By using the Internet to market events, organizers can directly target potential delegates using
Use of Internet for marketing their events appears to be growing rapidly in popularity.
Websites now offer powerful search engines with extensive venue and other supplier listings, which claim to enable planners to carry out their research and book venues online.
Essentially, the virtual exhibition removes the roles of geography and physical space from the conference experience. Most probably, the relevant role of virtual trade fair will continue to be complement to a live show, rather than a direct competitor.
1. ADVANATAGES OF VIRTUAL TRADEFAIRS
Increase revenue
More choices on content delivery, event organizers can create more revenue opportunities.
Attendees unable to attend the event due to budgetary or scheduling consttraints, will have another option to attend. Online attendees can cherry-pick content. Attendees can save 100% of their travel costswith online events.
Additional meeting you could have if you utilize virtual events as a part of your mix to cut costs.
Extend the brand
many associations have only one major meeting each year. What is your audience doing during the other 51 weeks ? They are not waiting round to get the information they need. They are checking out other websites, blogs and other events. With virtual events, organizers can provide opportunities to keep their attendees, exhibitors, spomsors, involved in their brand to troughout the year.
Broaden the Community
The recent explosion of online social networking illustrates how important meeting like-minded people is to both individual and coporate succes and how much demand is out there for access to online communities of interest. Virtual events can integrate with tehse networking applications to rpovide a richer online experience. at a physical event, there are many barriers to the right people meeting each other. Online community provides a matchmaking service similar to a dating site. Like the people, who have formed successul relationships from dating sites, your attendees can have the same advantages in strating successful and complimentary business relationship.
Enhance attendance Tracking
The date collection trough virtual events are often far more complete tah with face to face meetings. On the physical show floor, visitors can wander onto booth, grab a white paper or brochure and leave without ever leaving a trace.This is not happening online; every click, every behaviour is captured. organizers can learn more about their attendees than ever before; which sesions they attended, what thier interets are, which sponsors they visited, enabling targeted messaging taht was not possible before.
Rapid response
With virtual events, meeting can be launched to large and globally disperse audiences with unprecedent speed. For product launches, changes to sales strategy, crisis communications or just getting out ahead of the competition, this technology enables event planners and meeting managers to meet any deadline.
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Google Goggles, Augmented Reality and the Future of Hybrid Events
'Over the last several years, mobile technologies have impacted almost every aspect of the in-person event experience. More recently, image recognition and augmented reality applications have started to create an information layer that has the potential to make every “physical” event into a hybrid event. The only question is how the information layer is built and how event managers take advantage of it. One thing is for sure – in a world where every event is a hybrid event, managers who learn to leverage the world’s information meta-layer will have a significant advantage over those who do not.'
2.VIRTUAL EVENTS PSYCHOLOGY
Where do psychology and virtual events meet?
On some level, everyone understands that attendees behave differently depending on the theme and physical context surrounding an event. After all, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas… right? Much less has been written about the ways in which technical platforms contribute to attendee psychology and behavior. This is a shame because it is only through an understanding of the mechanisms that drive behavior that we can hope to improve all types of events from F2F interactions, to audio conferences, to virtual events. Following is a very brief look at some of the challenges facing virtual events from a psychology perspective. My hope is that this will help to spark a larger discussion regarding event psychology (F2F, audio, video conferencing, etc).
3 challenges in virtual events psychology
93% of communication is non-verbal – Almost everyone is aware of Albert Mehrabian’s communications model, which states that 93% of the content of a message is linked to gestures or tone of voice. While this model is often overstated (it relates mostly to emotional content), it still has important implications for virtual events. In many virtual environments, communication between attendees and presenters is often limited to typed messages, which lack much of the color that is available in a F2F engagement. In order to help attendees to get the most from their virtual event experience, event organizers must find ways to deepen attendee interactions. For example, Social27 pioneered a “mood-o-meter” technology that allows attendees to share their emotional states with presenters. In effect, this technology allows presenters to get a sense for the emotional state of their audience. Are the majority falling asleep? Or, are most attendees sitting attentively, hanging on your every word? Companies should also give attendees a full range of communication options from traditional typing to video and audio chat.
The three D’s of CMC – deindividualization, depersonalization, and disinhibition – In Challenges in Virtual Communication, Lynne Wainfan argues that computer mediated communication (CMC) tends to lack interpersonal information and is therefore more task-oriented than F2F events. By implication, compared to F2F activities, virtual events would be better at solving tasks than building relationships. In response to this challenge is it critically important that virtual event organizers use every tool at their disposal to humanize their events and provide attendees with an emotional context within which to operate. One powerful tool in the fight against the “3-D’s” are social media integration. From a psychological perspective, social media integration has three major benefits. First, linking attendee profiles to their social media accounts counters deindividualization and depersonalization. Second, since attendees are not anonymous, disinhibition will be reduced. Finally, SM helps attendees to establish relationships that will live on beyond the event, encouraging them to present their best possible face to their peers and potential customers.
Passive consumption vs. true interaction – on the whole, virtual event attendees seem to be more focused on information consumption and less on interaction. At F2F interactions, attendees feel social pressure to engage, but, the same is not true at virtual events. On the one hand, there is nothing inherently wrong with attendees wanting to acquire information efficiently. The challenge for virtual event organizers is to increase engagement without decreasing information consumption efficiency. The good news is that game dynamics can help to convert passive attendees into engaged participants. One way to accomplish this is to reward attendees directly for their active engagement. For example, Social27’s game dynamics system encourages visitors to post their own content, interact with other attendees, and visit sessions. Another way to drive engagement is to create a sense of shared identity by giving attendees problems to solve in groups. Both of these mechanisms can help to drive true interaction.
“Ideologies aren’t all that important. What’s important is psychology” – James Carville
Every year, companies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what makes their consumers tick; through a better understanding of consumer psychology, companies hope to find better ways to build, market, and sell their products. In the virtual events space, there are several challenges that event organizers must overcome. First, in order to address the fact that 93% of communication is non-verbal, companies can use tools like Social27’s mood-o-meter to collect and communicate emotional feedback. Second, event organizers can fight deindividualization and depersonalization through the use of social media integration. Finally, companies should leverage game dynamics to convert passive consumption into true interaction.
3.SET UP YOUR TRADEFAIR SHOW
4. FUTURE IS GREEN
“The environment is everything that isn’t me.” – Albert Einstein
In an era of growing public concern about sustainability and the environment, many companies are seeking to “go green” in a number of ways, whether it’s recycling paper, plastic and other materials, using environmentally-sustainable sources for manufacturing, working with eco-friendly suppliers, or encouraging employees to carpool to work.
One of the most important ways that companies can demonstrate a commitment to environmental sustainability is to “go green” by adopting virtual events in place of traditional business travel.
Virtual events can be an ideal fit for a company seeking to “go green” and operate in a more environmentally-friendly and sustainable fashion. Virtual events can have several positive effects on a company’s sustainability activities:
■Business travel is bad for the environment: A typical passenger jet plane emits one pound of carbon dioxide, per passenger, for every mile it travels – and in a typical year, U.S. business travelers fly 240 billion passenger-miles. Air travel is particularly costly for the environment, and travel makes up 25% of a typical company’s carbon footprint. Instead of producing all of this carbon dioxide (which is a “greenhouse gas” contributing to global climate change), virtual events can help your company reduce its carbon footprint. Instead of flying your personnel and customers to a central location for an in-person event, you can host an online virtual event that brings the content (and connections) to the people.
■Virtual events save paper: Even in the age of the iPad, too many “in-person” events still rely on big packets of paper – handouts, brochures, welcome packets, etc. All of this paper adds up to a significant environmental cost – especially if the paper documents are not made from recycled materials. There are numerous environmental costs to producing paper materials, ranging from the energy and water used to make the paper, to the materials used to make the inks, to the carbon footprint of shipping the paper to the meeting site. Virtual events avoid all of these environmental costs – the average virtual event (by using digital content and online documents) saves an average of 36,000 sheets of paper.
■Virtual events avoid financial and environmental costs of hotels: A typical in-person event requires the attendees to stay at hotels – and despite the efforts of many hotel chains to become more eco-friendly by reducing their use of water and other resources, most hotels still consume vast amounts of resources, especially water. The typical hotel room uses 200 gallons of water per day (and luxury hotel rooms often use 475 gallons of water per day). With a virtual event, you can bring together your key audiences without incurring the environmental costs of a traditional in-person event.
■Virtual events make haste, not waste: Think of all the in-person events, business meetings, expos and conferences you’ve attended over the years: they’re awash with waste. Disposable plates and silverware at mealtime, paper handouts and brochures that end up in the trash, marketing collateral and trinkets that inevitably get thrown away. Just the nature of travelling and staying at a hotel tends to make people more wasteful than they are at home – the typical in-person conference attendee generates over 20 pounds of waste per day, compared with 4.6 pounds at home. Instead of bringing together hundreds (or thousands) of people and having to support and equip them with food, drinks, and the comforts of home (which inevitably requires lots of resources), a virtual event quickly connects your audience via an online events platform. You can still get all of the engagement and drive results for your organization, but without the environmental impact.
■Virtual events give you a story to tell about “going green:” Cisco hosted an annual sales meeting in 2009 for 19,000 sales people, and the company estimates that choosing to host this gathering as a virtual event prevented 84,400 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and saved 209,000 pounds of waste that would have been created by an in-person event. Choosing a virtual event in this case was a sustainable choice equivalent to planting 3.5 million trees! As customers become more environmentally aware, they are often looking to do business with companies who proactively “go green.” If your company uses virtual events, like Cisco, you will have a powerful story to tell as part of your marketing efforts – you can develop your own comparable statistics about how your company is helping the environment by using virtual events.
Some people might wonder, “Are the environmental benefits of virtual events worth the potential drawbacks? Will we lose something essential about the in-person experience?” To be sure, every company needs to make the right choice about how to host events and connect with audiences, and the decision often goes beyond calculations of environmental impact.
However, if you work with a good virtual events platform provider like Social27, you will get a customized, immersive, interactive and intuitive virtual event that delivers all the engagement, emotion and positive impact of a traditional in-person event – along with powerful interactive tools and data tracking. Virtual events aren’t just about saving money and reducing environmental costs – they’re a way to add value to your organization by introducing new ways to connect and build relationships with your customers and key audiences.
In an era of growing public concern about sustainability and the environment, many companies are seeking to “go green” in a number of ways, whether it’s recycling paper, plastic and other materials, using environmentally-sustainable sources for manufacturing, working with eco-friendly suppliers, or encouraging employees to carpool to work.
One of the most important ways that companies can demonstrate a commitment to environmental sustainability is to “go green” by adopting virtual events in place of traditional business travel.
Virtual events can be an ideal fit for a company seeking to “go green” and operate in a more environmentally-friendly and sustainable fashion. Virtual events can have several positive effects on a company’s sustainability activities:
■Business travel is bad for the environment: A typical passenger jet plane emits one pound of carbon dioxide, per passenger, for every mile it travels – and in a typical year, U.S. business travelers fly 240 billion passenger-miles. Air travel is particularly costly for the environment, and travel makes up 25% of a typical company’s carbon footprint. Instead of producing all of this carbon dioxide (which is a “greenhouse gas” contributing to global climate change), virtual events can help your company reduce its carbon footprint. Instead of flying your personnel and customers to a central location for an in-person event, you can host an online virtual event that brings the content (and connections) to the people.
■Virtual events save paper: Even in the age of the iPad, too many “in-person” events still rely on big packets of paper – handouts, brochures, welcome packets, etc. All of this paper adds up to a significant environmental cost – especially if the paper documents are not made from recycled materials. There are numerous environmental costs to producing paper materials, ranging from the energy and water used to make the paper, to the materials used to make the inks, to the carbon footprint of shipping the paper to the meeting site. Virtual events avoid all of these environmental costs – the average virtual event (by using digital content and online documents) saves an average of 36,000 sheets of paper.
■Virtual events avoid financial and environmental costs of hotels: A typical in-person event requires the attendees to stay at hotels – and despite the efforts of many hotel chains to become more eco-friendly by reducing their use of water and other resources, most hotels still consume vast amounts of resources, especially water. The typical hotel room uses 200 gallons of water per day (and luxury hotel rooms often use 475 gallons of water per day). With a virtual event, you can bring together your key audiences without incurring the environmental costs of a traditional in-person event.
■Virtual events make haste, not waste: Think of all the in-person events, business meetings, expos and conferences you’ve attended over the years: they’re awash with waste. Disposable plates and silverware at mealtime, paper handouts and brochures that end up in the trash, marketing collateral and trinkets that inevitably get thrown away. Just the nature of travelling and staying at a hotel tends to make people more wasteful than they are at home – the typical in-person conference attendee generates over 20 pounds of waste per day, compared with 4.6 pounds at home. Instead of bringing together hundreds (or thousands) of people and having to support and equip them with food, drinks, and the comforts of home (which inevitably requires lots of resources), a virtual event quickly connects your audience via an online events platform. You can still get all of the engagement and drive results for your organization, but without the environmental impact.
■Virtual events give you a story to tell about “going green:” Cisco hosted an annual sales meeting in 2009 for 19,000 sales people, and the company estimates that choosing to host this gathering as a virtual event prevented 84,400 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and saved 209,000 pounds of waste that would have been created by an in-person event. Choosing a virtual event in this case was a sustainable choice equivalent to planting 3.5 million trees! As customers become more environmentally aware, they are often looking to do business with companies who proactively “go green.” If your company uses virtual events, like Cisco, you will have a powerful story to tell as part of your marketing efforts – you can develop your own comparable statistics about how your company is helping the environment by using virtual events.
Some people might wonder, “Are the environmental benefits of virtual events worth the potential drawbacks? Will we lose something essential about the in-person experience?” To be sure, every company needs to make the right choice about how to host events and connect with audiences, and the decision often goes beyond calculations of environmental impact.
However, if you work with a good virtual events platform provider like Social27, you will get a customized, immersive, interactive and intuitive virtual event that delivers all the engagement, emotion and positive impact of a traditional in-person event – along with powerful interactive tools and data tracking. Virtual events aren’t just about saving money and reducing environmental costs – they’re a way to add value to your organization by introducing new ways to connect and build relationships with your customers and key audiences.
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