BOTH SIDESNOW: On-screen captioning andtext translation allowedfor key sessions atWEVA EXPO 2011 to be presentedin both English andSpanish, at a fraction of the cost of live translation.WEVA Chairman Roy Chapman plans to expandtext-translation to 18 languages for the association’s next online conference. Plans forWEVA EXPO 2012—online only or other—have not been announced.
Wanted: Virtual Planners After following devel- opments in technolo- gy for many years, WEVA Chairman Roy Chapman jumped into virtual meetings with both feet at the 2011 WEVA EXPO. And he thinks that the meet- ings industry has just scratched the surface when it comes to the potential of virtual events. He’s keeping an eye on 3-D, he said, which “is coming on quickly and is going to change everything.” One thing that
not tell a novice planner to go into something [as complicated as this],” Elland said. “You have to know what happens on land in order to know what some of the outcomes could be.” Good communication skillswere, if anything, evenmore critical for the online event, because Elland was readying speakers in multiple time zones and working with some of themthrough a translator. She said: “The world clock is your friend.” One meeting detail created a reaction from
Elland, a nearly 30-year veteran of the meetings and hospitality industry, that was close to awe. Whenthe text-translation technology—an enve- lope-pushinginnovation—wasn’t ready in time, rather than proceed without the bilingual compo- nent, the entire event was postponed for three weeks. Normally, that would have created “utter chaos,” Elland said. “For the virtual event,wejust made an announcement.”
There were things that Elland would have
improved. For example, attendees would have profited from more orientation in usingthe new video-chat features.“Somepeople never did get the full value of the networking, because they didn’t get it,” she said. “There was so much going on.” Although she prefers face-to-face networking at a physicalmeeting, Elland said, “this platform real- ly does allow for relationship-building.” Chapmanwouldn’t argue that attendees don’t
prefer interactingin person. But the online event proved to be an affordable, accessible way for WEVA members to keep up with trends in the industry: Attendance tripled compared with the 2010WEVAEXPO.“This is not a replacement for an in-personshow,”Chapman said.But “you need to look at yourownorganization and ask yourself why people come to events and what motivates them.”
ON_THE_WEB: To learn more about WEVA EXPO, visit www.wevaexpo.com. For results of a virtual-events survey, conducted by virtual-events technology company ON24, visit http://bit.ly/virtual-meetings.
is not going to change is the need for meet- ing planners, Chapman said. As vir- tual meetings— which are less expen- sive than physical- location meetings— become more techno- logically sophisticated, there will actually be an increased demand for meeting planners, because companies and organizations will add more meetings. And “there is no way you could do a show [like the 2011 WEVA EXPO] without a meeting planner,” Chapman said. “An online show is just as frenetic as one in a physical location.”