What's Next and Why Everyone's Focused on Building Community with SwapCard CEO Baptiste Boulard

Before we begin, I want to direct your attention to the bottom right of your screen. If you open up the Live Discussion tab, there are a few questions in the poll section that we posted that we'll revisit at the end of the session. There's also the Q and A and live chat, so we'd love for you to participate. So we'll begin. You may have heard the quote, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Well, we took that to heart. Swapcard was an app for in person events. And in March, like the rest of you, we saw the crisis happening and we adapted. We started reinventing our entire business model and essentially we created a new product to serve virtual and hybrid events. Since March, we released over 100 new virtual features and have another pipeline right now. We saw a 400% in six months and we aren't slowing down anytime soon. We're on Track to host 5,000 events this year with 10 million on our platform. So people are already spending more time online than off. We know this virtual is already happening. You were already networking on social media sites, learning from tutorials on YouTube, sourcing purchases and reading reviews on Google. The events industry primarily focused on in person experiences, but you were slowly seeing more and more virtual offerings. We were headed that way, but Covid accelerated our path to virtual and helped change our mindset along the way. In a survey by Harris Insights and Analytics, they noted that 35% of Americans are glad to avoid in store shopping. That's not news, right? Otherwise Jeff Bezos wouldn't be a billionaire. This doesn't apply just for shopping, but Covid has sparked a change in our behavior and our attitudes towards everyday travel. In a survey asking how likely people were post Covid to travel for business, you can see now that there's a threshold when deciding. But pre Covid, many of us, especially in Salesforce, travel any distance for business because that's our job. But after Covid and how easy it is to still meet most of your business objectives from home, people are really starting to evaluate what they're willing to travel for. Do they really need to hop on a flight and book a hotel to meet with a client? Can it be done through a video call? Perhaps you travel for the big annual event, but attend the smaller ones virtually. We're not saying that in person events are going away. We're saying virtual gives organizations more opportunities on how they execute their events. So why do we do events from a marketing perspective? Perhaps for brand visibility, the opportunity to engage with your audience with virtual you can touch so many more people. For example, a few weeks ago we held our Evolve 2.0 event and had that we had about 10,000 attendees from all over the world join. Had this been in person, we would have had at most 1,000 people. And our clients are also seeing higher engagement across the board for their attendees and their sponsors. At an in person event, you may be too shy to start a conversation or raise your hand for Q and A. But you might feel a little more confident doing it from your home behind your screen. Traditionally at in person events, you may have known the demographics of who attended your event, their title, the company, their location. But at virtual events, platforms like ours give you the opportunity to capture targeted data from your attendees. You can now see who they connected with, what sessions they attended, what products they liked, what sponsors they visited. You have so much more information on your attendees behavior. We have an open API that allows you to push all that data into your CRM tool so you keep all that information. You can also deliver all this data to your sponsors. Along with the ability to monitor how their sales teams are performing at the event. You can know who they connected with, who they met with, what conversations they had. Another huge benefit is lowering your operating costs. You no longer have to pay for things like the venue and the catering. So event organizers are seeing higher revenue margins across the board. Everyone is saying hybrid is the next wave. And traditionally you may be thinking that means hybrid events, mixing virtual elements in with all your in person events. But what we're seeing in the industry and from conversations that we're having from all our clients is more of a hybrid strategy. When planning their events, event organizers know not all their events are going to be hybrid. Some events are naturally better suited for in person. Some should have always been virtual. And now they're figuring out which events, perhaps their bigger annual event or their user conferences. Those might be the best for the hybrid events model. So to tell us more about what that means and what's next, I'll turn it over to Baptiste.

Thank you so much un for really listening to the audience. All the benefit of running virtual events, I want now to focus on what's next, how virtual event will evolve towards community. We believe at WAPcard that virtual event will be part of a bigger opportunity, a bigger experience and something that we will incorporate virtual events into a global marketing experience. We the event industry are in a three step market evolution. We used to do face to face events and we are now doing fully virtual events. Virtual events only because we are forced to because of COVID 19, this will last until summer this year minimum. The next phase, the second step of the market evolution is to move to virtual to hybrid events. As Woon was mentioning. Hybrid events, the simple format of a hybrid event, it's a two days conference where people are attending online and on site and we're having all discussion with our customer all over the world to how do we create the perfect extranet for hybrid events for Q3, Q4, 2021. But the conversation was really interesting with our clients it's how can we turn events into something much bigger? How do we turn virtual event face to face event into a global community? And that's something where we see a lot of traction with our clients who are all marketers. It's a very different way to market. There is the old world and there is a new world. The old world is what we have been doing since many years, an event experience. It's a very siloed experience. Let's say you're a marketer and you're running 10 events a year. Very often you will create a website for each of your events. Me as an attendee, I need to go through all these websites and and for each event I need to register and I will have a specific form and I will have to register many times. And then once I'm registered, I will only have access to the content of that specific event. So my excellence is very limited. With a community approach, you are putting your customer, your audience in the middle of your marketing strategy. Within that community platform you can of course list all your events into one platform. I can discover every venture running. If it's a massive event, is it just a webinar? Any type of event webinar you want to you're doing within the platform can be accessible. Maybe I can have access to some content, maybe the content is restricted, I need to register. But then all the content you are creating from your events can be pushed to an on demand access library, a kind of next week for your own company. The good news also with the community that I will be part of something much bigger because I will have access to all the attendees that register to all your events. So let's say I'm attending an IBM event. By attending one event, I will have access to all the member of the global IBM community. And of course within that community you can also push services. If you have partner, you can list them, list their offerings. So I can discover great audio ecosystem and great tools or services. I would need the last thing. It's also something because it's a social media social network, your attendees, they can also create their own content and interact within the social feed. So this is a very bigger, excellent and the true fundamental change for us as marketer. Why do we run events? As UN was saying is to capture market share is to create brand awareness. But when we used to run events, the experience we were providing was really limited to the dates of the event. So let's say during two days you work during one year to have one massive user conference. And then after this user conference, nothing happening, your brand is gone. And then you have to work again to recreate everything. And so there is the waste of marketing effort and marketing cost because let's say you're spending $20 to track an attendee. The attendee will log and register. Half of the people who register will not attend your event. They will not come with virtual event, hybrid event. Of course we can have more people joining so we can reduce non show. But then you need to nurture them and to retain them. This is a big challenge for us running events is how do we keep all these people coming every year. This is what you can do with the community approach. Instead of organizing a two days event once a year, you can turn your event in a lot of small virtual events. And so then you are able to run virtual events at scale every week, every month. It's very easy to use swapgyard to do so you can do any types of virtual events. It can be a short webinar. We have clients are using swapyard as a hosted buyer program for their partner ecosystem. We're pouring lots of conference like Saster who haven't done job fair for universities. So you can really provide a lot of value. And then you will plug also your hybrid impersonal events into that platform. And that's something that we were not expecting. When we start to have a lot of traction from the market. The marketer who were running this event, they told us hold we will not use the platform just during two months. We want to keep our event open and constantly updating and creating a community. We at swapcard have also launched our own community of event planners. When we launched our first virtual event in June last year, we just done our second virtual event. Evolve 2.0. We moved from 5,000 attendees to a global audience of 10,000. Event planner. The good news is that they already registered to that platform. So every time we update the platform we push content. They don't need to find out, they don't need to register, they don't need to go through these boring forms. They are already part of the community. And people start engaging to each other, creating more engagement, bigger brand awareness. And this is the beauty of community, is to keep the relationship with your audience. So a community offer more value than just event, as we have seen. And so you can really create something much bigger. You will have all your events, as we just discussed events now. It can be just a small webinar of half an hour, but it's also a great way to have your own media. We are all using LinkedIn or different platform where there is so much noise happening. You can use your community to push news about you, your ecosystem, your partners. You can have your curating media that people can consume and people can interact with this content. And you can also sponsor content within that community. Of course there is the networking element. I can network with people within the community who are my peers, who share the same knowledge, excellence. And this is something I can do all year long. Chatting with people, launching video calls, scheduling meetings, not just on an event basis. And if you are part of the exhibition industry, for instance, you might want to have a marketplace of all your exhibitor with all your services. So this is a great add on. It's a lot of value for us as marketers to offer something bigger to our audience. And that approach is not something new. This is just a list of logo of great companies who have a community approach. And that's something that been really successful Both on the B2B part and on the B2B part. So it's something I really suggest you to have a look. The reason why I want you to think about community is because it will add a lot of value for you as marketer. As I just mentioned, our main challenge as marketer is to acquire customer leads or members at the lowest cost and to keep these people in our global audience. So having a community approach will reduce the cost of acquisition because we will be able to create network effects and word of moss. So more people will know about your brand and more people with come to your events or be part of your community. As I mentioned, you will increase retention forever. Because people when they have attended event, they are part of that community forever. If it's a free community, of course. Because the second thing is that you will learn a lot because you will be able to track everything happening to the community, what content people consume. When you run an event, a big event, there is so much content that it's impossible to to look at all the session or to network with everyone. There is so much Missed opportunity and missed learning. And that's something they can do within your community. They can keep going so you can learn from all these market trends. And of course the beauty is that you can really nurture your audience. You can keep posting them, providing value and you can use all these leads and have a much better lead scoring for your sales reps because you are able to push that to your market or platform marketing automation tool to your CRM. And so you will be able to capture much more behavioral data, what people have consumed, how much they log with, who did they interact. So these are my three takes away why you should move from events to community. And I think Pandemic had a huge effect on all business. We are one of the lucky one to have been able to really grow very very fast because of COVID 19. Not everyone is growing. And I know it's a challenging time, but it's also very good time to rethink and think about what's your strategy as marketer. Do you just want to run events once a year as we used to and do a very limited experience or do you want to create something bigger? And I think it's the right time to sit with your team, with your CEO, with everyone involved in strategy marketing, to move to event only and think about hybrid and then community create network effects and reach a global audience. So thank you so much for being with us. I will pass over to UN to see if there is any question in the chat and happy to answer any question you have.

All right, so we have a question about how would community model boost engagement with our audience.

The reason why it really boosts engagement is because you have access to much more content. As I said, it's no longer siloed experience, it's a global experience. So I don't need to register to all of your events and I will have access to much more content, much more people, so which means more value for me. So then I will be able to interact with all this content and you will create more engagement, but you will also create longer engagement. Instead of creating engagement during two days, you're able really to create engagement all year long with your community.

Let's see, we have another question. How should we structure membership and payment for a community?

I think this is really a strategy. You can have a very curated community which is paid only and something which is really restricted to few members. For instance Harvard as a paid community and it's nothing free. But maybe you want to use your community to have something bigger and in which case you maybe want to create network effects and maybe you want to have as much as people attending your community. So it depends on your strategy. You can have a free community, I will register to event. Maybe I only pay to event and then I'm part to a free community. Or maybe I can have the event paid and then maybe you want to set a subscription or a freemium version. So it's really depend on what you want to achieve, if you want to give it for free or if you want to monetize it. Also with community, if it's a free community on the attendees part, you can always sponsor it. You can create sponsor package, you can have a partner doing a webinar within the community once a month. So there is a lot of way to monetize communities.

Baptiste, you bring up a good point about how sponsors would get ROI from community because you know, in essence it's kind of like a business directory come to life, right? It's not just. They just look at their profile and there's a phone number. They can actually see their products. They can engage with the sales team. Is there any other ROI that you see from sponsors on the community platform?

I think one of the challenges of the event industry for every sponsor, every exhibitor, and from any marketer is to measure the return on investment. And I think with virtual events or community platform, the really added value is to be able to track everything happening to the platform. And that really is a game changer for the event industry.

Very nice. We have another question. Any tips on how to best nurture event attendees? Top do's and don'ts.

It depends if it's virtual or in person events. I would say that what you have to deliver, it's really amazing content. These days people really attend virtual event for content. For in person events, we mostly attend for networking opportunities. It's a different game. So I would say that really focusing on the content and making sure you have great content will attract people and then they will network from the content. So great content, then you will create networking and that's where you should be focusing as marketers these days.

I'm going to just look at the poll questions and the question we asked about, are you planning to incorporate a community approach for your organization? Interesting to see that. So 22% are already using community, 11% do not have plans, but 67% are actually they're all thinking about it and this is the time that they're evaluating and needing more information about what that means and how they implement something like that.

I think just if you want to launch a community, you need to create adoption. So focusing on events and create engaging events and from the event convert them into a community. It's very important to create adoption at first and so event, it's a great way to start a community. It's much, much harder to create a community if you don't have a live event, if it's virtual or hybrid or in person events. So use event to create emulation and then you will end up with a community.

And then the question we asked about, have you run a virtual event in the last year? 86% have and 14% have not yet, but they're planning to. So that's very interesting.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I think we should not be scared to run virtual events and virtual events should not be webinars. Virtual events are not zoom. This is very different from running a webinar. Don't forget that events. It's a lot of stuff. There is a lot of conversation. It's able to run table. It's able to schedule meetings, interact with people and do networking. I would really recommend you if you run virtual events. If you have run virtual events, you have seen challenges, maybe just to benchmark new platform and think about how you can create better and more engaging virtual events.

We have a question on any tips on how to avoid community fatigue and not to spam the community.

To avoid what?

Community fatigue. So overestimate.

That's a really good question. Frankly, I don't really know if we can create community fatigue like zoom fatigue. For me, when I'm part of a community, normally the community give me the knowledge, give me the value and there is, you know, we all want to belong to something. I don't have much communities. I don't know if you guys have a lot of communities, but me, even LinkedIn is not a community. There is so much noise. I just want to network with peers who are having the same challenge and me and then can really give me value. So I will not subscribe to many communities. I would try to find one community who really fit my needs and fit who I am as a person and my job title. So maybe if we all go towards community, we will have a community fatigue in few months. But right now I have mostly a zoom fatigue.

Okay, so another question. What are the best tactics to community building? You've seen to be the most successful in your experience?

Yeah, so as I was saying, I think it's really, really creating a gathering of people that you want to target with an event. About Swapyard we touched very Quickly we had to adapt, otherwise we would have died. When COVID 19 arrived, we lost all our clients, we lost all our pipeline and we had to adapt as a platform and say, okay, we need to evolve and we need to provide virtual events. And so to prove this new module, this new platform that was something you can rely on, we have run our own virtual events. And so we were planning to have maximum 1,000 people and we turn out to have 5,000 virtual events. Something that really make us to be successful was this virtual event where people logged and discover us. And they were able to answer a lot of their question about how do I launch a virtual event? What is a virtual event? How do I monetize virtual events? And so we really give the power to people within the ecosystem. Not pushing swapcam. We gather lots of speakers and we had like partner. So every time someone was registered, was posting on LinkedIn, so he was creating some word of mouse on LinkedIn and more people were noticing that virtual events. And once we have done that virtual event, because we had so much engagement and people really love to be able to speak to each other because we all have the same challenges, then we decided to turn it into a community. And then what we have done is that since June, we do once a month a virtual event on a specific topic. And we keep sending polls and surveys to the community to say, what are your challenges? What do you want us to focus on? The next episode. And so my strategy, because this is what we have done, we learn it by doing it, it's to really turn your event into a community. I think if we have launched a community without all these events attract the people. We have never had a 10,000 plus community members, maybe we will be 1,000 members. And so my advice for you is to keep the relationship with your audience. And now with virtual events, it's so quick to launch, it's so quick to run. It's not like what you used to do in person events with lots of cost, lots of logistics. You can really run a virtual event once a month. It's very easy to implement. Once you have done once, you know how to do it very quickly at scale. That would be my advice for you guys.

All right, see if there's any other questions. There aren't right now, but let's see. So in your conversations, Baptiste, that you've been having with clients, what have you been finding is what are they saying about their need? Like why are they launching a community? Why aren't they just doing events?

I think we are in a Very different. What they realize with virtual events is that you can have a much bigger audience. When you used to run face to face event like Saster, I will have never been able to attend Saster. I will have maybe never take a flight to become a speaker at Saster. Maybe there is a lot of you guys joining now. We will have never attend Saster because it was maybe too expensive, maybe with all the associating costs, maybe because of the region, maybe you were too busy to travel during three days. So with virtual events, our customer were not really willing to do virtual events at first. But then, sorry, then they learned that virtual events, you can have a global audience. There is no border for your events. And because I have been able to attract so much members or attendees, they say, oh, we now have a global audience. So what do we do with these global audience? And because they have captured so much data, they say, oh, we should keep going, we should keep tracking all this stuff. And then of course, they learn to do one virtual event, two virtual events, and now they are experts into running virtual events. So when the event team could only focus on one event a year, now they can turn virtual event very quickly. So because they learned that you can scale virtual events, you can run lots of virtual events, this is why they have the global audience. And now they understood they can provide value at scale and keep going and provide something much bigger than just throwing events once a year.

All right, someone's asking if we have any. I don't know if we thought about this yet, but any cybersecurity features for community.

Cybersecurity, we do a lot of cyber security events. We actually are powering Black hat. Us, Asia and Europe used to be three separate events. And they are launching a cybersecurity community where they will have all these Black Hat attendees and content. So I would say, I don't know if we have any specific feature for cybersecurity community. I would say that we have a very good security not to be hacked by the member of these communities. So that would be my answer.

All right, let's see. I'm trying to see how much more time we have. All right. Yeah. Well, what Baptiste was bringing up, a good point is we were seeing, we have 15 minutes. We were seeing already that our clients were using our platform already the way it is as a workaround community. Is that safe to say, Baptiste, that a lot of people were using that evolve model where they're having their big event, but then they were doing little mini webinars beforehand to get the excitement up and then post event they were doing perhaps another virtual event where they went over what they learned and maybe trends, you know, on that community is just kind of the next step, right? The next, next evolution where you, you keep all that engagement, you know, like Baptiste was saying, the, the acquisition, like the, the dollars you spend to, to get that, you know, attendee, you're, you're keeping them in that platform, you're engaging. What I think it's great is also for sponsors, another thing is they can also perhaps do a survey to that group, that's their key group. So they could probably work with an event organizer to do some user research for a new product launch. There's a lot of ways that community can be monetized.

I think something regarding this learning was that when we were doing in person events, the content was nowhere. If you were not attending the event, you could not consume the content afterwards. With virtual events, everything is recorded. So you have access to the content in a digital format. And because our clients have been able to capture all content, they have created the library of very valuable content and that enable them to monetize that content. We have a lot of clients that the community is paid and if you paid the subscription then you have access to all content. They organize all year long. And so some of our clients like are really large event like south by Southwest is one of our events clients and so they are able to create a lot of content and all over the world because they organize many, many events and then they will create all this content into the platform and turn it into on demand access. And that if your community is paid, that's good because every week, every month there is updates, content has been updated and pushed to the platform. And if you are really good at creating engaging content, if you have a great relationship with a top speaker of your industry like Saster, Saster could turn all their content into this library. And me as a CEO of a startup, I want to reach out to VCs. I want to know better SaaS. You know, I will subscribe to the community because I would have access to all the most valuable contact plus all the most valuable content. And that, that why this community starting to be on every, every mouse. Because I have the content, I can turn it into a revenue model. I have a global audience. So now I have a community and people were not ready but now they have lots of community in their hands.

All right, we have a question. Typically what profit percentage should we push for as organizers especially when we are doing virtual events?

Wow, that's A tricky question regarding profit, I don't really remember, but we sponsored a study with seer, which is the association of the event industry, which is available on our website. If you go to swapyard.com, there is a resource center and then there is this white paper you can download. And there is actually a benchmark about profit you can generate. With virtual events, we haven't seen a standard margin. We have some clients who really struggle to generate margin. This will be mostly exhibition because they used to sell square meter. And so the price of the booth was really expensive. And so when I have an online booth, I will not spend as much as a booth with all the furniture. So the very large event, they reduce revenues and you know, because it's a different game, it's mostly buyer and seller meeting. Then it was hard for them to have a high margin event. If you are doing conference is very different. Conference is really focusing on content. We have done Black Hat. Black Hat was really successful in terms of ticket sales. I think we had also emap, a client who have done a case study. They said that with virtual event they have increased margin. And we have some clients, we have plus 70% margin. And so I think the more you understand how to streamline your processes to organize virtual events, the higher margin you will get. And again, as I was saying, once you have a community, you create network effects. So you can monetize all this. You can monetize events. So you can say this event is paid only. You can say that accessing to the content is also something paid. But then if your community is free, you can have sponsor in Swapyard, you can run ads, target groups. So there is a lot of way you can monetize. But I would say that your virtual event should be higher profit and you can ask for higher ticket sales. Because if I was attending your event, it will cost me a lot of associating cost. I will have to take a fly, I will have to book a hotel, I will have to pay for my food. Maybe will be me and who coming. So two people, double cost. But I will still come to your event. Organizing a virtual event, you remove all these associating costs. So maybe you want to increase your ticket sales because you know you're still providing the value. And why don't you capture this piece of this part of the cake? So I would say that it depends on where you are. I will be glad to send you afterwards the ebook to download. And there is a benchmark run by SEER about that average margin.

All right, so we have a question, what are the most effective metrics for measuring virtual events?

So I would say that the main metrics it's engagement during live session, how many session your audience watch and did they really watch the session? I mean for the entire duration of the session. Something cool about SwipeCloud is that we have a picture to picture so you can navigate and go to other page and you still watch the session. And so this is another way to capture the attention of your audience. So for me you should have a look at of course total people of total of people register who logged to the platform and then how long they spend to the platform. And so we have learned that for virtual events the main metric these days is on the content versus the networking. We are in pandemic. People want to really learn before to network. Once we will get back to hybrid event, trust me, it will be the opposite. People will want to just have a good time and network and meet all the people they have missed. So for me the main metrics will be the engagement on all the session you create and of course the feedback you will get. With swipcat you can send poll survey, you can get a lot of engagement and we have seen that lots of people share when they have a good session in the live chat. For last evolve we had a lot of messaging. Hey was very helpful, it was very valuable. When you are in in person events, people watch the session and they leave, they don't say anything, they don't share that feedback. So I think you can also collect a lot of feedbacks and that's something you can really track.

Another good way I think to measure the ROI or the effectiveness of the virtual event is you know how your sponsors are acting. If it's an event that you had sponsors on, like we were saying earlier, you can deliver all this data to them about not only in an in person event, like let's say they're at a booth. They're not really going to see the people who just kind of came in. Maybe you were too busy to speak to them so they looked around and they left. Maybe they forgot to come back. That might be a lost lead where now in virtual you're going to get all that information regardless. You'll see when they came in what they looked at, you know, what papers they downloaded from you. It's you know, you have a wealth of knowledge now and that you can deliver to your sponsors as you know some metrics on, you know, how they did, how their engagement was. Okay, so I think they are telling us to wrap up. Thank you so much for having us. This is really, really great.

Thank you so much, guys. Yeah.

Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it. Great questions coming in. So it's great to learn a little bit more about the platform and what you guys are seeing for our attendees. Thank you for joining. We've got some other sessions going on right now, as well as some networking opportunities, so we'll see you at the next session.

Okay, we're backstage.

Do we just go off now? Right? Because we don't do the roundtable session now, right?

No, Amelia said that there is no roundtable session, so that was roundtable session.