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I didn't know this was going to be virtual events week, or I'd have posted a warning. But to wrap up previous posts on Tuesday and Wednesday, here are some more thoughts.
In terms of evolving the virtual event model, one part of the challenge is to free the imagination of the architects or directors of events who, inevitably, are very often looking through the prism of a traditional events background. Not surprisingly, people stick to what they know. They also need to migrate audiences who genuinely enjoy the comfort of familiar event formats. So it makes sense to use traditional event paradigms to engage them.
In these circumstances it is understandable why most virtual events start life by mirroring the trusted formats of physical events.
Interesting then to read this post - The Future of Virtual Conferences - which expresses a similar desire to find the Holy Grail of virtual events - it is from Gerd de Bruycker, one of the central marketing team at Microsoft. Now Gerd, really does know about running big successful events, but in his post he is quite open about still searching for the formula for success in virtual events.
To speed up that search, Gerd started to list a few ideas for the elements of a great virtual event. Take a look - what would you add?
Perhaps what is needed is a non-tech, risk taking brand (a Red Bull or a Virgin?) to push the current models forwards. They would be free of legacy thinking; could push the amazing technologies we have available today to the limit of their capabilities; take some risks around interactivity to better engage youthful digital native audiences; and liberate the rich content that originates within events, through more compelling user experiences.
To evolve the current model, boundaries need to be broken.
Perhaps examples already exist?
If you know of examples, point me to them.
Tags: virtual events, Gerd de Brucker, Microsoft
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Yesterday I posted on feedback from Judith Hurwitz and James Governor on their experiences of attending virtual events. Extending some of those thoughts, Judith's summary, which James also endorsed, was:
1. Virtual conferences need really good planning and execution. It cannot simply be a disconnected voice with some slides on a shared screen. That is called a conference call.
2. Streaming or live video is wonderful but it needs to have the technology foundation so that it will work no matter what the customer/participant’s environment happens to be.
3. If virtual conferences are to work they have to be conferences. I don’t think that we have good models for executing virtual conferences that work. They need to be electric, informative, and have interactivity. Right now the virtual meeting is not a true model. It is simply old execution applied to a new idea.
I'd agree with most of the above. With the possible exception of the last couple of sentences.
Taking the points in order:
Yes, just like face-to-face conferences, virtual events need great planning and preparation. We have a specialist virtual events team and, just like our live events team, they often have to tell clients that unless the content is interesting and presentation is top quality, it doesn't matter if the event is virtual or not, it will flop.
Yes, the technology needs to just work. This actually becomes more critical the smaller the size of audience. With thousands of visitors online no-one notices if ten people drop off, but with just thirty visitors, losing ten would distract all the participants and send the event down a cul de sac.
Regarding the last couple of sentences:
Right now the virtual meeting is not a true model. It is simply old execution applied to a new idea.
Yes, that is probably an accurate view of the typical virtual event today. But I would say that the organizations that are running and hosting frequent virtual events - the Microsoft's and Cisco's - are rapidly gathering the practical knowhow, the technology platforms and the conceptual frameworks or execution models, that will achieve success.
Tags: virtual events, Judith Hurwitz, Redmonk, James Governor
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Some informed opinions from two industry analysts - James Governor, Redmonk and Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz & Associates, on success factors for virtual events.
Judith posted: What's the future of the virtual conference?
James posted: Cisco and Microsoft virtual analyst conferences
The back story is that Microsoft's Server and Tools Business (STB) held a virtual conference for analysts. Although a Microsoft event (which is a customer), we weren't involved in this one (big company, lots of initiatives going on, etc). Clearly, Cisco did likewise.
Both Judith and James highlight the main payoff for virtual events: less travelling, less cost, less carbon.
But to achieve those benefits trade offs need to be made. A virtual event is a different kind of experience, one that shouldn't be judged in a straight comparison with physical equivalent events.
I suspect because of the size of the analyst universe, these events were in the hundred or less attendees ballpark, rather than in the multiple thousands seen at big virtual launches. Obviously the number of online participants dramatically effects how much interactivity is desirable and can be managed effectively.
We are beginning to see different execution models for virtual events with requests falling into two categories:
- Those with thousands of online visitors, where interaction is part of building buzz in and around the event and the activities that take place at it, but quality discussion has to be handled outside the main virtual presentations, in breakouts and supporting sessions.
- And smaller events aimed at around 50 or less visitors, who are usually known to the client, where sessions can be interactively moderated and meaningful Q&A takes place efficiently.
Assuming that there would have been a considerable number of highly knowledgeable and critical tech analysts at each event (it was possible to track some of their activity through associated Twitter hashtags), it would be great to read more feedback from analysts on their virtual event experience.
Any feedback can only help advance the quality of the virtual event experience faster.
Tags: virtual events, Judith Hurwitz, Redmonk, James Governor
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If there is a prize for the best use of social technology in reinventing journalism*, then I reckon the Guardian is a front runner with it's crowdsourcing initiative to review MP's expenses, explained here.
I'm impressed with the work done by the Guardian in recent months and have commented on this before.
For me, the direction taken by the Guardian contrasts with the range of work done by other media organizations. While others seem to be looking to apply technologies to sustain their audience base or transition advertising franchises, the Guardian seems to be applying technology spontaneously and inventively for purposes that fit the tool.
The irony is that the Guardian's Datastore initiative appears to be ahead of anything done by the Government itself (or anything I have seen from the BBC for that matter).
*yes, if there was such a prize, the use of information gathered via #iranelection would be in the running too
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 Great to see Microsoft's UK operation making the most of the company's virtual events platform (mentioned a few times by me, including first of all here).
Why go virtual? My view is here.
Or in the words of TechNet UK:
... helping you to cut costs, increase efficiency and reduce environmental impact, whilst still getting all the latest information you need on Microsoft technologies and technology insights.
Sounds like enough good reasons to me.
Find out more here or better still tune in on June 19th.
Tags: TechNet, Microsoft, virtual events
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A few months back we announced the PageLife platform for producing e-Magazines - or digital magazines - built using Microsoft Silverlight technology. So it is interesting to note a couple of pieces around the topic of e-Magazines.
ReadWriteWeb has penned - the Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? - prompted by the demise of the print format PC Magazine in favour of a digital only edition. In fact RWW takes a dim view of the digital version PC Magazine.
We perused the June edition, but didn't see a lot of interactivity. Also many of the hyperlinks simply opened up pages in PC Magazine's website. A letter from a reader in the feedback section of this issue noted how he likes to print out parts of the digital PC Magazine. That implies to us that PC Magazine hasn't fully escaped the shackles of print. In fact it seems very much like the print magazine simply transplanted into an eBook. The magazine has plenty of fans, and is known for its reviews, however, it still has a few tricks to learn about digital magazines by the look of it.
RWW did reference much better examples, in particular Avantoure, a lifestyle magazine that started life exclusively as a digital edition. Avantoure looks to have an interactive design team that are digital natives and operate free from any print legacy.
This point links to the second post from MediaWeek on Buyers Wary of Electronic Subs Counted into Circulation Stats. The piece quotes media buyers as complaining that digital editions aren't worth the paper they are not written on.
Scott Daly, executive vp, executive media director, Dentsu America, said he sees “absolutely no value whatsoever” to digital editions and that if he were negotiating with a magazine that sells digital subs as part of its circ, “we would probably discount it, because a digital version of a magazine is not the reason we’d go into a magazine.”
I agree. Sticking a passive ad inside a sealed PDF to be despatched to free circulation oblivion would be a waste of money. The point is media buyers need to capitalize upon the opportunity for interactivity to get the best from the medium.
That's just what Mediacom did by asking us to help their client Seat with this example of an e-Magazine created for a recent Seat car launch. We pushed for rich interactivity, Seat agreed, and loved the results. Shortly, we should be able to share a few of the performance analytics. The lead conversion rates are most noteworthy, they are much higher than we'd normally expect from a microsite (although the work of Mediacom and MSN in targetting would have played role too).
Several more PageLife based e-Magazines are in the pipeline. We'll keep an eye on performance and report back.
Tags: PC Magazine, e-Magazines, Avantoure
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Couple of interesting contributions to the ongoing discussion about what PR will look like in the future. They are from quite different perspectives too, one an ex FT journalist now earning a living via new media, the other from the head of a global PR agency.
Tom Foremski of SVW has posted on The New Rules in PR. I don't agree with all his assertions, although many are correct. I do agree with the general thrust: that everything is changing, so you'd better change too. Tom promises to continue and expand the discussion, so worth staying connected.
Richard Edelman posted on PR in a World of Expression. This has a slight public policy and public engagement slant because of the conference Richard was speaking at. Again, I wouldn't agree with everything Richard says but he does make some good points. All aspects of traditional PR aren't going to go away, however much some observers might want them to. But they will change, they should have changed already, and the shape and skills needed inside agencies in particular will evolve most radically.
I've posted thoughts around this topic before too. These two posts might have inspired me to dust some of them off and update them.
Tags: PR, Tom Foremski, Richard Edelman
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A few sources have published data points highlighting the hiccup in the growth of online advertising. Mostly they are referring to 'traditional' online banner advertising, so whether that spend is now sneaking off to slightly newer 'online' channels and techniques isn't clear.
Also, just take a look at the chart below from Neilsen Co via eMarketer on US Ad spend growth. Yes, online display stutters downward by 3.4% but look at the state of everything below it. The B2B magazine figure is 29.9% down.
The most interesting thought is that this is never going to come back. This isn't a dip, it's a one way ride.
Traditional media - in it's traditional formats - is scuppered. The economy might turn a corner but marketers will have moved on to more accountable ways to spend their marketing dollars, and they won't be returning to the old world.
Things will have changed forever. The only direction is onwards into a digital based future.
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Harvard Business Publishing shared some research on Twitter usage last week. The data gave ammunition to PC World among others, to deflate the Twitter bubble, just a little bit at least.
According to David Coursey at PC World:
Across the 300,000 users studied, the median number of lifetime Tweets is one. That means half of Twitter users tweet once every 74 days. Which is also about the churn rate for new Twitter users, many of whom quickly leave the service. Seemingly after tweeting only once.
On the other hand, the top 10 percent of Twitter users are responsible for 90 percent of all tweets. If that isn't broadcasting, I don’t know what is. Twitter would be better served if maybe half of users were responsible for the same number of tweets.
I tend to agree. But none of this diminishes our interest in Twitter. Our interest is driven by understanding what key influencers think, not to use Twitter to monitor broad consumer perceptions.
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Not wanting to be outdone by the success of our colleagues in Metia New York, the London team and client Logica have been nominated for an Institute of Sales Promotion Award here in the UK. The work was our Logica Does it Better campaign.
We are particularly pleased because the ISP Awards are all about driving sales success, which in the current climate is pretty important to every client. The campaign was a smart mix of traditional DM and digital that inspired a 60 per cent response no less, from a small but very high level segment of corporate decision makers.
Fingers crossed for the outcome.
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 Twitter and blogs are all a buzz about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (aka Kumo for project/product name genealogists).
I'm no search engine expert, and haven't got any inside track until, like the rest of the public, we can get our hands on the Bing search engine. So I'll defer to more knowledgeable sources to discuss the merits, or otherwise, of the technology.
As a marketer it is interesting to consider the approach exposed to date and what is likely to roll out over the next few weeks and months. SearchEngineLand has some inside information on Bing's upcoming $80m advertising campaign, others like Todd Bishop discuss the strategy.
Personally, and purely from looking at the video and available screen shots of the site:
I like:
- The decision to adopt a distinct, non-Windows/MSN/Live family name.
- Ditto the distinctly non-Windows/MSN/Live family logo. The actual name chosen and the actual logo aren't really the issue for me. They just need to be 'fit for purpose'. The logo doesn't look anything particularly special (or particularly bad). Why these two items just need to be 'fit for purpose' I'll come to.
- Ditto the positioning of the site to help decision making. Apparently, it's a decision engine, not search engine. Which pragmatically sidesteps the confrontational 'better mousetrap' issue with the dominant force in search.
- Glimpses of the UI look more than usually clean, open and typographically led for Microsoft.
I don't like:
- The US centric video. Come on.. searching downtown Bellevue, domestic US references? Think global. There's a whole world of us out here, you know... (but that is small change in the greater scheme of a campaign on this scale).
For me, the entirely parochial and personal acid test for whether or not a technology or a brand has gone mainstream, is whether I can chat about it to other parents at the school pick up, without needing to explain myself about why I, and the other dweebs in techland, are getting excited about dweeb.com or whatever. So, by that measure, Twitter only just made it about a month back. Live Search always drew a blank look.
For Bing to breakthrough in these terms will take a lot more than $80 million of advertising.
It needs to have the basics in situ, first. The basics are a name and a logo that is for fit for purpose (done).
Then secondly, it'll need a billion dollars (or ten) of positive Word of Mouth - 99.9 per cent of which will be driven by the experience, not the marketing.
While I'm certain viral and social media figure on the Bing campaign plan, with strategies to accelerate and amplify this effect, what I'm really driving at is, the service needs to deliver to consumers. That will determine Bing's success. Not the opinions of a million brand / advertising experts over the next week or two as Microsoft rolls out the launch campaign.
If the service delivers, it will be Word of Mouth that can determine whether or not Bing will make a serious dent in those market share figures for search.
Tags: Bing, Microsoft, search engine
Disclosure: Microsoft is a client but as you can tell from my tone, not this division. No inside track here.
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Listen. Hear that distant rumble of thunder? That's the sound of traditional ad agencies stampeding into the world of digital just as fast as their Hush Puppies will carry them.
The data points below, just released by eMarketer and Forrester are startling, not for pointing out the strength of the resilient areas of B2B marketing (pretty much what you'd expect if, like us, you work in B2B) but for showing the depth of the collapse in traditional forms of advertising. By my reckoning five of the bottom eight categories are core service offerings of traditional ad agencies.
No wonder all those ad agency types are furiously reinventing themselves.
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 Always had a soft spot for compelling data visualization. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has a post on how people are using source data from the Guardian's Datastore to re-package and re-present data on the MP's expenses furore here in the UK.
The example above, link here, using Microsoft's Silverlight and Virtual Earth, was featured on MSN today and created by Shoothill.
None of these visualizations, totally nails it for me. While 'flipping' and moat cleaning aren't to be sponsored by the taxpayer, part of me actually wants to see MPs using their office expenses to the maximum in order to serve their local constituents effectively. Which is a difficult thing to measure, doubtless the datapoints are out there, just waiting to be liberated either by leakers or reformers. Which just goes to prove the first law of visualization, there's always someone who wants the data sliced another way.
Either way, these examples serve to highlight what a smart initiative the Guardian's Datastore is.
Tags: the Guardian, DataStore, Crooks & Swindlers, MPs expenses
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 This slick Silverlight based Business Value Calculator has just gone live over on the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 site. It has earned a nice reference from Channel9, and there are some positive comments accumulating on Twitter too.
Obviously, while a Business Value Calculator is very much in keeping with recessionary times, our development teams have also built other tools, like licence calculators and deployment roadmaps, to assist customers through purchasing decisions with an improved experience to boot.
Far from being flashy add ons, these types of RIA site enhancements are increasingly being used as incredibly hardworking ways to improve lead generation rates from online campaigns.
Tags: Silverlight, SQL Server 2008, Microsoft
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Compared to a couple of years back, I have less and less enthusiasm for wasting time contributing to the noise around which type of agency is best placed to serve and support the growing social media arena.
The latest example is this PR Week story about Volvo giving it's online PR to a media agency. See also the fuss about nothing, sorry the conversation, continued here.
However, this spat did unearth the blog of Duncan Forrester head of PR for Volvo: Torque Talking.
It seems to me that blogs from in-house PR or marketing professionals are still pretty rare items (in the UK at least). Which is a shame because they could add some sensible perspective to these incestuous debates. Such as this soundbite in a comment by Duncan:
"..irrespective of what an agency calls themselves or, to the outside world, appears to specialise in, it's all about finding somebody who understands your business, understands your customers, understands what you are asking them to do and can prove from the outset they can deliver on the objectives. And then over-achieves. Can't ask for any more than that!!"
Wise words Duncan. I know who I'll be following.
Tags: Volvo, Duncan Forrester, PR Week
btw - I hope that blog is all your own work Duncan, or I'll look like a bit of a ***
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