Don’ts and Don’ts of a Virtual Event

This post is based on the first-hand experience at a virtual event (essentially a webcast) to which I was invited. I attended this event wearing the hat of a qualified corporate buyer, and here are my observations.

1. Don’t bore the daylights out of me. Webcasts that are an hour-long lose audiences or their attention. Take a tip from TED conferences. 18 minutes long. Try allowing the presenters to talk for no more than 20 minutes, open it up for 10 minutes for Q&A, but let the audience members stretch it to an hour if there are a lot of questions. A lot of questions means a very interested audience. Ask the moderator to inform the online audience that all questions will be announced anonymously.
2. Don’t allow me to drift off aimlessly. Throwing a bunch of icons and tabs, and a lot of human-like figures gliding aimlessly on a screen just wastes my time. Give me a roadmap but let me have the flexibility to jump from point to point. By the way, back to my earlier point – long webcasts do contribute to people drifting off to other places including the networking lounge or worse yet, to a browser window outside of the virtual event.
3. Don’t make me feel like I am intruding – especially intruding on a conversation in the Networking Lounge. Have an usher welcome me. Have a few people from technical support in the networking lounge.
4. Don’t let booth chat conversations be publicly visible. It can hurt your event’s brand, your sponsor’s image, and certainly does harm the exhibitor’s image. I am not interested in reading the conversation between your sponsor and a booth staffer asking how the traffic was and how you had 2,000 registrants. That should be a private conversation.
5. Don’t call your networking lounge a ‘social networking lounge’. It is a dead giveaway that you are trying too hard to fit in. Most audience members can see through the gimmick.
6. Don’t make the public chat room a generic one. Give it a purpose. If you expect large traffic, consider opening a few (chat rooms) and give each one a purpose. That will help channel conversations more effectively. Most audience members do not participate in the chat lounge. I guess like me, they are afraid to appear rude and interrupt any ongoing dialog between the few participants who like to dominate the scene. One would not typically barge in the middle of a f2f conversation among two or three participants, so the same holds true in the virtual event.
7. Don’t drool in public. To the exhibitors and sponsors of the virtual event, if you have your clients in the chat lounge and they are lavishing praises on your product, a polite thank you is good enough. Besides, the conversation looks staged, so it can be counter-productive. I suggest that you ask this overly complimentary customer to leave a note in a testimonial on your booth in the message board on your virtual booth. If you do not have a message board, ask your provider to include it.
8. Don’t let every click in your virtual event respond with a ‘loading’ pause. Lucky you had only 5 virtual booths on display in your exhibit hall. Imagine a virtual trade show with 120 booths. With 10 items in each booth to click on, we are talking of 1,200 ‘loading’ pauses in the virtual event, which means I have wasted an hour simply loading stuff on my high-speed internet connection. Choose some combination of technologies to improve my navigation. Keep it simple where possible.
9. Don’t show me expired webcasts in your list. I spent a lot of time trying to see which one was going on at the time I signed in. The time zone it showed was PST where I am not. Online, audiences have fleeting attention. Don’t lose them for this.
10. Don’t let sponsors dictate your registration form. They did not leave me with an option of ‘not interested’ in their product. I was there to see if an exhibitor from whom we were considering purchasing a product had any updates on their product lines.

The role of the telephone in a virtual trade show

Virtual exhibitors often ask us to review their virtual booths and give them recommendations about the content they have displayed on their virtual booths.

What we have observed is that in the clamor to ‘go virtual’, marketing professionals who are responsible for displaying messages on their virtual booth tend to forget the main goal of the virtual booth. Let me reiterate it here: The raison d'être for your virtual booth is to get a buyer to contact you in the manner most convenient to such buyer. Even if that means a telephone call. (Feel free to replace 'buyer' with 'prospect', 'lead', 'job candidate' or whichever specialized category to which your audience belongs.)

It boggles my mind as to why a company would go to great lengths to try to hide the phone number as a way to contact them on their website. That same approach seems to be common in planning content on the virtual booth. While your company’s logo and the cool tag-lines may be great to display on your virtual booth, if you are serious about making connections through your virtual booth, do not for even a moment think that it is old fashioned to expect online visitors to make a phone call.

Instant messaging, text messaging, SMS, skype calls, a twitter message – all of these are fine. However, there is absolutely no harm in displaying a specially set up phone number – a hotline, for your online visitors to call decision makers at your company.

During your virtual trade show, try giving your prospective buyers a refreshingly new experience. Allow visitors to cut through the corporate red-tape by setting up a hotline with your company CEO or a VP of Marketing or Sales. Display the phone number prominently on your virtual booth. You might even use some variation of the phrase common in infomercials … “Our operators are standing by to take your call! Call now!” That is because, in a virtual trade show, you have the power to attend to your online visitors no matter where you or they are located. It’s a promise you can make and keep. All you need is a phone that works.

Now, one can get fancy with technology relating to phones as well, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.