that Richmond Events was the first to attempt this on a large scale, their unique twist being that events are held on cruise ships, increasing the attractiveness for attendees, and reducing the likelihood that attendees will “skip out” on their appointment commitments.
2. Speed-dating or speed-networking has been implemented at a number of events that I’ve produced. It usually involves vendor/attendee, attendee/attendee, and even vendor/vendor meetings of several minutes. In a less formal implementation that has been called “tech tours” or “booth tours” a group of attendees is led by a tour guide from booth to booth to see a presentations pre-selected exhibitors.
Here’s the problem: This format requires a commitment of time and resources by event producers, and the result is essentially just a marginal value-add for participants, and has not been successfully monetized by event producers. I would counter that unless you can list ten or more marginal value adds at your traditional trade show, you’re probably on the downslide.
Here’s the opportunity: Social networking, Twitter and other comm tools create the opportunity to try new types of appointment events, informal meetings, meetups, flashmobs—whatever. These events can create value for participants and a living for event producers. There needs to be a more intensive application of imagination and experimentation to discover successful new memes.

Important Events About the Future of Events

Bill Rutledge — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:11:45 +0000

Just as there are many songs about singers and many books about writers, there are many conferences about producing events. I recently came across an event that actually understands the current digital evolution in event media: VirtualEdge 2009 has assembled an impressive program of event producers and technology leaders in a program that emphasizes business imperatives over technological flash.

I spoke with the event producer. Michael Doyle is a B2B veteran with experience in both print and event media. VirtualEdge 2009 reflects the coming transformation in event media. Especially impressive is a slate of speakers that includes Nielsen, Ziff Davis, and United Business Media. These are companies that are on the front lines of B2B event media evolution. The concurrent technology showcase has a unique format, with individual meeting rooms with interactive demonstrations. They’re developing the audience for this event as a community, through the website VirtualEdge.org, and you receive a Virtual Event Handbook when you join the community. The event is May 28-29 in Santa Clara.

In a similar vein: Government scientific and technological research efforts often incubate and spawn important commercial innovations. This week, National Defense University is hosting the Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference. The consortium seeks to “improve government collaboration through the use of virtual worlds to enrich collaborative online experiences.” While it may be too late to attend the event, the online agenda serves as a catalog of virtual environment technology in the service of distance learning, personal interaction, and information sharing.

Second Life Necessary Stopover for B2B Event Managers

Bill Rutledge — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:49:48 +0000

I’m ready to state, without reservation, that Second Life has become a “must know” platform for business event managers. A simple description for neophytes: In Second Life you move a character around a three dimensional environment. The character represents you. You can speak to and interact with other people, who are represented by their characters. It feels like a video game. It’s free to try, but you have to download it and install it on your computer.

Second Life first caught my attention when Visa committed to a sponsorship of over $75,000 to create their own environment and event on Second Life. This was at a time when I was trying to get Visa to take out a minimal sponsorship on a live event where we had a proven audience. I was surprised that they were willing to spend so much on an unproven format.

Here’s what I’ve learned: 1. If a large portion of your audience is spending time in Second Life, then they are likely to come to an event in Second Life. They are enthusiasts. 2. Second Life is not like other “virtual event” platforms. If an attendee is in Second Life, then they they are compelled to interact with their surroundings, and other characters. In other virtual events, they can just log in and tune out (which they often do). 3. Since it’s a virtual environment, you might assume that it’s cheap to produce. It’s not. To create the elaborate 3D environments in second life requires professional designers who spend hours of development time. 4. Like the Internet itself, most of the (non-business) environments in Second Life look amateur, flaky, menacing or worse. That’s a red herring.

As an introduction to Second Life for B2B markets, it’s worth taking a look at the projects that have been created by World2Worlds. Also, Second Life and other virtual platforms have now inspired real-life meeting, where real people meet face to face and discuss opportunities for creating virtual events, including the Virtual Edge Summit, and the Second Life Community Convention.

Here’s what I think about the trend toward Second Life-style events: The majority of people born after 1975 are comfortable with these environments after a lifetime spent on Nintendo, xBox, Playstation. This experience will translate into new modes of business interaction that are richer and more productive than those we currently know. New memes in conference organization will emerge, and one can imaging a hybrid live/virtual model with a lot of exciting possibilities. Business event managers can ignore or dismiss this trend at their own peril. This is an integration opportunity.

CNBC recently covered the phenomenon of business conferences in Second Life:

Follow Up: ZDE Virtual + Live. A Workable Events Biz Model?

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:00:14 +0000

Some interesting discussion around this topic, below. Of course virtual components of live events have been around for over a decade. The biz model has been elusive. I remember sitting through a disastrous demo of an audio simulcast tool in 98. The product had horrible latency (audio delay) problems. Me and my colleagues sat there yelling at a PC for ten minutes. It kept echoing back at us, until the guy doing the demo disappeared into a fog of echos. That company disappeared in the dot com bust.

I did some checking around on the ZDE platform. It’s apparently based on tools developed by Stream57. I spoke with them and they seem to have a lot experience with live webcasting. I also spoke with someone who has worked with them and they said they do a good job (maybe with a little lack of attention to detail, but nothing terrible).

Here’s the problem for business event producers:There are hundreds of companies now that can do a live video webcast. These companies typically aim at the high end: They bring in a full production crew and produce high-quality video content that cost tens of thousands of dollars. So now you’ve sunk a big dime producing content that goes out to desktops where everybody eats for free. How do you monetize that? What’s the business model? The sponsorship model only goes so far.

The nub of the problem seems to lie in this: Software Developers don’t produce events, and Event Producers don’t really understand software.

Full disclosure: My company is working on a new event model that takes on this problem. A lot of what I write about comes out of research that we’re doing to launch this model. I hope to write about it more specifically in the future. I’m posting here because I know a lot of event organizers are struggling with the same issues, and I’m hoping to share ideas.

ZDE Marries Virtual to Live

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:22:49 +0000

At B2B Presence we pontificate in a self-serving way on the benefits of face-to-face media, and take pains to point out the shortcomings of webcasting and other “virtual” events (would you be happy with a “virtual” vacation?). However, we’re not blind to the glorious digital sunrise and we’re frequently scanning the horizon for signs of the inevitable convergence of live and virtual media.

Now comes Ziff Davis Enterprise, a company that frequently “gets it” before many others. This recent press release on their new tool to bridge virtual and live events is extremely promising. They appear to be leveraging this in their custom event business, so I would expect this to start small. The proof will be in streaming—we’ll keep an eye on this.

The rise and fall of ZDE’s custom events business is a story that deserves its own mini-series. This group, under Martha Schwartz and then Kirk Laughlin grew to mammoth proportions. Someday someone will have to capture the entire story in a business school thesis. ZDE continues to innovate. I spoke with someone there recently who surprised me with a long discussion about a business built on the development of widgets. And in February they announced a “new suite of Alinean-powered interactive, web-based, self-service calculators and sales tools.” That deserves a second look.

Extra Credit: Anyone who can point to other examples of live + virtual event media will receive a free subscription to B2B Presence. Do the math: that’s a savings of over infinity. Leave comments.