You’ve gone through all of the effort to create an outstanding event by bringing together the right speakers around compelling topics causing attendees to feel educated, motivated and inspired to take their new learning and put it to work. Congratulations, job well done and off to the next looming project!
“That’s the traditional mindset of event and meeting producers,” says Tim Hughan, Marketing Director at Altus Corporation “and you can understand why after all that work they have to do. But now we’re seeing that clients that kick in a whole new marketing effort to drive traffic to that great content immediately after the show is over are seeing huge returns.”
Altus captures content or works with another vendor that is already capturing content at your event , synchronizes the audio or video with slides and creates a transcription of the session that allows users to access specific points in a session timeline as well as find exact words in a presentation. This is an extremely effective capability for the user making the content that much more valuable. “Think of an event like Oracle OpenWorld where they are capturing hundreds of sessions and how powerful it is for a user to be able to search through all of those sessions for very specific terms. You can search through thousands of hours of content in seconds to find the four sessions that you need,” said Altus CEO Ted Cocheu.
What’s even more powerful is that now all of that rich, valuable information can be indexed by search engines so anyone searching on those key terms and phrases can find those sessions as well. For example, Oracle has had over 450,000 session downloads in just four months after the physical event. “You can see from that one example how the value of that content actually mushrooms after the event. And the costs for those additional customer and prospect “touches” is hardly anything compared to what it takes to put on the initial event,” noted Cocheu.” Another way to look at it is to think what it would cost to create that content on its own for online-only marketing and education purposes…the number would be staggering but now it is almost free.”
Learn more: Virtual Edge is hosting a Livecast on May 13th called ‘Capturing, Maximizing and Monetizing Your Content’ which will feature speakers from corporate and association producers that are going to share their experiences and strategies to generate maximum benefit as well as generate actual revenues. This session will take place in the Digital Event Center by Virtual Edge Institute.
“There are certainly events that are monetizing their content and there is probably a much larger opportunity for event producers to do that, but we also think there is an additional opportunity to take that content,package up three sessions on a particular topic and create another mini-event around that same topic and content,” said Hughan. “Most event producers are trying to figure out how they engage their audience 365 days a year, and this is a perfect way to do that. Add in live audio, video or text chat with this valuable content and the result is a nice event as well as another reason to touch your attendees and have them recall the value and experience they had at the original physical event. “
For large organizations, the benefit of these types of systems in finding important information from technical conferences, sales meetings, product launches, etc. is tremendous. “The effectiveness of a sales engineer can be greatly increased when they can get fast access to information they can use to help them solve a problem or generate a client reference example. The ROI for these uses is easy to measure in increased productivity,” said Cocheu. “Presentations or other video content from events are searchable and accessible at the point of interest, enabling busy field staff to find and reuse the exact knowledge they need, whenever they need it and on any device.”
Altus has taken it a step further to integrate the physical event experience and the virtual experience with a hybrid event solution called Event MyStro. Event MyStro gives conference attendees a single, unified user interface from which to access agendas, live and on-demand video, and social media content. With the mobile version (Mobile MyStro) it literally puts conference content at the fingertips of conference attendees, dramatically improving engagement before, during and after the event and significantly improving overall event ROI.
For presentations that event participants cannot attend, Event MyStro enables them to view streaming or on-demand presentations from any computer or tablet.
“We decided to take a different approach than the other virtual event platforms,” said Cocheu, “because we all know that major corporate conferences and events require multiple modes of engagement, including: in-person and on-line, live and on-demand. Virtual-only is fine for short-duration webinars, but the trend for larger corporate events with multiple concurrent tracks is clearly hybrid. And this required a radically different approach to enable easy access to all conference content for both in-person and on-line attendees, as well as live and on-demand content access.”
