Meetings and event professionals who met over a recent WiT Virtual to discuss what successful meetings look like in the new reality, shared things they miss most about physical events – the energy, the vibrancy, the opportunity to make new connections and to meet someone new at the buffet or coffee line.
Indeed the new reality is harsh because none of those things is now possible. “It’s like the road has disappeared and suddenly all these other roads have come up and you are left wondering which road you should be taking,” said Yeoh Siew Hoon, founder of WiT and moderator of the session ran in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board (STB).
Suja Jayaraman, global category expert, marketing sourcing, APJ Region for SAP Asia, an organisation that holds an annual average of 175 events with 50 people or more in APAC, recounted the effort it took to move its largest annual customer-facing events with close to 15,000 attendees online with a very short lead time.
“This whole transformation is pretty quick for us. We have had to adapt and learn…to see how we can still maintain the integrity of the event but in a different manner,” said Jayaraman.
Yet, while the virtual event platform has become the engagement ground the world over, it is not all bad.
Andrea Teo, head, Pacific World Singapore, is one who has seen the positives in this development. “The exciting thing now is that we are able to do a lot of exploration and discovery with our partners and clients and it is very nice to see, although forced by circumstances, the courage to be different and to be open to new ideas.
“This has really brought us to a very new place now where you see a mindset shift. You see agility, creativity. The structure of traditional live events has been consistent for a while but this has really forced everyone to rethink the way we do things in terms of content experiences and delivery,” said Teo.
Alicia Evanko, executive vice president, global events, Northstar Travel Group, agrees. “The one good thing that has come out of this is the collaboration – the collaboration amongst people, whether it be your internal colleagues or your hotel partners, your destination partners.
“I have seen more creativity, innovation, collaboration…we’re learning about technology and different platforms and different ways to network and different ways to engage,” she said.
Newly minted an entrepreneur before Covid-19 hit, host and media personality Yvonne Chan who came from the TV networks, said it has been for her “trial by fire”.
“The bulk of my business was in hosting and moderating live events and a small part of the business was in media training. But since the government restrictions on social gatherings started to trickle that down towards the end of January, I found myself pivoting more to doing online presenting work.”
But Chan says the demand for media work quickly picked up when people started realising when you’re presenting and communicating to people across the screen, there are no more body language cues, and subtle facial nuances that you could just pick up on are not as obvious anymore. “It’s heartening to see that people want to improve and they want to deliver more effective messaging.”
This new reality of doing meetings has also brought into focus the importance of content. If content was king before, it is now emperor, said Yeoh.
Still on the positives, the panelists contributed what each, as event organisers, saw virtual events could deliver that live events cannot.
“Going virtual allows us to reach out to more people. And that (benefit) is tied to the cost component. If we previously had people who couldn’t fly to an event, now we can have them online,” said Teo.
Evanko pointed out that virtual events allowed her more accessibility to speakers anywhere. “You can do some things really cool things that you’ve never been able to before,” she said.
For Jayaraman, one of the biggest benefits of hosting virtual events is scalability. “You are not constrained by physical premises. Nobody needs visas, flights and so on, so you have access to a larger audience.”
But for all the benefits there are, downsides do exist. Low entries to barriers leading to a deluge of low-quality events, no business model, lack of energy were some points that were raised.
Addressing the lack of a business model, Evanko feels that the threshold for people paying for an online event is about 50% of the price of a similar but live event. Evanko suggests that we should not “undervalue our audience”.
“You’re still connecting with that same audience, but just in a different way.”
So how can we ensure that in this whole new world of virtual meetings and events, we are making the best use of the new platforms?
Tips and ingredients, collated as a playbook, that lend towards organising successful meetings emerged from the session. From “ditching the high production” to creating an experience that people could feel, these pointers were shared and scribed live during the WiT Virtual session.
This playbook was perhaps the night’s strongest statement made about the benefits of collaboration and creativity, two elements that were highlighted as bonuses that have emerged from this crisis.
