Virtual events were dead, long live virtual events. But how to make them come alive?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and on this podcast, I like to share 25 years of public relations experience in less than 20 minutes. And I do this for business owners and entrepreneurs that would like to unlock the value in their own companies by using effective and profitable public relations. Today, I would like to share with you about trade shows and how they're going virtual and what that means for us all, whether we've got our own businesses, we're selling businesses, or products and the impact it makes on our public relations. Now, I remember back in 1998 when I was living in Singapore and I had a product service called goevents.com. It was a search engine for business events, and at the same time there were a couple of young Englishmen in America running a service called the Virtual Press Office. And at the time, Singapore was making a play to become the international center for virtual trade shows and events. The, the only challenge really was that we were all a bit too early, maybe 20 years too early. There were issues of bandwidth, issues of processing speed on the computers themselves, but also people still like to travel and they could. Well, of course, COVID has changed all of that. COVID and the technology that we've all got to hand now has meant that trade shows and conferences and corporate events are really going virtual, but they're not just going virtual out of necessity. They're also going virtual because they frankly offer a great number of benefits. And on this show, I would like to just share with you some benefits of the virtual trade show, but also the ways that you can leverage and select the right trade shows to go to, or even to host your own. Now, some 20 years ago, virtual events were mocked and laughed out of the industry, says Jeremy King, who's the CEO of Festival of Media and Media Marketing Global and also a member of the Virtual Events Institute Advisory Board. Now, in America, they started this Virtual Events Institute to really gather all of the players that are both providing the platforms and all the event organizers together. Now, Jeremy King went on to say that it's great to see virtual events forced back onto the agenda. Now is their time to shine and forge a legacy way beyond the current situation. It's so much more than rules and governance. It's about human behavior and virtual events in tandem with live experiences, which will be here to stay. So back in the day, back in '98, when I was running my, my virtual events listing and my friends from the UK but living in America running their online media platform, we were trying to encourage companies about the benefits of not traveling, the benefits of accountability of digital, the benefits of smaller companies be able to compete with with larger ones. And although we didn't think about it at the time, of course, the sustainability benefits, especially when it comes to trade shows— any one of us that's been to a trade show knows that these are really expensive events from an environmental point of view as well. When I was working, for example, building the Morgan car business in China, we would build a booth, a trade show stand that would be made out of wood and maybe 300, 400 square meters, and for a week would be a little village. And anyone that's been to, for example, the Geneva Motor Show knows that there are acres and acres of basically buildings that are temporary. It's a massive waste of resources because most of these stands get trashed again because it's cheaper to build and destroy than to ship, build, and ship. So there's really a great benefit actually on many levels to going virtual, but from a public relations point of view, how can business owners take advantage? It used to be that we would go to trade shows and be speculative, really. We might in advance try and do some prospecting and arrange meetings in advance, but a lot of the trade show work back in the '90s and early noughts was to check in, register, get the big fat directory, sit down with a cup of coffee, circle all the companies that you hadn't heard of that you wanted to go and find, and then to traipse around the trade show floor hoping the, the marketing manager or the sales director or whoever it was we were trying to see would be there. And of course, by the last few days of any trade show, people are looking pretty ragged and may well even have gone home if the show is not good enough. So frankly, quite a waste of time in my view. But there were some upsides, and we'll talk about those a bit later on. But those of us that have tried to host events also know that the logistics of renting a venue, of organizing the signage, of arranging parking for the attendees, the food, the beverage, the security, the accommodation— companies will have full-time in-house event teams. This is an expensive on-cost for any business, and a lot of the trade show and the conference management time was really on logistics, not on sales and business development. So frankly, I was one back in '98 when I started my goevents.com business that was a real fan of going digital. Now fast forward to the really the sweet spot of technology and the last decade of the internet, the last decade of mobile phone technology, the last 3 or 4 years with cameras embedded of the kind of value, and now products and services like Zoom, meaning that people are familiar with the practice but also the technology is readily available for everybody to participate. The co-founder of LinkedIn, Eric Lai, has said that he believes that there's a great opportunity in the virtual and hybrid approach to events and that he's excited to play a role in advancing the cause. And he's a member now of this Virtual Events Institute advisory board. I was thinking about this whole online and virtual because I'm working for a client called Rosti, and they are a Scandinavian company with manufacturing capabilities in plastics in China and Malaysia, and a lot of their customer base are in America. And so they're going to participate in a virtual event hosted by Assembly Magazine, which is the leading magazine for procurement. And what we want to do and what we can do because of the way that events are taking place now is that we can participate without all of the costs of actually flying to America. So now my client, who's based here in the UK and also in Malaysia, they can have a presence really equal to a company that's, for example, in Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. So this AssemblyMag event is going to be hosted in October. It's the first time they've done it as a fully online event. And I think what we're seeing, what we are seeing, is big events, for example, like the Geneva Motor Show, which was cancelled this year, has actually cancelled next year as well, and the organisers are declaring bankruptcy, as far as I understand. Some of these big trade shows, especially ones that were hosted by, for example, trade associations, may well have gone out of business due to the costs and the money they might have lost from booking venues this year and events being cancelled. But the flexible entrepreneurial event organizers like the Assembly Mag publishers have built a fantastic community because they've still got the readership, and they're going to use platforms like Intrado. And so what the listing will be on their virtual platform is companies like Rusty can have company name, contact information, Product categories, hyperlink logos, company description, PDFs, company product videos located, meeting scheduling with attendees, on-demand access and exposure all the way through 2021. So there's a longevity now to an online event that never existed when we had to move in and out of a venue within a period of 3 to 4 days, but also the organizers are starting to add in things like email registrations pre- and post-event. What's then happening, of course, in the traditional world from a public relations point of view— attending a trade show often accompanied the, the opportunity to speak at that event, and PR firms would be eager to get clients to speak at these events because the world's media would also be at the event. Now, of course, the media could still be at the event without traveling. They could probably see and get to a great deal more press briefings and interviews than they could when they had to go, for example, in Las Vegas to the NAB. They would walk miles and miles and miles to go to all the different press conferences that would be scheduled every 15 minutes for them. So there are companies now like swapcard.com that are providing amazing big platforms. Intrado is another one. Intrado was formerly West Communications, and they're hosting as well these multiple events. Now, if we look at the role that public relations firms can play is to help clients to understand which platforms are going to deliver the best engagement, the best delivery. Some of these platforms like Swapcard, which is apparently trusted by some 1,000 leading conference and exhibition organizers, they have conferences, exhibitions, corporate events, and congress platforms. And they're offering agendas, live streaming, audience response including polls and surveys, networks, one-to-one videos, group chats. And what's very interesting then is that they're understanding that there are some areas where events have structured content and structured opportunities to present, for example, products and services, a bit like having a trade show floor where there would be booths and people walk around. But also there would be offline, there would be conferences taking place and work— working groups. But also there would be the large number of one-on-one meetings that people would be having. For example, in the coffee lounge of the official hotel or in the business centers. With a product, for example, like Swapcard, which is quite interesting, the business model has also moved on. In the old days, we used to have to book a space at a trade show, different size booths, and they'll be more expensive the smaller they were, and it was very inflexible and also very costly, frankly, because one had to then book the space and then either take a shell scheme or build your own stand and so on. And obviously, if you, if you didn't get a good spot, you could be by the toilets and meet nobody except for those people desperate to go there. So now with, for example, this platform Swapcard, they have a free app. So we can actually start to experience as an organizer We could be a company, we could be an event organizer, we could be organizing a conference for our own, for example, sales teams or dealers. And they offer a free networking app which allows event networking, onboarding emails, registration, email and chat support, and a free API in case you want to plug that into your website. So it's very powerful. Now what they also do is they have an event app and matchmaking service powered by AI, and this is just $2 per attendee. And I think this is beautiful because when one went to a traditional conference or exhibition, you paid the same price whether it's a good show or a bad show. You paid by— you pay by space, but actually no one really measured the performance of a show by space. It was by number of leads. So for just $2 per attendee we could host an event ourselves and invite people to that event. Now, they also offer services for organizing an event, which include what they call an exhibitor package— matchmaking, lead capture, exhibitor center— from just $49 per exhibitor. So this is a wonderfully scalable service, which means that if we're want to organize, for example, a niche event, a new startup event, we can do that without booking an expensive venue months in advance, without needing to make commitments to vendors, for example, like contractors, electricians, and so on. And having experience, for example, of putting together a trade show in New York where we were leveraged by the, the local unions quite significantly on the rates for things like electrical services, being free from being taken hostage by local contractors would also be a massive benefit. They organized an event by a group called Hello Tomorrow, and they had some 9,413 connections made through the event app, and over 104 attendees created their own schedules. Swapmeet is not by any means the only provider There are others with names like Airmeet, BigMarker, Connects.me, BoomSet, Attendify, all with different levels of services, connectivity, integration, and so on. So for those of us that are looking to attend events or to help clients to attend events, looking at the nature of the platform is now a little bit like looking at the venue. So we used to have to look at the venue and see, for example, the facilities for move-in or takedown. We had to look at the venue for proximity to the airport or to the, the storage facilities, for example, or to the hotel, and also look at things like breakout rooms. These new platforms like Airmeet, BigMarker, and so on are creating virtual spaces which are then infinitely flexible. There's a company called smartexpo.com which is actually for the event organizers themselves, and if we want to organize our own events, you can use a platform like Smart Expo which provides analytics to boost the performance and the profitability of a particular trade show or conference or an event. So they have a suite of applications which really helps to analyze the performance of these different events and the different services that we might provide, or you might provide, to clients. Interestingly, they also provide the facility for automated price optimization. And budgeting and forecasting and margin improvement. So these things, when I used to do public relations for trade shows, which I did in Singapore, for example, for the Asia Boat Show and the Asia Print and Packaging Show, the big anxiety for the trade show organizers was selling enough space at enough of enough price to get the venue prices covered. So they would set prices based on the cost of the venue, not on the price and the affordability or the competitive landscape of other shows. So now event organizers can set the price according to the demand, not to the cost of putting on the event. So now that's an amazing opportunity for smaller companies, startup companies, to organize events where an industry doesn't currently have them. And as we're seeing, there are many new events and new categories that have arisen due to COVID, for example, or due to sustainability, where there were not events before but there could be. And these platforms enable smart and entrepreneurial event organizers to organize those. Now What this means is that as business people, entrepreneurs, we can start to target events to attend like we're doing for our client in America that are well run, that have a great community, and that are on platforms that are multifunctional. It also means that as companies, we can start to host our own events that could be scalable and help us to build our own brand and our own community. In the niche sectors that we're operating in, or to hold conferences, for example, for our business partners or our staff without all the costs of people flying, venue rental, and also this— the disruption that those trade shows used to cause to business continuity. So the beauty now of all these virtual events and platforms is that now we can leverage events without the traveling without the hotel nights, without the expenses, without the inconvenience. But moreover, we can have analytics because there's a digital footprint, and there's also content that we can amplify. On the downside, of course, there's no traveling. There are no nice hotel nights away from everybody and eating room service. There's no living on expenses and buying meals that we might not buy when we're at home. There's also no way to blame the trade show organisers for the lack of results. So digital once again brings great opportunities, more accountability, but as I was a great believer back in 1998 in virtual events, I'm now here in 2020 working again in virtual events and really a great fan of the benefits that they can bring to small business owners like us. And so with that, I'd like to say thank you for tuning in to this episode of Speak PR. Welcome you to our website, eastwestpr.com. If there's anything that we can do to help you communicate on and offline, please don't hesitate to get in touch. In the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on attending some events.