The Pixilated Podcast

Ep. 99 | 8 Hybrid Event Ideas

October 08, 2020 Patrick Rife | Alex McGlynn Season 1 Episode 99
The Pixilated Podcast
Ep. 99 | 8 Hybrid Event Ideas
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Pixilated Podcast. I’m Patrick Rife and I’m Alex McGlynn and today we’re going to talk about 8 Hybrid Event Ideas

- What are Hybrid Events
- Why Hybrid Events Are Valuable.

1. Recording its sessions and using them as marketing pieces in the future
2. Special Content for VIrtual Attendees
3. Create a Freemium Ticket with limited access
4. Event Specific Product Offerings
5. Syndicate Streaming onto other Platforms
6. Deploy Recorded Content to Re-engage attendees
7. Tailor Networking Experiences for each Environment
8. Give Attendees access to other attendees for networking & community building. 

So, that is it for today before we go don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe it helps us grow and we will see you soon.

Subscribe at http://podcast.pixilated.com/

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Patrick Rife:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Pixilated Podcast. I'm Patrick Rife. And I'm Alex McGlynn today we're going to talk about a hybrid event ideas.

Alex McGlynn:

So if you don't know, we're going to do a quick player what hybrid event is, and then pass on to share some reasons for why it's valuable. And then we're gonna share some ideas. So what's the hybrid event? hybrid event is a combination of an in person event and a virtual event happening at the same time with the same goal under the same branding and umbrella. So a lot of a lot of event planners, and a lot of conference planners, and a lot of professional meeting professionals in general, have chosen to still host an in person portion of their event. So again, a lot of venues are allowing 30% capacity. So they're still able to have some portion of their their attendees come in person, it works really well for the local folks. So if you're hosting an event in Houston, let's say anyone who's in the Houston area that was planning to attend, it is assuming they feel safe, and you're making creating a safe environment for them might feel comfortable coming in person, because they don't want to sit in their living room when the event is happening just down the street. But for those of us in, you know, the Baltimore region, for instance, that want to attend, but don't feel comfortable getting on a plane or feel like maybe it's a little irresponsible to do so can still happily attend from the comfort of our lovely podcast studio, or our home offices or living rooms or whatever, and still learn and grow and get takeaways and still be able to network and get something out of it without having to travel. So again, that's kind of the basic idea. You're taking the virtual, and you're taking in person and you're blending them together to create a hybrid event.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah. So why are hybrid events valuable? They are valuable for variety reasons, some are short term, some are long term, they're valuable right now, because you can still have people that wanted to show up to your in person event, but can't travel from Baltimore, be able to attend, right. So it allows you to have a secondary channel by which people that aren't able to physically come to wherever you are for your event to still be able to attend. So what does that mean? It means that you don't lose engagement with your community, it means that you potentially don't have as big of a fall off in revenue, it means that you still have places and opportunities to be able to activate sponsors that have maybe already bought in with you. So you don't have to write refund checks. And in the long term, the value is going to be that it gives you the opportunity to build an entirely new digital only audience that is accessible anywhere in the globe. So your total addressable market, that you're able to expose your conference in education, conference, learning platform, you know, training program, whatever the case may be, all of a sudden, it is that much bigger. So if you really embrace the idea of hybrid events, as opposed to just virtual events, and know that you're nurturing to different audiences, you know, in in four or five, six years, you could look up and be sitting on top of a massive empire that you never would have been able to facilitate by just being a local live event that serve a very specific geographic region.

Alex McGlynn:

If you can't tell we really like the idea of hyper advance. And we think that the future Yes, and we think that that is where the globalization of the event industry is probably taking us maybe a little more rapidly than we were all prepared for, but you know, got to learn and adapt. So let's get to the ideas. Really, yeah. Okay, so I'm just gonna say full stop, you need to be recording everything that happens at your conference, everything. So if you have a presenter, you need to be recording. If you have workshop breakout sessions, you need to be reporting when people present their ideas. So again, have a recording of everything. Full stop, there's a lot of things you can do with it. We'll get into some of them later on. But that is just a general, you must do that. If you're hosting a virtual event, a hybrid event or an in person event, recording everything. So why don't we recording everything number one, because you can repurpose those sessions for marketing pieces in the future. There are a lot of cool tools out there that will take all of the audio that you've been able to record and transcribe it for you into text formatting. Those are really easy ways to get cool sound bites, to get quotes, blurbs, etc. That can be repurposed for website content or email content for marketing content, when you're trying to get folks into your event the following year, and you can take all those videos and dice them up and create really kind of exciting highlight reels that show people exactly what you what they're going to learn and what they're gonna be able to see and experience at your event. For those of you who know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, he does a great job of dicing up, he or his marketing team, someone does a great job of dicing up his His talking and your speaking engagements and kind of blending them together to show why you should come to his next conference. And then obviously at the end, you know, there's a link to a ticket so that you can attend as well. You can do the same thing with your conference, I'm sure they're amazing things, there's probably some things that are getting people really amped up. They're not gonna know about them if they can't see them, though.

Patrick Rife:

And that was an episode in and of itself, like, 11 minutes.

Alex McGlynn:

No, it wasn't not just during it.

Patrick Rife:

So number two, he'll along with

Alex McGlynn:

sorry, Alex is passionate,

Patrick Rife:

very spicy. So number two, special content for virtual attendees. Look, the people that are coming in real life, they get a whole lot of special that the virtual attendees aren't going to get whether it's, you know, carrot cake, or it's like a coffee bar, or it's, you know, like the balloons and the decor and the music and the smell, and the people in the field and all that stuff. So think about your virtual attendees, and figure out how to create awesome shit that they only get. So do you have some badass speakers coming in? You know, can you? Can you facilitate a special q&a that's just five questions deep, and maybe it's pre recorded, so it doesn't even you know, interfere with their schedule, but release it only to the virtual attendees. That kind of stuff people love, maybe you do have a sponsor that is looking to get some more kind of FaceTime with potential buyers or something like that, can you facilitate like a five minute speed dating session where the sponsor still only has to give up, you know, 20 minutes of their time, because there's only four seats available. But you know, like you gamify how the virtual attendees get access to be able to do that. Just think about it. You know, like, I'm confident that as long as you pose the question to yourself, you'll be able to think of some really creative ideas, but but do that make sure that you go the extra step to make the individual type of attendee tickets differentiated, and having value props for both of them, because you don't want your virtual attendees to feel like it's a completely lesser experience, what you want is you want them to think that it's a different experience.

Alex McGlynn:

100% Yeah, again, different, but still really valuable. And, you know, giving them something that is gonna make them feel special is important. It's not easy to be a virtual attendee, they still want to feel like they're getting value out of it, and into the experience, cool things that they're not missing out on anything. So think through it, it doesn't have to just be exclusive content, there's a lot of other things you can do to try and make them feel special. Again, think about it, and get outside your comfort zone and get your get outside the box, your ideas. So next up, this is definitely getting outside your comfort zone and your ideas, because this goes against a lot of the way that people think about their events, but create a premium ticket with limited access for your virtual attendees. So a lot of conferences and events are very expensive, they cost a lot of money to attend. And there's a reason because you are creating amazing content that is going to help further someone's career or help them make new partners, find new partners, or increase their business development opportunities, or network or find something that makes it valuable, and they're going to be willing to pay 500 to $3,000, to attend your conference. And you shouldn't want to give all that away for free, especially to virtual attendees. That definitely doesn't make sense. But there are probably pieces of your event like keynote speakers, that you should be giving people access to because what you want with virtual attendees is as many eyeballs as possible on your event. So if you can tease them with some free content, like a keynote speaker, and pump it out through social media, and get people excited about it and get people to tune in who would have never paid for a ticket to come in and just see a little taste of your conference or your event, you have a much better chance of getting them to my re monetizing them the next year. So if I tuned into your event to watch a keynote speaker, or to watch a specific portion or workshop or something like that, and I like it, and I mean themes, and I feel like I got something out of it, you can bet I'm going to bookmark your event for next year and pay for a ticket so that I can get the rest of that content that I didn't have access to freemium works. There's a reason that software companies all over the world are doing it, give away a piece of it so that people can get an idea of how amazing everything behind the paywall is going to be. and use it as advertising and use it as marketing during the event live event experiential event marketing. In its truest form, we're giving someone a small taste of how amazing things could be if they're willing to pay for a ticket next year.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah. So next on the list is event specific product offerings. So the opportunity there is, you know, who are you working with? What are your sponsors comprised of? Do they have? Do they have specific product offerings that you could bundle up and and serve out to your to your attendees and audience like, it stands to reason that if you are producing a conference that is about health care, and you have a bunch of health care providers or companies that produce products for the healthcare industry that have your sponsors there that they would be that they would be thrilled to be able to bundle up some entry level freemium version of their product or, or, you know, load load test version of their product, where you're really able to continue to add value to it. So you know, when when you're looking at taking an event and you're losing the in person touch and you know, you're losing the catering and the hospitality side of it, you know, you want to look and identify all the ways that you can add value on the other side of it, and looking towards creating like very specific product offerings that people get to interface with and they can take away, it's going to also extend the life of the impact of the conference, because you know, that that following Monday, when they pull up in their grab bag, and they go and start checking out, you know, the free PixiWeb subscription that they get to try out for 30 days, or, you know, maybe it's like a credit from AdWords or anything along those lines. Like, that's a really great way to to add specific dollar value, when you know, like, you're gonna get a package of, you know, like a coupon book, right? everybody's like, those are cheesy, but you know, you're like, in there looking for, like the coupons that you want to use in your space. So the same thing is true inside of the business world. They're cheesy, but they work and people use them.

Alex McGlynn:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So next up, this actually kind of goes hand in hand with my last point about bringing tickets actually, on the note of premium tickets. The other benefit to that is that you're getting their contact info, if you make them sign up for it, you're still getting their contact info so that you can hit them with some of this amazing marketing material we've been talking about, again, to monetize them, and get them be a paying customer. Additionally, you can syndicate streaming onto other platforms. Again, you don't want to give the whole boat away for free. But you can give people a test drive, you can let them watch a keynote speaker, you can let them watch a specific session streaming on Periscope and Facebook and Instagram. And I guess LinkedIn now has streaming and Twitter and get it out there as far as you possibly can to get as many eyeballs on your brand. One, it's gonna make your sponsors way more money and way happier. There's nothing sponsors love more than having hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on their brand and their logo. So don't think about it like giving it away for free. Think about it, like you are creating more value for your sponsors, and hopefully getting to open up their pocketbooks a little bit more next year. But to you're getting a lot of potential customers to see your event and experience a piece of the amazing content that you've been able to put together. So again, if you're going to have like a live band play or something like that, consider giving it away for free over, over streaming, if they're okay with it. Again, check with your speakers and your entertainment before you do anything like this. But as long as they're on board, they really probably want exposure more than anything else as well, as long as they don't know making any money from it. They should be cool with it. And they should be happy with you their name out there. So again, take the time think through it, maybe find a specific piece of your event you think is going to be real legal wow factor for the general public. Get it out there. Because you never know when you're going to find your next attendee or company or sponsor by doing something like that,

Patrick Rife:

you know, play the long game, play the long game, just because they're not coming in through your paid portal right now, doesn't mean you can't give them you know, like, they're gonna feel a distance between being an attendee and watching the Facebook Live or the Insta live of it. Like it's not quite the same production quality, it's not quite the same frame, like the person is like, we're on Instagram Live right now, like they're there and hanging out. And it's wonderful, but like, they don't have our full attention, right, you have our full attention. So there is still value that is separate between the two. So don't think that you're just giving given the whole Calloway for free because it's definitely not the case. So and then building on that. So earlier, we talked about recording everything. So that way you have the content for marketing purposes, whatever the case may be, just now we talked about syndicating on two additional channels, that syndication also going to create most likely an archive document that you can save and you can redistribute. So next on our list is deploying your recorded content, but not for marketing, deploying your recorded content to add value for your attendees. And that means two different things for the two different types of attendees. For your virtual attendees who are going to have seen a lot of this content through a portal right through their laptop through their phone, wherever they're attending through. Is it the same content? Yes, most likely. Were there different sessions happening simultaneously that maybe they had to pick one and they wanted to see them both? That's definitely going to be true. Were there things that were like total like eye openers for them, aha moments, things that they want to share reference make notes about, tell their colleague like 100%. So there's a huge opportunity in saying like, here's the Encyclopedia of that event that just rocked your world. Use it as much as you can. Can on the other side of the coin, everyone that intended in real life, not as easy to take notes, how definitely you want to be in the moment more, right? So you're not indexing it in quite the same way. And then also, you won't have watched it through that same portal, you won't have felt like a webinar to you at all. And to be able to have access to go back in those events that you couldn't attend in person, if there are some of those special pieces of content that were only available for virtual attendees, the day of the event, but now also like we're going to sneak out the like 10 tips from daymond john on how to like acquire your first real estate rental property or you know, like, like teasing that back out all the sudden, the community side of what you're doing from a dissemination of information, consolidating points of view, holding like bonfire talks around which our community wants to share info that becomes richer and richer and richer when you're taking all that content you've captured, and you're deploying it back into the immediate community.

Alex McGlynn:

Yeah, 100% i, okay. So just as a another easy example, I get a lot of sales conferences, I've been to a lot of sales conferences. There are times where we're providing recordings afterwards. And it's amazing because I can share it with my team, especially if there's something I think was particularly valuable for like a an SDR or an account executive or an account manager, I can send that group of people the video so that they can watch it and get to experience the same takeaways and learnings that I did. Conversely, when that's not available, and it's not easy to get to, it feels like it makes it more difficult for me to share that with others. And really, what you want is people to be sharing information and sharing what they learned. Because that gets people jazzed up and increases the total number of people that are going to go to your conference, there have been plenty of times I went to a conference one year and then the next year to four members of my team, because I felt like it was that valuable. That's what you want to happen. Similarly, but different. You want to be able to tailor your network experiences for the virtual and the the in person folks as well. So people go to events to network, that is not the primary reason every time but it is always a piece of the pie. So obviously, as a sales professional, I my primary goal is to network, find new partners, find new vendors, find interesting people in the industry, I can bounce ideas off of find mentors, find potential employees, all that kind of thing happens when you are at an events. It is kind of the lifeblood of the events industry. It's what keeps people coming back to conferences year after year after year,

Patrick Rife:

where you have drinks.

Alex McGlynn:

Yeah, the same thing is true for virtual events. And it can be continued to be true for virtual events. But the reality is, it's really difficult to create networking for virtual events if you aren't intentional about it. So setting up slack channels, setting up group, group meeting rooms, creating topics around which they can discuss maybe taking some time out of the conference, when you're having a virtual happier a happy hour in person, and creating a virtual happy hour environment for people to log into and share ideas and communicate. You need to be thoughtful about how you're doing it. Because if you're not, it's not going to go over well, and people are going to lose out on part of what makes conferences and in person events. So amazing. So make sure you're intentional about it. And I know that there are a lot of folks out there who are trying to create crossovers between the in person and the virtual audience. I don't think that if you can figure out a way to do it amazing. I don't think it's wise. The people who are there in person are not gonna want to sit in front of a computer screen and talk to someone who's sitting in their living room over zoom. It's awkward. And it's weird enough to video chat with someone you don't know. Yeah. So I think maybe hit the pause button on that. And instead, what Pat's talking about Nexus create community.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, create community for sure. I think one of the other things that, that we had kind of talked about leading up to this question is don't be afraid also to like, suck the, the networking experience out of whatever your regular platform is, this is something I've seen people done. But the the analogy that we gave is, a lot of times when you're attending a conference, you know, you're at the Marriott all day, and whenever in San Diego at the waterfront and you go through all your conferences and five o'clock hits and the last one and you know, six o'clock or 630 is when like the evening event begins. So people are expecting to like they're gonna go back to their hotel room, they're gonna freshen up writing and maybe change their outfit and they're gonna head out for the evening networking event. So in that sense, the opportunity to kind of change the setting really will help people mentally prepare to kind of move on into like more maybe a networking at ease kind of mindset. So you know, look at look at the additional thing like things like house party or or any other kind of like breakaway setting where you could hold That networking event that maybe isn't inside of the zoom or the webinar platform could be a good way to also help people realize that like, we're moving into a different kind of tone of the evening.

Alex McGlynn:

quick shout out to house party, they also have games built into their video chat platform, which makes it even more engaging, and feels less awkward than something like zoom. So think about that. Think about creating some specific events, or engagement or ideas around the the virtual networking to make it less awkward, icebreakers are a huge help. Yeah,

Patrick Rife:

yeah. And you use software that's, that's meant to be fun. It's not meant to be like crazy efficient, sometimes, like coloring outside the lines is really good. So number eight on our list for hybrid event ideas. And this, this kind of picks up where Alex was was leaving off, which is giving, giving attendees access to one another building community, maybe doing both of those simultaneously. So what we mean by that is, there's never been a better time to really figure out how to facilitate a long, ongoing community. So just because you're having a virtual event that is focused on the hrs values for whatever, you know, nonprofits doesn't mean that those folks are ready to stop learning when the event is over at the end of the day. And if there is already a hybrid component, there is a virtual component, if there is all of this content that is being recorded, and it needs a repository or place to live, like why not think it the next step through and rather than having you know your attendees, whether it's in real life, or whether it's a virtual attendee, rather than have them just purchase a ticket, what if you know with their ticket also comes membership to this community, right? And, and it gives you this opportunity to not only facilitate access to your attendees directly, but also to be able to stay in touch with them to be able to query them more frequently about additional events, new ideas that you have things that you want to fire out there, keeping them more engaged, creating more opportunities to provide more value to them on an ongoing basis, will undoubtedly lead to a far more robust community, it will set you up to have astronomical success when you plan your next hybrid event and your next hybrid event in your next hybrid event. And it'll pull you even more into the digital ecosystem of organizing your community. And even doing that is going to add a just untold amount of value to your in real life events, again, because all of a sudden, it's going to just all feel that much more cohesive, because rather than it being one dog and pony show that you run once a year, and you have to ramp all the way up to it's just how you operate. And it becomes a much more effortless, kind of comfortable casual extension of your brand. Because it's not like oh, we can't like we can't screw this up. Right? It's we do this, like, This Is Us, like, let's keep carrying on. So

Alex McGlynn:

yeah, everything it does is it allows people to continue to make a re Kindle reignite connections they made at conferences, there have been plenty of times where I had a passing conversation with someone getting coffee, and like, oh, man, I'd like to pick that guy's brain, like I didn't get a business card, but I might know his name. I know, we've worked, but like, I'm not gonna like, if I can't find him on LinkedIn, it's pretty much where it's gonna end for me. But if you're getting a community where there's like a repository of everyone that attended, and you can reach out through that community, you know, don't just give their email address away, respect people's privacy. But if I'm able to send them a message that you forward along to their email address or something like that, you're helping facilitate business development, and you're helping facilitate partnerships. And that is what's gonna keep people coming back to your conference, you're after the year because as long as they can prove ROI, there'll be there every single year, maybe even in a larger group. Everything I would say is that hybrid events are a unique scenario, and that you're gonna have two people who had the same takeaways with two completely different experiences, and isn't going to be interesting things to talk about, and trying to bring those people together. As I said, I don't think you should do it during the event. It's awkward, and it feels awkward. But if afterwards, you're encouraging people to connect through this digital community, you are facilitating additional networking opportunities that didn't exist to them during the conference, and it's going to keep them engaged for longer.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah. So that brings us to the end of our episode that focuses on eight hybrid event ideas. We hope you all have found a lot of value in it. If you could please remember before you go to rate review, and subscribe. Your reviews help us find more listeners for our podcast and your subscription ensures you're notified each day when we publish a new episode. So until tomorrow, I'm Patrick Rife,

Alex McGlynn:

And I'm Alex McGlynn