forward thinking Dave Lutz, CMP

The Two Extremes of Content Capture

Do you offer audio recordings of your conference’s concurrent sessions synced to PowerPoint decks? If you do, you’re probably experiencing a decline in the number of attendees who purchase and consume this flavor of archived content. If your numbers are holding steady, I predict it’s just a matter of time before your royalties evaporate.

apturing content at your premier face-to-face conferences is a must! Attendee palates for content consumption, however, have evolved and are going to two extremes — high-tech and low- tech. Audio synced to PowerPoint is caught in the middle and losing ground. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) People prefer content in bite-sized chunks, and 2) they prefer learning that includes a social component.

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HIGH-TECH CONTENT CAPTURE Hybrid meetings, where live-session content is streamed to a virtual audi- ence, is what everyone’s talking about these days. Many attempts at hybrid have not met expectations. This often is due to the fact that the presenter(s) did not design an experience for the live and virtual participants that is social in nature. It’s often a one-way broadcast. To improve your next attempt, it’s

critical that you coach your presenters on engagement techniques for both audiences. After the conference, drip out scheduled replays one session at a time. Be sure to have the presenter(s) develop a plan and show up to make the replay social. Refrain from scheduling multiple replays on a single day. On-demand view- ing is much less engaging and valued less by your customers. Another high-tech approach is to

capture sessions on video and edit the best portions into shareable clips that are between two and 15 minutes in duration. Alternatively, you can also test the waters by offering commute-friendly podcasts (30 minutes, max) of your best content.

PCMA.ORG APRIL 2013 PCMA CONVENE 33

LOW-TECH CONTENT CAPTURE Believe it or not, low-tech is the low- hanging fruit for many conferences. Well-written session recaps or key learnings can have incredible reach and effectiveness. Conferences that do this well have a content-marketing strategy that shares these nuggets via print pub- lications, e-zines, newsletters, blogs, and social-media outposts. What once served as the only method for sharing the best of conferences is coming back in style, but with new twists in distribu- tion strategy.

BITE-SIZED AND SOCIAL One of the coolest, low-cost capture ideas in the low-tech arena is a graphic facilitator. During a session, a skilled graphic facilitator uses large-scale imagery to storyboard the key points. Some conferences will put these

works of learning art on display in public spaces to serve as a social object or conversation igniter. These storyboards can also be shared beyond the conference walls via your content- marketing strategy. If the graphics are provocative enough, they have a high tendency to go viral.

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Dave Lutz, CMP, is managing director of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, velvetchainsaw.com.

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Case in Point Capturing and sharing premium conference content serves three primary purposes:

1 If an attendee could not make a session, captured content gives them the CliffsNotes version.

2 If attendees want to apply the learning to their job, captured content helps them develop a plan to do so.

3 For members, customers, or prospects who didn’t attend, nothing helps convey what they missed more than a sample of the premium content — especially when it is delivered in bite-sized/shareable pieces or when social-enabled.

ON THE WEB Nancy Duarte’s team created a visual story that synthesized several TED Talks. Read/view her “Graphic Recording at #illustrateTED | Progress Enigma” post at convn.org/duarte-ted. Told you graphic facilitators are cool!

ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP