What are some of the biggest misconceptions about virtual and hybrid events? They will cannibalize my physical attendance; they cost too much; “our attendees” would

never go for them; they are too hard to do; you can’t tell if peo- ple are really engaged; they have to be really short to keep peo- ple’s attention. Right away you can forget about cannibalization, as all of

the event producers that I talk with say, nope, not a problem, just the opposite. The cost issue is a valid concern, but pricing is changing dramatically, and that is likely to continue except where you haveAV, Internet, and unions involved, but that has nothing to do with the technology and ability of the technology. We hear “our attendees won’t like these kinds of options” a lot, and to a certain degree it is true—most prefer face-to-face, and will. But it’s not about that. The world has changed, and not everyone will be willing or able to travel like they used to.

How are virtual events changing meetings? Meetings aremuchmore accessible to people and, withthe addi- tion of any number of social-networking tie-ins, are becoming muchmore interactive and responsive to attendees.

Does the Virtual Edge Summit have a particular theme this year? There are a couple of things that are really the hot areas. One of those is the perpetual environment—the 365 environment. One of our keynotes is devoted to that.Agroup from IBM will be doing it. What they’ve created is an enterprise-wide event

On_the_Web

To learn more about Virtual Edge Summit 2011, which will co-locate with PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, visit www.virtualedgesummit.com.

meeting and learning environment based on a virtual-event plat- form, and basically anybody in the IBM organization can go into that and deploy an event or an activity within that envi- ronment. I think that’s going to be a theme—people really look- ing at, how do we make these environments even more effective for their business, whether it’s an association or it’s a corpora- tion, by having these other kinds of activities?

What other speakers and topic areas are you excited about? One is the whole area of using these technologies for learning, training, and certification, so that’s an area that we see grow- ing very, very rapidly.We have some experts from association

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learning applications as well as some corporate folks that are going to be talking about how they’re using these technologies to drive their learning objectives. The third area is hybrid, and that’s just something that is

on people’s minds every time they do an event: Should it be hybrid? What are the options for doing a hybrid event? What’s it going to cost? How do I do it?

The Virtual Edge Summit itself is a hybrid meeting, right? It’s definitely a hybrid.We will actually start our program vir- tually, so the first sessions of the daywill be “simulive” sessions, meaning that they have been prerecorded and then they will be aired in the virtual environment and thenwill have liveQ&A after that. One of the reasons that we do that is, because we’re in the Pacific time zone in Las Vegas, we want to have a pro- gram that starts earlier for the Eastern time zone and Europe. We have a live host for the virtual audience—kind of like

an ESPN desk, where we’re streaming interviews and what’s coming up next and what’s going on now.We have that stream- ing right before our sessions start, and then once our sessions start,weswitch over to streaming in the meeting rooms. As soon as the sessions are over, we switch back to streaming from our studio, which is located there at the event.

How is your program affected by the fact that the audience is made up of meeting professionals? Sometimes we look at it as a lab, so it’s not necessarily the best practices, but we’re going out and doing things that you prob- ably wouldn’t do withyour event in order for you to experience it and see it. For example, last year we had the event running in five different platforms—we wanted to give people the expe- rience of what a straight screen experience, a 2-D virtual envi- ronment, and a 3-D virtual environment were like. No one would ever do that, except for us. It is a platform for us to really showdifferent kinds of things and try to be out there on the edge.

How has the Virtual Edge Summit evolved since it first launched in 2009? What we saw in the first year with the program and the focus of what people were really looking at was really more of virtual events—not so much hybrid, not so much other kinds of satel- lite events.With the second event that we did, it was much more focused on hybrid interactions. That will continue again this year.We’ll also be looking more at these satellite hybrid events or connected hybrid events. You have people who are actually meeting face-to-face, in a physical location, but who are a virtual portion of the event.

Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene. www.pcma.org