Quick Thoughts on Virtual Conferences

As I was cleaning out my inbox from the weekend, I happened across the most recent newsletter from Jason Bradwell on trade show booths. For some reason, this got me thinking about virtual conferences — the bane of my existence.

I’ll admit that I love(d) in-person conferences. While the content was usually important, it was the networking and experiential parts of the events that I felt were invaluable. Everyone knows that you gain the most from the non-event parts of events (I miss you SxSW).

Enter the pandemic.

With business travel a non-starter, many companies who relied on conferences did what they thought was the next best thing. They simply tried to recreate the wheel online. But in doing so, they failed to do the most important thing…reinvent.

Recreating and reinventing are in fact two different things.

Since the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to attend numerous virtual events and conferences. Unfortunately, I’ve hated every one (except for Apple’s product launches).

Why?

Well, for one, companies haven’t taken a step back to look at the attendee experience or why some in-person events were successful. Getting on a plane to Austin, Texas makes the event feel like a big deal. Having a happy hour with your peers and heroes feels enjoyable.

Sitting in your same chair at your same desk watching hours and hours of video content…yeah, not as enjoyable.

For companies to improve virtual events (and especially conferences), they need to make attendees feel like this is a big deal. Instead of simply creating a virtual convention center for its expo hall, why not transport attendees to virtual tropical island or a beautiful historic virtual venue.

Instead of just hosting the event on some crappy virtual events platform on your computer, why not create an event app for Roku or Apple TV and allow attendees to view your amazing content on the big screen? Or even better, why not rent out some theaters regionally and broadcast the event on a really big screen?

Before I left LinkedIn for my current role, I was working on creating a virtual summit in virtual reality using AltspaceVR and Oculus. Luckily, my former team picked up the reigns and pulled off an amazing event that had attendees talking for months.

With in-person events slowly starting to come back into the fold, it’ll be interesting to see what this next phase of events looks like. As real people begin to trickle back onto flights and into expo halls, I do believe that we’ll continue to see new event formats emerge (hello hybrid). But in order for them to be successful, they really must be reinvented.

Take a step back. Understand what parts of in-person events we love and find a way to bring them to life virtually. Figure out what parts of in-person events we hate. Kill them and find a way to make them better.