Take Away

Byte-Sized INEXPO routinely produces virtual events for thousands of remote attendees as well as large-scale virtual trade shows. But CEO Malcolm Lotzof has this advice for newcomers to digital events, partic- ularly if they’re hesi- tant: Start small. “Pick one track

you are going to live- stream. Don’t go straight to a virtual exhibit hall with 50 different exhibitors; highlight a single sponsor,” Lotzof said. “It’s much more important to do less and beat the expec- tations than to set out to do the world’s biggest and best event, and not deliver on the promise.”

Barbara Palmer is a senior editor of Convene.

Meeting Management: Online By Barbara Palmer

Binary Logic

How digital extensions can leverage the content that you already create for your meeting.

As the CEO of INEXPO, a leading producer of virtual events, Malcolm Lotzof is bettingon the future of virtual meetings. So what’s his take on face-to-face? “It’s irreplaceable.” But, Lotzof said, most organizations meet in

person with only a small percentage of their cus- tomers or members.Companies can only afford to sit down with key clients and prospects,while associations typically drawonly 15 to 20 percent of their membership to meetings. Meanwhile, they’re busy creating content—

presentations, videos, and other programming — for comparatively small audiences. “The

stream of a keynote by Condoleezza Rice, edu- cation courses, a tour of the exhibition hall, and other sessions. Some digital sessions were open to non-member dentists, dental team members, exhibitors, and the general public. “The goal was to have a presence for all of

our members—whether they attended physi- cally or not,” Goodman said. “We are not try- ingto replace the live experience virtually, we are tryingto enhance our meetingand offer a member benefit to 90 percent of our members.” ADAalso expects peoplewhoattend remotely will be more likely to physically attend future

“We are not tryingto replace the live experience virtually.”

toughest thing to do,” Lotzof said, “is to create the content.” TheINEXPOphilosophy, he said, is that if you’re going to create content and a meeting environment, why not do a virtual extension and make it available as a benefit to the rest of the audience? That strategy — delivering virtual content

as a member benefit — helped launch the American Dental Association’s (ADA) hybrid meeting last month. ADA is the nation’s largest dental association, with more then 157,000 members. But “even in robust economic times,” said James Goodman, ADA’s managing vice president for conference and event services, “we had less than 10 percent of our members attend the annual conference — typically we get between 5 and 12 percent.” ADA has made content available to remote

attendees before, but this is the organization’s first “robust, full-fledged” hybrid meeting, according to Goodman. Held in Las Vegas, the online conference featured a members-only live-

meetings, because in a sense the virtual extension broadcast the best of the annual meeting. “If we show them what they are missing,” Goodman said, “perhaps they won’t want tomiss it in the future.”There is stillmuchmore for themto gain by participatingin person, he said, includingthe fact that virtual attendees “don’t get the face-to- face networking or get to walk through the trade show.”Andcontinuingeducation credits are only available to those who attend in person. The costs of digital, which have been a bar-

rier to many organizations, have dropped sig- nificantly as the virtual-events industry has grown. Many companies have created browser- based and self-service platforms, Lotzof said, which reduces IT as well as customization costs. But lower prices weren’t what helped driveADA to create its first fully hybrid meeting. Instead, it was the recent advances in quality that the vir- tual-events industry has achieved.“We were not going to take something to our members,” Goodman said, “that wasn’t top-quality.”

ON_THE_WEB: Digital-events strategist Dennis Shiao lists a dozen reasons to hold a hybrid event at http://bit.ly/npDBon.

ILLUSTRATION BY GREG MABLY pcma convene November 2011 37