Consider a Cocktail of Venues. The combination of relaying the town hall meeting through a webcast and television allowed for a larger participation. I did not read about the size of the TV audience that tuned in, but on the web alone there were 67,000 viewers as reported by the Mercury News. If all the 67,000 were showing up because they were part of the 12+ million that received the email alert, that makes for a 1/2 percent response rate, which is not bad for a debut event. However, what is important to note is that by including the television, the Online Town Hall Meeting was able to cater to an audience that just wanted to watch using their TV remote. A meeting planner must consider the lower common denominator of a target audience to be able to reach the largest audience, even if that entails combining multiple venues and channels to improve the return on investment.
Seek Speaker-Whisperers. Every speaker at a meeting deserves the ability to gather intelligence before, during and after the online event. Obama's online town hall used Google Moderator. We recommend to our clients who are in the face-to-face events business that a simple online email form that directly sends emails to the keynote speaker, or an online threaded-discussion board work just as well. Some webinar tools automatically track the audience behavior by telling if they are viewing a presentation or if they have something else on the top of their screen. I recall a fellow traveler on a business trip to a conference telling me, "I hope the keynote speaker covers topics of my interest". He wished he could whisper into the ears of the speaker. Tools to tap into the opinions and intelligence of the intended or actual audience abound.
Splinter-Events Don't Hurt. I have addressed the matter of the ideal size of a virtual fair before in this blog. In large-scale organization-wide virtual meetings, it would be ideal for the event organizer to consider creating branches of the larger meeting. Breaking it down by topics might make sense, allowing the speaker to delve deeper into a subject, aimed at an audience that shares a deep concern about a certain topic. Each of the micro-events can then become part of a larger online meeting. We are working with a client for a global online trade show. When we do a virtual trade show with more than 100 exhibitors it makes sense to dice and slice the virtual expo into pavilions and sub-sections based on the demographics of the audience. The event brand only gets stronger with splinter-events, if held under the umbrella of the larger event.
Crowd-source Conference Agendas. We hear about the wisdom of crowds a lot lately, probably because tools and success stories are starting to surface. The online town hall meeting tapped into that wisdom through giving the ability to vote up or down the questions. With web-based tools available to poll invitees or letting them vote up or down a topic, even conference topics can be a self-selecting process. What will happen eventually is that those topics that could not rise about a certain level of interest for the larger majority, will start forming their own sub-groups within the larger community, thus qualifying for their own niche events.
Seek the Path of Least Resistance: Once the meeting organizer knows the goals of the meeting and the comfort-levels of the audience with various technologies to interact, it behooves the meeting planner to go for the simplest mechanism that will deliver the goods. If that happens to be an island in a virtual world and avatars, that is fine. If that happens to be a combination of emails, online polls and the television, that works. Find the medium that offers the least or no resistance to achieving the goals of the meeting, whether it be disseminating a message to an audience, getting feedback, or engaging in live interaction, or all of the above.
The reason virtual events are becoming mainstream so quickly is because of the ease of use of various tools, and because they can be combined seamlessly with traditional methods of meeting. One can now even foresee such hybrid virtual events being used for something as local as a PTA meeting.
