Virtual Events Checklist

By Brent Arslaner, VP of Marketing, Unisfair

I promised more information on what a virtual event solution should deliver today. A virtual event solution should provide the following:

1. Ease of Accessibility – your attendees must have instant access. Register; click on a link; enter the virtual event; and use the mouse to get around.

If an attendee has to download an application, dress up an avatar, and learn new commands – your registration-to-attendee ratio will suffer miserably.

2. Professional Networking – as you know the top two reasons people attend events is to gather information and to network.

Your virtual event solution should take all the business-applicable aspects of web 2.0 and “social networking” and apply them to fit the needs of today’s busy businessperson.

3.Unified Experience – a virtual event environment should include a conference hall that supports multiple sessions, an exhibition hall with exhibitor booths that support a variety of rich media that attendees can download, and there must be live interaction between attendees, sponsors and presenters.

Most importantly, it should all occur in a unified environment. If the virtual environment is cobbled together with disparate applications, it appears very clunky to the attendees and results in poor user experience.

4.Marketing Intelligence – for events used for lead generation purposes, marketing intelligence is especially critical. Unified virtual events should be able to supply the organizer and its sponsors with the richest marketing data available from any marketing vehicle.

It should track and report on all attendee activity and then rank this data so the organizer and sponsor can identify the hottest leads, at the push of the button.

5.Best Practices – this is critical for those event planners entering the virtual world for the first time. Find a solution provider that can offer you the best practices for content creation, audience generation, event management and post event reporting in the virtual world.

In an upcoming article, we can review a couple of case studies for various lead generation, sales training and user group virtual events.