I am enjoying one of the main benefits of virtual events this weeks-not having to travel. Michelle Bruno, My erst-while partner on the EastVirtual Event Workshop, is attending (and working at) The Virtual Edge Summit(VES) while I work on other customer projects in the office.
I am attending VES virtually which is a relatively rare experience for me to attend something more intensive than the odd webinar . Usually with an event which I interested in enough to pay attention to, I usually go to the physical event or not pay any attention at all.
I feel that I needed to get ‘in training’, that is, if I am going to watch the sessions, I really need to make sure I get rid of the distractions. I first set up my calendar for yesterday and for the next two days, knowing that I had to leave the office for a few appointments. Then I picked from the sessions which were available the ones which looked interesting. I watched a couple yesterday, both good. I even got a welcome from Rich Erb when I joined the first session!
The key takeaway from the sessions I got was: when doing a virtual hybrid event, there are three audiences, the physical, the virtual and both the virtual and physical together(which must be the hardest one to get the ‘the experience’ for everyone right). As a virtual attendee, yesterday I didn’t feel isolated thanks to Rich’s moderation and management(good job Rich!)
A call out to Lance from ICohere, great presentation last night(for me was at 7PM Eastern), he covered a case study of a virtual event with no co-sponsors which broke even with a $100k budget.
Looking forward to today’s viewing.