Virtual Events

In all of the hubbub last week (see blog titled Project Break-through), I failed to write about an event we had last Tuesday. It was Virtual Content World and it was a ‘virtual event’ attended by roughly 1100 Open Text customers. We had staff members manning the virtual booths and customers were invited to chat about what was on their mind. If a customer had a specific issue, the chat could be conducted privately, or if there was a more universal question, the entire group could see the dialogue. There was an Exhibit Floor, an Auditorium for the keynote speakers and a Lounge for more casual interactions.

Have you ever attended or hosted a virtual event? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts on how it went.

Here are some observations on how I think we could improve ours.

1. We used a recording from our live event (Content World) for our Chairman of the Board as our kick-off keynote. I would recommend against that in the future. Because the talk was recorded, our Chairman referred to things that weren’t relevant to the virtual event – upcoming speakers, demo-pods, etc. Plus the timing wasn’t exactly right so his talk ran over by 3 minutes, making everyone late to the next speaker.

2. We had several different ‘rooms’. The Exhibit Hall had a number of booths and the lounge had several folks ‘manning’ it and I had trouble figuring out where the subject matter experts would be. I am interested in your feedback – should virtual events have virtual walls, to simulate the brick and mortar environment? Or should we rethink the space in virtual events?

3. The screen wasn’t intuitively sized. The chat ran off the page for me and there was no way to scroll. I checked my screen resolutions (1024 x 768) and I couldn’t find anything in the FAQs for how to fix it. After contacting support, I learned that you could drag and drop the chat anywhere on the page and that worked. But it would have been more user-friendly to size the screen such that the chat appeared without issue.

All in all, I thought it was a great event. The interaction was superb, the technology appeared solid and the agenda topics were well received.

What is your experience with virtual events? I would love to compare notes.