Virtual Event Success

I’ve blogged many times on the ways you can use Twitter to fill your virtual event here and here. Plus, I shared a video by CeCe Solomon-Lee on the very same topic. Dennis Shiao, a colleague of CeCe, also weighed in on the topic and while I loved all his points, one stood out that caused me concerned.

Dennis wrote about the frequency of using your event’s hashtag in your tweets and warned that you shouldn’t use them excessively. In particular, he wrote:

Be careful not to over-promote to the related hashtags, as constant promotion of your virtual event will surely turn off the followers of that hash tag – you’ll even receive backlash from them.

On the one hand, I see his point. However, there’s a way to use your event’s hashtag on Twitter that will help you avoid this backlash and allow you to tweet out updates from your virtual event.

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This is a wonderful video that Cece Salomon-Lee, Director of Marketing for InXpo, put together explaining how to use Twitter for virtual events.

The first part of the video focuses on Twitter basics, such as signing up, following people, retweeting, blocking people and sending tweets or direct messages. So, if you consider yourself to be an intermediate or advanced Twitter user, you can skip the first 5-minutes.

Cece starts to explain how to use Twitter for virtual events at the 5:50 mark. Some very valuable advice, so click on the play button below to hear her tips.

I also blogged about how to use Twitter hashtags to fill your next virtual event.

There are many tools you can use to host your virtual event or virtual show. Some of the leading tools out there are:

• Unisfair
• InXpo
• VirtualVu
• On24

But I was floored to learn how much it costs to use their platform to host your virtual event. According to Masthead Online:

"Running a virtual event with Unisfair requires a minimum investment of $25,000 (U.S.)."

Yikes! That's typically how much I generate in revenues for the event. I would break even if I were to use these platforms to host my virtual event.

Now don't get me wrong. These virtual event platforms are gorgeous. Touring these virtual event platforms is like being on a tradeshow floor. They are just stunning to see. When I spoke at eComXpo in 2006, I was blown away at how clever and intuitive the platform was. I don't know which virtual event platform eComXpo used, but I felt as if I were in a room speaking to people.

The drawback is that you'll have to spend a year inviting sponsors to exhibit at your virtual event in order to cover your costs. Attendee admissions just won't cover it. Plus, you'll have to guarantee your sponsors a certain number of leads. Unless you're in the business of hosting virtual events, this can be an expensive and time consuming exercise just to help cover the cost of "renting" a virtual event platform.

Over the years, I've used two things to host my virtual events:

• A conference bridge line that can handle 200 callers or more
• A webinar platform that can handle up to 1000 connections

That's it. Both are inexpensive options and help me focus on delivering great content to attendees. Yes, there are certainly drawbacks to each, most notably, I won't have exhibitor booths for sponsors. However, I'm already managing affiliates, speakers, attendees and alumni (those who attended my event in the past) and managing these 4 groups is tiring enough.

So don't get overwhelmed by the cost of using a virtual event platform. I would encourage you to start off with an inexpensive tool first than to see you miss out on such a lucrative revenue stream.

InXpo, a company that provides a platform to run virtual events and virtual shows, announced that Twitter is now integrated into an enhanced version of its software.

This is good news because attendees can now tweet their reaction to the event they're attending without having to leave the InXpo platform. Instead of having attendees leave your platform to head over to the Twitter to publish their thoughts and feedback about the sessions, they can instead post them directly through the InXpo tool. This helps to diminish the need to login to several different systems and to minimize multi-tasking.

If you're unfamiliar with how you can use Twitter to attract new attendees to your virtual event, read this blog post and this blog post on the topic.