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01:30:45 am on February 8, 2012 |
Last month the Virtual Edge Institute hosted its 3rd Virtual Edge Summit at the San Diego Convention Center. This was the second year in a row that the event was collocated with PCMA’s convening leaders annual conference, exposing many experienced event planners to this emerging technology. Naturally, there was a virtual aspect to the event as well. Select sessions were live-streamed during the conference and a full agenda rebroadcast was hosted on-line 2 weeks later that included a virtual expo hall with the exhibitors from the live event.
Some may wonder why the virtual events industry would bother to host an in-person event as opposed to conducting it entirely on-line. The answer is simple… virtual events aren’t an adequate replacement for face-to-face meetings, and bringing together industry leaders, practitioners, and vendors to collaborate and share best practices is a worthwhile endeavor to move the industry forward. This line of thinking wasn’t always the case amongst our brethren.
A few years back, during the peak of the economic downturn, the industry first began getting serious traction and the leading vendors, ourselves included, positioned the technology as a replacement for physical events. In hindsight that value proposition probably did more to stunt adoption than to accelerate it amongst traditional event organizers as evidenced by studies like this. The earliest adopters of this technology weren’t event organizers but rather enterprise media & publishing organizations along with those who utilized the technology for virtual recruiting applications.
The fact of the matter is there is no replacement for looking someone in the eye and doing business with a handshake. Despite technological advancements and the social media revolution, the best connections are still made in person.
That being said, the physical event space has been permanently invaded by technology via mobile aps, social media, QR codes etc… and there is no turning back. Any event organizer, meeting planner, or venue who doesn’t account for how the audience uses those technologies won’t have the privilege to continue organizing or hosting events in the near future.
Moving forward, the more we can align ourselves in a manner that compliments strategies for engaging & connecting audiences in the physical event to the content or brand(s), the quicker we will see the adoption accelerate. Event organizers & marketers alike must be educated by the virtual event industry that we share a common raison d’être with the other technologies referenced above. Simply put, as was said at Virtual Edge, we are all about “collapsing distances and connecting people.”
