VIRTUAL EVENTS BEST PRACTICES

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to the Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Road Ahead podcast. Today we have three amazing guests. I have Barry Keesey, who is the Director of Technical Production for Opus. I have Stephen Dahlem, who is the Senior Creative Director for Corporate Magic, and I have Kevin McCabe from LMG who is the Executive Director of Technology. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Today we are going to talk about what we've learned about virtual events and having done them for the last few months, and having pivoted from doing live events to virtual events. And I kind of want to get best practices and share them with the audience. So I'm going to throw this right to Stephen Dahlem, and I'm going to ask you from the last three months of doing virtual events, and we've done a lot of them together. What can you share that you've learned that you would say our best practices? Well, it sure has been a whirlwind of production for sure. I think one of the biggest lessons would be not lowering your expectations, you know, don't fall into the trap of just trying to recreate that familiar flow of like the standard convention center general session. You know, you have the opportunity to create something that's super cool. The world is your own. So you should take that opportunity and lean into it. And I think that's one of the biggest lessons is just be creative, lean into it. Don't think of it as a limitation. Got it. There are no limitations in doing virtual events. So now I want to hear Barry's thoughts on this in the last three months, doing these virtual events and whether it's the creative of the technical side. What could you add to this discussion? Yeah, I would agree with kind of, you know, Stephen's take on that about being creative and kind of throwing out traditional convention from live events. A big, a big part of our approach is really trying to look at the foundation of why you do something. You know, why you do a keynote, why you have an expo, why you have a breakout, and go down to those roots and try to build from it based on what you can do in an online environment. I think it's been the biggest lesson of how we develop a strategy around our events. Got it. All right. Well, I'm going to throw it to Kevin. And Kevin lives a little more on the technical side. Could you share with us in the last three months, maybe just a couple of best practices of what you can share and what we've learned? Well, I'll tag on first to what both Barry and Stephen said is, you know that when you're in a traditional live setting, you know there's an energy or a synergy around what the production team backstage and in the virtual world, you kind of lose that, and it becomes hard sometimes for the team to actually speak up or be aware of if there's challenges. So allowing for people to be able to to speak up is one thing, and then it does require additional sets of eyes, which is one thing we've learned to kind of be there, to be that voice, to say, hey, we're seeing some issues or challenges. The other thing is, is the internet quality really, really matters. You can have the best presenter kit that you have put together with the most expensive hardware and send it to someone's house, but if their internet is challenging then your the product is going to be poor. So there are times when we have to look at a bonded cellular service in those situations. But the internet, the quality of it is everything. So virtual events without the internet just don't work. Correct? Pretty much. So, Stephen, what would you try to do to avoid doing in a virtual event that you've learned? Maybe something that doesn't work or something that you know you've tried and the experience wasn't what your expectation was? Well, I think one of the things is getting presentations, people to understand that because of this different medium, the presentations cannot be their normal shape. You can't have a 45 minute keynote speech in this kind of environment. You can't you can't overestimate your audience's ability to remain in front of their computers for that long. So I think that is one of the big things, is making sure that it's like episodic television, that you're creating these engaging events and in these environments that are relatable when you're online. Not trying. Again, back to what I was saying earlier, not just trying to recreate that familiar. You've got to really rethink how much time you spend and really make it each moment valuable. So, so trying to make sure that because this is a broadcast and you don't want it to linger too long, so whatever is being communicated, you want to make sure that it has value and is engaging. And and it's time well spent with that's suffice. Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be time well spent. Got it. Okay. So Barry, on virtual events, what would you avoid doing? What are the practices that we learned maybe that just don't work in your opinion and and that, you know, since this COVID world started and we all went no more ballrooms, we're just going to go home and get on our, our broadcasting via whether it's a studio or whether it's a computer at home. What can you share? Yeah, I think that, you know, not only making the session length a bit shorter, but the overall event a bit shorter. So you want to you want to avoid putting too many sessions. If you had a live event that, you know, had 2 or 300 sessions over the course of four days, you really have to kind of pair that down. You know, obviously I'm coming at it from a production approach, and we look at it through the lens of creating these videos and the presentations to put on the virtual event site. The reality is there's a lot more strategy around that that lives outside of our production world. Things like gamification, networking and connection. You know, the registration component, the matchmaking, and the 1 to 1 because there's not really any or organic networking or meeting. So there's a lot of elements that need to be kind of crammed into that, and not just the production side of it. So I definitely would, you know, like Stephen said, avoid making the sessions too long, but also avoid making too many sessions. I think if you if you create the channels that give people a lot to choose from, that's certainly helpful because they can go at their own pace. But I would avoid putting too much into it because there's a lot of other experiences that people look for in that virtual event. Got it. So. So, Kevin, what have we learned? What not to do in from a technical perspective or the weakest links, weakest links, technical perspective, hard wired as much as possible for everything. No more wireless, no more wireless. You know, things that we can control at that point. People prefer to use their wireless earbuds. They prefer to be on Wi-Fi at home. You know, things that we kind of would normally do in our normal life. But for a broadcast, we want to be wired as much and connected as much as possible, and we want the ability to, again with remote presenters, to be able to have control of their laptop and be able to kind of troubleshoot and walk them through things. Losing that ability or giving different setups to different presenters becomes challenging to manage, you know, on that remote presenter thing. And I'll throw this to Stephen. Stephen, how do you guys go about coaching people that are at home that have had to put this little kit together and, and how do you get them to present some type of material that has value and it puts them in a good light when they may not be as technical. Well, we've always been in the speech coaching business, but you're right in the technical aspect of it. We have sessions before we actually capturing it where we're teaching them how to put it all together. Applications like Open Reel, where we can be there and actually control the camera that they're using remotely, and the teleprompter and everything all together at once. So that's kind of our approach to remote capture. If we have to do it. Got it. And Barry, as far as coaching the remote presenters, have you had any good or bad experiences that you could share? Oh yeah, a lot, a little, a lot of both. But you know, like what Kevin was saying earlier, you know, not only is the wired internet a must and the bandwidth the must, but you you have to be cognizant of what's going on in your household. You know, with people being home with their families and kids home from school, people streaming on the internet, choking up the bandwidth. It's a household issue. It's a regional issue. So there's been kind of ups and downs in terms of the quality of video we're getting based on their home internet. So that that has been a challenge. And we're also seeing that a lot of people kind of come into this with the expectation of, oh, well, I know how to use Zoom, or I know how to use go to meeting or WebEx. And of course, as we all know, if you're on the V mix or the WebRTC trying to do this protocol, it's a little bit of a different experience. So we're trying to be really diligent on training the presenters up front, giving them some reading material and finding good guidance to coach them. And that guidance is an evolution because you're always finding a new experience with somebody of, oh, I didn't think of that. And so you're trying to incorporate that into how you're coaching these presenters. So, so, Stephen, have your events improved over the last few months as you guys have kind of honed in on, on, on, on this process and, and are the clients adapting to this new world of virtual. Yeah, I think as far as improving over the past few weeks, I think our workflow process has gotten a lot better. I think we've been able to anticipate the hurdles, you know, in advance of our clients, you know, getting their content ready and their the self capture segments ready. We've I think we've gotten a lot better in that aspect with as far as workflow goes and as far as clients adapting to the new world, what's always been surprising to me is how clients are now coming to the table, you know, already beat down, you know, because of all of the Zoom meetings and the WebEx and the teams and all of that, and the fact that a lot of the internal stakeholders in these meetings for the client, they've been through a thousand demo presentations from a zillion different platforms and their their expectations of what's available is really like like I said, they come to they come to the process really, really, really beat down. So I think that getting them to realize that, you know, their event goals don't have to change. I think it's been one of the biggest challenges in getting in adapting to this virtual space with the clients. I would think if they feel like they can achieve the same goal, that would make a huge difference versus having to change their program or, or have think there's some subset of limitations. So I want to know, Barry, if you could share with me, how important is it to have a live component versus a lot of pre canned material that you're playing back or playing within the segment? So do you think every virtual event needs to have a live component, or do you think that it can all be prerecorded? What are your thoughts? I, I think when we first started going into this, the technical in me really started gravitating towards that pre-record, really, just because when we're pulling content from people's homes and they're broadcasting that internet component, that ISP was a wild card. So it really it really kind of affected the way we think about that. But as we've been going through this process, I think that we feel that there is a value to the live component, even though you're not in front of an audience. There is an energy that comes with being live. And I think there are certain things that make sense to me live, especially if they're engaging, like back and forth Q&A workshops, things like that. So it's really just kind of a case by case basis with each event where you try to go through all the content and really define what can be prerecorded and what has a value to being live. So I think it certainly is a balance. I agree with you for sure. Sometimes when there's a live element, it gets everybody to to at least show up at a certain time to watch it if it's something engaging. So I'm going to throw this to Kevin, and I kind of want to know. In the past three months, what have we had to do to deal with hardening our networks, and what best practices can you share of what we have done to make sure that the zeros and the ones get broadcasted out properly? A lot of work behind the scenes on the robustness of our infrastructure. You know, we're at an enterprise level now and we have separate network bandwidth that is separate from our company network specific. For these virtual studios. We have redundant power now backup generator. So if we have a failover we lose power to our building. We do not lose anything. We now have pretty much enterprise level technicians that are monitoring things, live in person for every hour that there's actual virtual event taking place. So we've added a lot to our infrastructure in our people to be able to manage this and to ensure that there's no interruptions to our service here in our facility. You know, producers put together these events and they may spend a month or two and a lot of people in the pre-production and working on the videos and the content, and to have a technical failure and which is the would be the worst case scenario. So, so as a technical provider, it's our responsibility to do everything to mitigate that type of risk. Let's shift gears and I'm going to throw it to Stephen. So what is the most important thing that you would share with a producer? Someone producing a virtual event to get a good outcome? What would be the the the best advice you could share? You know, for a producer, there's so much more on their plate now with a virtual event than it was in a conventional convention center event. You know, you would have the destination services do all the registration and the hotels and the travel and everything. Well, now all of that invitation and registration, sign on, custom engagement module kind of pieces, that's all on now the producer's plate. And so to pay attention to those details, to make sure that not only is it engaging and crazy cool, but it's also a seamless user experience from beginning to end. And I think that that is what I would tell the producer to focus on is don't don't drop those details with all of those new things on your plate. Got it. And Barry, would you opine on the same question, what is the most important thing that you would share with one of your producers to get a good or great outcome for a virtual event? I think trying to define and understand the avenue in which you're getting content to the site, you know, if you're if you've got 100 plus presenters, how are you filming that? Are you filming it in their home? Are you sending them a kit? Are they using their own hardware? Do they come into a broadcast studio? Are you sending out a remote camera crew to their home or their office? Defining that really kind of helps you to zero in on what those costs are. Obviously streaming someone in from their home without sending them any equipment and just sending them a browser link is a lot more cost efficient than building on a broadcast audio and having a stream of presenters come through, so I think that that's probably the best advice I can give to producers out there is really try to understand how you're going to capture that content, what methodology, because that is really going to frame your budget. Got it. Okay. And so I want to throw this question to to Kevin. And this will kind of be my like sum up question. Will virtual events improve as we get more comfortable with technology. And you can take this from a technical perspective. And then I'll ask both Stephen and Barry the same question from a, you know, a holistic approach. So will they improve as people get more comfortable with technology? Absolutely. We're constantly looking at for different solutions or ways to kind of refine that experience. So there's always development with current offerings and new things that are coming. And I think people are kind of adapting to that kind of mindset of doing things virtually. So with the technology, the more and more experience you have with it. It's like playing a video game, the more comfortable you get with it. But we're starting to see now that the industry is shifting their focus from raw equipment to now these virtual kind of solutions. With NDI technology in different cloud studio based offerings, a lot of the manufacturers are going that way. So I think that it's going to get a lot better as the year continues to move on. So, Stephen, could, you opine, will virtual events get better as we get more comfortable with the technology, whether it's the producers, the presenters and anyone involved? It could be the audience. What are your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I think just like Kevin was saying, we are always looking for those new crayons to paint with. That's why we appreciate you all bringing those to us. And you know, the technology is only there to serve the why of the event. You know, my boss legend in the industry, Jim Kirk, you know, it's always message, message, message. So how we can use those new technologies to deliver those stories in new, engaging ways in the virtual space is what we're all about. Interesting. Bury your thoughts on that question. Will virtual events improve as we meaning the presenters, the producers, the audience? Everyone gets more comfortable with the technology? Yes, I certainly hope so. I think that, you know, a lot of us that have been, you know, in this industry for a while, you know, have that background of, you know, a little bit of the broadcast. We've been webcasting events from live events for years, and I think we all kind of came into this thinking, well, it's going to be a similar thing, but obviously it's it's a lot more than that. I think that we'll certainly see an improvement in our strategies, our approaches to getting that content, getting it out to the people where I'm really focusing in on seeing an improvement in virtual events is virtual event platforms. You know, we we know that the CDNs out there are capable of delivering to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people with no problem. The real crux is there's not a lot of virtual event sites that have a lot of engagement, gamification, polling, chat, all of that type of interaction with hundreds of thousands of people. So that's where I'm kind of got my eye on to see the improvement, and I'm hopeful that they will. Well, guys, the one thing I hear from this conversation is virtual events are not really going anywhere. They are evolving and we're all learning to adapt and create better ones every day. And as we continue to move on, it'll be interesting to see what the next few months bring as virtual events I think are here to stay, as even when live events come back, I think we're going to still have virtual events and we're going to have to do a little more broadcasting and and gamification and have fun with these technologies. I want to thank all three of my guests today, Barry Keesey, Stephen Dahlem and Kevin McCabe. You all are true professionals. I look forward to working on more virtual events and hopefully back to live events one day. Thank you all again for joining us. And this is Les Goldberg and the Road Ahead.