Virtual events are an up-and-coming method for bringing groups of professionals together in a manner that is convenient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly. There are features of the virtual platform that provide benefits beyond traditional conferences. Read this article to get the scoop on the newest format for virtual conferencing, what makes the experience unique, and how data analysis can create a powerful impact after an event.
Technology allows for a number of leaps to be made in terms of what we are capable of doing and how we shape the way we go about business as usual. Social media is a familiar platform for networking and interpersonal correspondence that provides people with the ability to share content with one another as quick as a keystroke. The microtransaction has successfully commoditized virtual goods. It appears to be the movement of our time to see more and more goods, services, and human processes extend to the virtual domain to find a new frontier in the ongoing history of human economic development. How about conferences and events?
Virtual events are an up-and-coming method for businesses, associations, and groups of individuals with common endeavours to share ideas, make meaningful connections, and have conversations that matter. How is it any different from a traditional conference, you ask? The distinction lies in the word ‘virtual’. A virtual event does not take place in a space that requires hotels to be booked, travel plans to be made, or taxi rides to shuttle attendees from location to location on the company credit card. It takes place online. The event ‘space’ could be anywhere. The virtualness of the conference allows for this convenient nature of attendance. Convenience is the most immediate taste of what this venue has to offer that geographically bound locales do not.
The virtual space provides the opportunity for the conference to be engaged in and captured in a manner that is wholly unique. While a traditional conference may be filmed and documented thoroughly for its audience, the virtual event allows for the conference to be analyzed through tools of data science. For example, a pre-recorded session could be turned into a transcript and then processed with a simple or complex set of parameters to give the simple outcome of organized and useful information from the whole of its speakers.
Another example of the capacity for applying data science to the virtual event is the analysis of an online chat. Say your online event is structured around an online chat. The event runs for one, two, perhaps even three hours. In this space of time, people are sending messages in the chat that – from an outsider’s perspective – look like synapse fires between the different chat handles. The ideas are communicated with lightning speed.
A great advantage of the platform is the ability for a team to go back through a transcript of the online chat with a fresh pair of eyes and a solid game-plan to run the transcript through finely tuned analytic programs. Unanswered questions and points that didn’t catch the eyes of the attendees can be given a proper spotlight, the hotspots of conversation can be neatly laid out for any curious mind to explore, and topics for future events can be identified, anticipated, and discerned through the chat activity of attendees.
In light of all of this, can it be said what the value is that the virtual event has to offer a company? The underlying value of the virtual event takes its foundation on the convenience of the venue. The value builds upward from this foundation through the ideas that come out of a collaboration between people of geographically diverse backgrounds, various forms of experience, and degrees of expertise. The value of a virtual event is created, maintained, and increased by those who come together and share their ideas, experiences, and knowledge. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts.