TalkingPointz Research: Digital Events
I attend a lot of meetings and events. Over the past decade or so, meetings have changed a lot. Events, not so much, but are about to in a big way.
Up in the Air came out in 2009. It’s a great movie and contains several important ideas. One of them is this crazy notion of firing employees via online meetings. That was blasphemous at the time. Terminations required hands-on empathy. Things changed during the pandemic, and everything became possible online: terminations, hirings, weddings, funerals, even a wedding. 
Awkward, necessary, but oh so logical. Post-pandemic, we are back to in-person weddings, but one can’t unsee the productivity and effectiveness we saw. So much changed so quickly that our brains are still confused. My decision to attend a meeting online or in person has many criteria—none of which are the fidelity of the experience, as that's consistent.
Now, let’s talk about the events I attend. In-person or remote typically isn’t my choice. The event organizer makes that decision. In-person events are primarily offline. Content is either emailed later or handed out. Those who don't attend completely miss out. Nothing can be time-shifted (played back later). In-person events are analog. With webinars, we trade streaming for effective interaction. Most likely, the entire audience is remote as well.
The analog experience of events are starting to change. I’ve attended about 12 in-person events this year, and I keep looking for a more digital experience. For example, I showed up to one event as a speaker, and had to sign a physical piece of paper about content rights. That seemed more logical to accomplish during registration.
We can ask questions more easily in person, but I was at one event where everyone in the room was directed to type their questions in the app. This was more inclusive for both in-person and remote attendees. The audience could also interact via emojis, voting, and polling—whether in-person or remote. The slides were available to all via a download button in the app.
While it’s nice to attend in-person events again, I doubt that I am the only one that feels in person events need a digital upgrade. This is what Cisco is doing with Socio, RingCentral is doing with RingCentral Events, and Zoom is doing with Zoom Events. UCaaS providers like GoTo and Microsoft are not far behind, which are very strong in webinars. Microsoft has bundled webinars in its advanced licensing pack for Teams. The is a definite awareness that UCaaS and events are connected.
The core prerequisites to hosting modern events are expertise and real-time audio and video, but many other synergies exist. It’s time to expand the concept of UCaaS again. UCaaS came from telephony, expanded into meetings and messaging, is expanding to CX, and will likely expand into events. It’s a logical adjacency.
Here's the breakthrough thinking: All events have online components. The entry point is usually registration, but there are others as well. As event organizers slowly embrace this concept, it’s just a matter of how far they turn that online dial. Registration, content distribution, questions, audience polling/voting, feedback/surveys, leads and lead retrieval, and so on are all online components. There is no shortage of event components that can and should be digitalized.
There’s the magic word. I used analog earlier, but digital is the word we love. When things become digital, we also achieve scalability and time-shifting, which completely changes the value proposition. Once we realize the event, the app, and the underlying coordination are really one thing, we see events very differently. Today, in-person events are analog and they are about to become digital. This is going to be very disruptive for a lot of the players in the events industry. The UCaaS platforms have some significant advantages in the digital realm that the analog vendors will have trouble replicating.
The transition won’t happen overnight. Events take a lot of planning. New approaches and tools will take time. I am confident the UCaaS sector will inherit events like it did meetings. The advantages and synergies are too significant.