Optimising the Visitor Experience

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So, who were the first people to try and take events online?

Were they events people who saw the opportunities to extend the life and reach of their existing physical events by publishing the content online and using communication tools to enable a dialogue between visitors and vendors? Or, were they developers who could see that, by pulling together a series of publishing and communication tools and putting it behind a user interface that effectively linked the physical and online worlds in the minds of the exhibitors and visitors, it was possible to 'recreate' an event online?

Either way, we are now in a rapidly developing market where the content owner/publisher has an impressive array of virtual events platforms to choose from. These platforms have a range of user interfaces, communication tools, content delivery and archiving options, functionality modules and detailed reporting capabilities, but are we all being a little blinkered in our approach?

The best quality of interaction will always be in person, face to face. Virtual events will only ever come a distant second in this regard. So virtual events need to offer advantages to compensate for this fact. These compensations are generally considered to be:

1. Extending life.

2. Extending reach.

3. Lower investment (lower risk/better ROI).

4. Lower carbon footprint.

Is that enough? Many would say a resounding 'yes', but I believe there is also a huge opportunity to offer a much better visitor experience online.

Regardless of the origin of a platform's design, most providers tend to offer a solution that takes a number of the limitations of a physical event and replicate it online. For example, why should every visitor be presented with the same exhibition? Why can't the virtual event recognise me, look at my preferences in my registration details, and deliver me a customised experience so that the stands/booths of the vendors that are most likely to have products and services that are going to help me, are presented to me 'front and centre'? Why not use tag clouds that can 'hover' over a stand/booth to give me an instant indicator of what is being discussed with that vendor? Features like this benefit the visitor and cannot be replicated in the physical world. Let's use them to demonstrate the full potential of taking the best of the web and the best of events and using them with the single minded goal of producing the best visitor experience possible.

As we all know, get the customer experience right and everything else will follow.

Circumstances & Disclosure

Before I start examining the 'whys' and 'wherefores' of existing virtual event platforms, services and business models I need to disclose that I work for a virtual events platform vendor, although this is not the primary thrust of the business, the platform was developed as a means to an end. When I joined Decisive Media (www.decisivemedia.co.uk), known to many in ICT and Telecoms as TelecomTV (www.telecomtv.com), the company was looking at launching a series of physical events. However, the whole TelecomTV community had been built online from the company's formation in 2001 and it seemed to me, as the subscribers were used to consuming content and interacting online, virtual events could offer a logical and cost effective solution.
Over a few weeks in late 2008 we took a look at a good number of platforms available in the market and concluded, with the in-house talent at our disposal, we could create our own. Primarily, the reasons behind this decision were:
1. We felt we could produce a platform on which we could run our own events that would have a return on the investment in development, within a reasonable time-frame, as opposed to paying a platform vendor a considerable rental fee.
2. We also believed there was an opportunity in the market to produce a simple platform that brought together the best of web tools and the functionality of events in general, and make it 100% browser based (especially important for corporate clients who have IT protocols that don't allow for large downloads and 'exotic' plug-ins) with an emphasis on allowing the visitor to have a 'relevant' experience and find the content, exhibitor or contact, as easily (within a minimum number of clicks) as possible.
3. Create a new revenue stream with a flexible approach to the commercial model - ownership, licensing, and partnership (shared revenue from stand, sponsorship and delegate sales to share the risk).
If you are interested, please take a look at some examples of our work:
http://ictworld.telecomtv.com/ and http://www.symantecvirtualexpo.com/
and let me know what you think.........