Virtual event worst practices: What are the mistakes organizations make with virtual events?

1: Getting lost in the technicalities of the "virtual event" platform and neglecting event-marketing 101 principles. Great promotion, attractive content, inspiring speakers are as important in virtual events as in physical events. As a matter of fact much more important.

2: Trying to simulate the physical experience in a virtual way as oppose to leveraging what virtual can uniquely offer

3: Shopping for the lowest cost vendor and not comparing apples to apples

4: Neglecting the on-demand portion and not taking advantage of this unique value

5: Pushing quantity (i.e. sessions) as opposed to quality; few and short are better

Excellent virtual event worst practices from Tom and Dennis. Here are a few more:

LACKING “THE VISION THING”
Unless you have clear goals in mind and strategies to achieve them, your virtual event will not be a success. An experienced Virtual Event Manager can help guide you, give you ideas, and convey Best Practices, but you have to know what you want to accomplish. Without a vision, clients have difficulty making decisions. “Our competition does virtual events” does not qualify as a plan.

NOT ENOUGH QUALITY CONTENT
Why would anyone want to attend your event? What’s in it for them? Unless you have something of value to offer them (great speakers / webcasts, opportunities to network with fellow attendees and exhibitors, informative presentations and collateral that can be downloaded, Prize Giveaways, etc.) there is no reason for anyone to show up. Even if you had enough quality content for your last event, you need to provide new and compelling content to ensure repeat attendees.

NOT ENOUGH RESOURCES
Your virtual event is not going to magically appear by itself. If you do not have the time, energy, employees, or money to complete your objectives for organizing a successful virtual event, then wait until you do. Life is difficult enough - why set yourself up for failure?

NOT ENOUGH POTENTIAL ATTENDEES
If a virtual tree falls in cyberspace and no one is there to see it, did it ever really happen? Unless you have a sufficient customer base / fan base to achieve your attendance goals and provide you sufficient ROI and the type of promotion strategy to make people aware and interested enough to attend, you should wait until you do. Why throw a party if no one is going to show up?

LACKING THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Organizing a successful virtual event can be challenging. There are several moving parts. It requires dedicated, organized, creative, and flexible people. Not only do you need team members who are capable of the tasks assigned to them, but also willing to make the effort to follow through on their responsibilities. Your event will only be as successful as the effort your team puts into it.

1) Lack of Strategy
Virtual events require strategy as solid as any other marketing effort that your brand spends money on. It requires a significant amount of planning in order to be truly aligned with your organizational objectives and to deliver a brand experience that addresses the objectives of your audiences and sponsors/exhibitors.
2) Poor Content
In this digital age, your audience has access to content at their fingertips. Invest in your content development to ensure that it is relevant AND unique to your audiences, do not re-purpose content or gloss over topics and hope that it resonates, your audience has a choice in how they spend their time, delight them by delivering on “tell me something I don’t already know” and offer actionable takeaways.
3) A lackluster audience
Start engaging your registrants from the time they register so they become invested in the journey, while helping spread the word to their networks. Keep them informed with timely communication and reminders, and always remind them of the value this event is offering. Polling your audience on their objectives and the type of content they want to see featured is a great way to gain insight into their needs/interests and create a more compelling audience journey.
4) Irrelevant and/or non-participatory sponsors/exhibitors
Just as you invest in developing content that is relevant to your audience, you should select your sponsors and exhibitors carefully to ensure that what they have to offer is relevant to your audience, this results in a win/win scenario. In addition, I highly recommend guiding sponsors and exhibitors through best practices and the event objectives so they know what the desired audience experience is that they need to help deliver on. This will keep them informed (not all companies have experience with virtual exhibition) and can develop an experience that is on par with your expectations. Also, outline what type of engagement is required from the type of promotions they should help foster with their audiences to staffing for live activities, part of the reason people visit exhibit spaces is to connect with company representatives so don't waste that opportunity for either side.

The biggest mistake is forgetting about the attention span of a virtual guest. The guest is not removed from their daily work distractions or habits.

A live off-site conference, has significantly different dynamics. If a virtual event is not packed with dynamic content that flows seamlessly, the opportunity for viewers to disengage is 100 time easier.

Just think of the difference in audience attention when Tony Robins speaks in front of a large audience and one of your presenters in a virtual presentation. Tony has practiced every element of his presentation because he knows that he has to keep 40,000 people captivated. What has your presenter practiced?

Organizers must have a Tony Robbins mindset. You have to create presentations and processes to ensure that you don't lose your audience.

Here's the 'honest' mistakes I made on my first one which I think are typical:

- went for the cheapest platform I could find
- chose to attach to a huge event rather than an event whose audience made sense
- had no 'live' content - only content filmed at the live event
- did not resource it sufficiently or have people driving discussions online
- launched it with poor lead time and at a time when the sales team were most stretched with the live event

Still broke even and had 500 uniques visitors though...

Content is always the largest area of concern with any program. Make sure you ask the question what will the attendee walk away with that they can implement into their day to day to save time and money. Can they use this information to help measure successes. How will all this information take their company to a new level.

We are a 30 second society and if you do not provide good content peole do not pay attention.

For all the sesisons make them as interesting as possible, DO NOT READ powerpoint slides to the audience. If that is the case send them a PPT or PDF and call it a day. If I cannot get what I need in a 20-30 minute session then there is no point to the presentation.

All presentations should be directed t the levels they are promised to educate. If you are inviting CEO's make the content directed to CEO's. If it is to a technical team, make the topics and speakers give real life info that a technician can use and walk away with.

Try and use a moderator to break up the conversations speakers can lul the audience to sleeep with a monotone voice or presentation. Keep it short sweet, direct and to the point. Do not pitch or seel products but give reasons why thse products and services help save time and money.

Organizations make mistakes typically because they are new to the space, don't know what questions to ask, don't plan sufficiently and they don't always get the best advice. It's an iterative process but taking pointers from my colleagues in the virtual event space and others that have gone through the learning experience, will smooth out a lot of potential hazards. Companies also rarely see virtual events holistically. They should be part a grand plan - much easier to sell internally if that is the case. I would add the following to what Tom and Dennis posted above:

1) Why a virtual event - This sounds terribly basic but organizations need to decide and then constantly re-evaluate why they are producing a virtual event and what they would deem as the key performance indicators or in plain English, did it work and why? This should be discussed in depth with whoever they are partnering with to put on the event, e,g, platform company, reseller, agency
2) Not enough resources - A number of organizations don't have adequate human resources to manage the event. If you are a large Enterprise account chances it's likely that you will have an internal events group who can utilize but smaller and medium size companies will have to pull resources from other areas. Companies get caught out by not planning for this.
3) The right amount of effort - Companies need to take the entire process seriously in that just because it's virtual doesn't mean that you can put in less effort into any aspect of the digital event
4) As Dennis mentioned in his point on WIIFM, companies don't take advantage of who they can put into a booth, live chat session or presentation. If I worked for a large Semiconductor company I would put the Chief of Design into a booth for a scheduled period of time (even if it's 30 minutes) and promote the heck out of it. Could he/she spent this amount of time in front of their PC to participate - of course and would the audience like to interact with them? You bet!
5) Companies need to evaluate their partners more carefully - they need to spend as much time as they can spare on evaluating vendors - attend a couple of events, talk to their customers and as much as the technology, make sure they have a team that is willing to take the time to explain the pitfalls and best practices of virtual events. Pick a company that is going to make YOU a rock-star in your organization. You will have happy customers, employees and management.

There are many more mistakes to look out for but don't be afraid to ask for advice from your platform vendor, agency partner and of course the community. It's in everyone's interest to make these events successful and a good experience for everyone.

Organisations thinking that an 'instructor led classroom' training event can be magically turned into an online virtual classroom event with little or no effort!

Booking too many people onto an online classroom training event - simply because they can - with no thought as to how these attendees can be managed.

Planning 'virtual learning sessions' that are far too long.

Assuming that all Presenters / Trainers (who are excellent in the classroom) can adjust to online classroom training.

Not investing in good 'network bandwidth' in buildings, meeting rooms, at employees desks in order to facilitate good VOIP and prevent lag or delays etc. - Making do!

Simple things - investinng and giving all employees a decent set of VOIP headphones / headsets to plug into their PC so that they can learn at their leisure and not having to borrow some or use the phones!

Organizations forget that "content is king". Whether you're producing a hybrid event, replacing an in-person with a virtual or just using virtual exclusively - you can't forget that your audience's experience is really what it's all about! I find that most organizations focus on what is the new hot technology, and how they MUST have it, (because everyone else does). If social media, web 2.0/gov 2.0 hasn't taught everyone that you must pay attention to your audience, virtual/hybrid events will be a much harder lesson indeed! It takes a tremendous amount of planning and quality content development to pull off a relevant hybrid/virtual event.

I have said it time and time again, "It takes just as much or more to plan a quality online event than it does an in-person one."