When hired as special projects manager for The Association of Boarding Schools, Amy Shivers knew she’d be working on something called a virtual event, but she could hardly have imagined what that meant or where it would take her.
Tony Lorenz, founder of bXb Online (Note: Cece is providing consulting services to bXb Online), wrote an intriguing post today regarding Celebrity Talent and virtual events inspired by Brian Wilson’s of the SF Giants foray into virtual events. Tony highlights three considerations when leveraging celebrity talent for your event:
- focus on the objective, not the talent
- be relevant to your audience
- integrate the celebrity throughout your event
Are there other considerations to add?
Ragan.com posted this article about “7 Video Mistakes that Communicators Should Avoid.” The tips are also relevant for those using video online. The 7 tips are: use lighting, have quality sound, keep the videos short, use a tripod to avoid shakiness, add variety with different spokespeople, add shots of what you’re talking about – not just the figure head, and do more than point and shoot at the subject.
An interesting concept from Dennis Shiao on personalized guides to help virtual event attendees acclimate to the environment, find what’s hot, connect with other like-minded attendees and generally get more from a virtual event. As he points out, it will certainly add costs to an event, but might increase the engagement level to a point that it’s worth it.
http://bit.ly/i7on6j
This guest post on SocialFish by Rich Finstein, CEO of CommPartners, gives six good tips for stimulating interest and engagement during Webinars. Most of the speakers we’ve seen online need help – doesn’t matter how good your content is if you lose everyone before you can present it.
http://bit.ly/et3WeZ
Michelle Bruno offers some good tips to help speakers at physical events engage with remote audiences.
http://forkintheroadblog.com/archives/say-it-loud-and-proud-top-tips-for-hybrid-event-speakers/
Though you’ll get more out of this if you pop for the $25 bucks and buy the audio version from PCMA, this is a great presentation from Jeff Hurt on audience engagement for hybrid and virtual events. Told mostly through the best practices at EventCamp, this covers social media, speaker training, blending remote and f2f audiences and logistics.
http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/03/05/engaging-attendees-today-how-to-combine-virtual-face-to-face-meetings/
While this is primarily a blog post by Michael McCurry about a specific hybrid event and what went wrong/what went right, there are some great, quick learning lessons at the end on the essentials of hybrid event planning.
http://www.michaelmccurry.net/2010/02/26/learning-lessons-from-a-hybrid-event-experience-mpis-md10-conference/
