Increase Your Virtual Event ROI: 10 Tips and Tactics

Source: Flickr (Ewan McIntosh)

If you recently exhibited at a lead generation virtual event, then I’ve got some tips for you.  While most exhibitors consider the program “complete” at the conclusion of the live virtual event, your work is just beginning.  Outhustle your competition and you’ll generate more ROI, beating them to the punch on shared sales leads.  There are two primary strategies for generating a higher return on your investment:

1. Leverage your existing investment to generate net new sales leads
2. Better convert your existing sales leads

Leverage Existing Investment

1. Convince the virtual event host to light up the environment – most virtual events remain “on demand” for 3 months after the live show date.  During those 3 months, you’ll see intermittent activity – some attendees return to visit your booth – some new leads sprinkle in, 1 here and 2 more a few days later.  Your event organizer should be incented to produce another “live date”, in which past attendees are invited to return – and, new registrants are invited to participate.  After all, the event organizer has fixed costs as well – and lighting up the show again means more revenue.  The organizer will want brand new content to draw users in (e.g. compelling Live Webcasts, like they used in the original event) – and you’ll want to leverage the same amount of booth reps to interact with attendees.
2. Convince the virtual event host to support portable booths – you spent a lot of time getting your booth just right – selecting the right logo and Flash movie, finding relevant White Papers and producing some case studies just for the event.  Your booth is a great marketing vehicle and should be leveraged elsewhere – how about placing your booth on its own microsite – or, embedding the booth on your corporate web site?  The eco-friendly practice of re-use applies here as well.
3. Syndicate booth content – for the White Papers, podcasts, Case Studies, etc. that you placed in your booth, syndicate them with the event organizer and related web and blog sites.  This broadens the reach of your content – and allows you to generate more sales leads.
4. Syndicate Webcast content – if you had a speaking slot at the virtual event, ask the show host for a copy of the Webcast – then, host it on your corporate web site and syndicate it with the event organizer and related web sites.  Any content generated for the event should be re-used – it can generate new sales leads with minimal overhead or cost.
5. Syndicate the supplemental Webcast content (in different forms) – convert your Webcast into an MP3 audio podcast and make that available on your web site along with the Webcast.  Syndicate the podcast as well, in case your target audience prefers the convenience of a download over the viewing of a streaming presentation.  Take the Q&A of the Webcast and transcribe that into a PDF or HTML document – and place this on your web site as well.  You get the idea here – spread your wings, without thinning the pocketbook.

Convert Existing Leads

1. Find those Top 10 leads – whether you have an automated system or need to do this manually, comb through the wealth of engagement data that a virtual event provides and find those Top 10 leads.  These are the folks who Sales must call now.  Perhaps they downloaded 10 of your White Papers – or, perhaps they did a text chat with a booth rep and requested that a sales rep call.  Either way, they need immediate attention.  If you know the sales reps who should handle these leads, don’t be shy about personally walking the leads over to them and providing the details as to why the leads as so hot.
2. Get the basics right in your follow-ups – if Inside Sales is following up by phone with some leads, make sure the reps have a script that covers the correct name of the virtual event – and arm them with some important details of the event (e.g. date, topics, speakers, etc.).  For email follow-up, be sure to include the virtual event title in the Subject line.  Always be sure to reference the context of the event in all of your touchpoints.
3. Build customized follow-up paths based on prospect activity – again, whether it’s automated or manual, factor in the prospect’s specific activities within the live event and tailor the follow-up touchpoints based on that activity.  Study the 5 White Papers they downloaded and recommend a 6th that brings it all home.  Study the chat transcript with your booth rep and send an email follow-up that ties up any loose ends.  Believe me, the prospects will appreciate the personal attention and the value you deliver to them.
4. Use the virtual event platform to faciliate your follow-up – your show host is keeping the environment open for 3 months – so it would be a shame not to leverage it for all its worth.  When you do secure a follow-up appointment – consider complementing your phone call by meeting your prospect back in the virtual event.  There, you can do text or webcam chat in an environment s/he is familiar with.  And perhaps you place some additional content in the booth for your prospect to review.
5. Send small prizes to highly engaged prospects – not everyone could win a prize during the live event – so, find those top 10 leads – or, top 10 most engaged users (in your booth) and send them a memory stick or webcam.  As discussed, reference the context of the event in your communications.  Perhaps the memory stick contains additional White Papers that may be of interest.  Just make sure the touchpoint is personalized – and don’t send the prize just for the sake of sending something.

So there you have it.  Don’t forget that your campaign doesn’t end at the conclusion of the live virtual event.  That signals the starting point of the important phase – the one in which you’re head to head with the competition.  So make sure you score a higher ROI than they do.

Interview With Nic Sauriol, Venture Lead on Nortel’s web.alive Platform

Nic Sauriol, Venture Lead of web.alive

Related Links:

1. Lenovo eLounge
2. Project Chainsaw
3. My review of Lenovo eLounge

Amidst great fanfare in January at CES 2009, Lenovo unveiled the Lenovo eLounge virtual environment. Powered by Nortel’s web.alive platform, eLounge allowed users to enter a 3D virtual world to learn about Lenovo Thinkpad notebook computers (with an option to purchase), interact with other visitors and “meet” with representatives from Lenovo and Nortel.

Nic Sauriol is the Venture Lead for web.alive (also referred to as Project Chainsaw).  Nic co-founded the project a few years ago with Arn Hyndman, the chief architect.  I sat down (virtually) with Nic to get his thoughts on web.alive, eLounge, enterprise virtual worlds and more.  Here’s the interview.

If you met someone on the street, how would you describe (or explain) the web.alive platform to him/her?

Nic: web.alive is a collaboration platform designed to integrate into an existing website much like flash. When a web site has web.alive and people visit that site, they can experience a rich and immersive environment and interact with other users – including the website’s employees/staff who are also on that site . They can interact in an immersive and fluid way thanks to real world positional audio. Fundamentally, web.alive is about bringing live, immersive and interactive communications to connect people in real-time via the web.

It’s designed to be a very engaging and entertaining experience – great for social networking efforts. A social experience of the web where a group of friends could meet up on Facebook or LinkedIn and then go visit a few stores like the Lenovo eLounge, watch some shows in Hulu and then comment on the news at Yahoo is what web.alive is about in this context.

web.alive also offers tremendous potential as a tool to facilitate collaborative learning.  Gone are the days of an instructor broadcasting content in one direction – today’s learning requirements call for more collaborative work between instructors and students.  web.alive provides engaging and collaborative environments to make this mode of learning a reality.

In the enterprise, web.alive offers a new world of opportunities to change in a positive way how people communicate. Moving away from calendar based meetings and formal phone calls, to a much more dynamic means of interaction. A place where employees from all over the world can go, bump into each other, exchange ideas, grab a meeting room to discuss and collaborate etc. Simply embedding the web.alive client into existing intranet web sites, integrating into a UC [unified communications] solution (visit Nortel if you don’t already have one) and suddenly your employees are collaborating as though they were collocated.

Nortel and Lenovo received quite a bit of buzz regarding Lenovo’s eLounge and its use of Nortel’s web.alive platform – what do you view as the successes of the launch – and, what were some of the challenges that you had to address?

Nic: The beta launch at CES of the Lenovo eLounge was a tremendous success from our perspective. We saw a great opportunity to help Lenovo take their customer service to an entirely new level. Significantly more users than we had expected visited the beta launch (articles and blogs like yours were a significant factor) and most importantly we saw the kinds of metrics we could have only hoped for. I personally assisted a number of customers who toured the eLounge to browse Lenovo’s laptops. What is most important is that these  – for the most part  – were purchases that otherwise may not have happened, at least not on a traditional retail web site. In addition, we have seen excellent retention rates. Even when users don’t make purchases, they spend a lot of time surrounded by Lenovo’s brand – over time this will also help conversions.

Obviously there are customers that go to the Lenovo web site that intend to make a purchase, and various tools facilitate that. While we are excited to help in that regard, what we always hoped would happen was that users would visit the site that did not have a specific intention of making a purchase, and would otherwise have bought from a retail store (likely helping a competitor to Lenovo) and instead they make the purchase from the eLounge as a result of an unplanned/informal conversation with a sales person or some other person like myself who just happens to be there.

In terms of challenges, there have been many. While the majority of users have had a smooth experience, some users encountered a variety of different bugs which we are fixing as they arrive (users send us e-mails at support@projectchainsaw.com with their bugs). Most users were able to get in and navigate without any specific help, but here have been some that required assistance, so we are working to make interaction even more intuitive and fluid. One really notable challenge was that Lenovo sales staff had to adjust their mode of operation. Call centers wait for a customer to call to initiate a dialogue, unlike the real world where we can reach out to shoppers.

We had to spend time honing that skill to get the right balance of support (i.e. not jump in someone’s face when they first arrive, but make certain that they know you are there and available to assist if you need help). The biggest challenge of all is that people want more, a lot more.

Have there been any new developments with eLounge since the time of the CES 2009 launch?

Nic: Yes, there have been a number of new developments, some deployed others coming soon. Most importantly, Lenovo has seen the positive metrics we had hoped for and have committed to coming out of beta and doing a full supported launch (coming soon!). Changes that have been deployed include a large number of bug fixes, a few new features in the client (like notification when new users arrive via a desktop balloon) with many more coming. While there have been a few minor content updates, there will be many more coming when the site launches out of beta.

Tell us about other enterprise use of web.alive?

Nic: There has been a tremendous interest in web.alive from an enterprise perspective. Whether it be as a global water cooler (e.g. as an enterprise, place web.alive on your global internal home page to enable informal/accidental collaboration and discussion between your employees) or as an alternative for internal meetings (in particular those that would require travel). We have been particularly happy with the tremendous support and pull from within Nortel and have slowly been rolling out web.alive for internal use. We have also been building a number of features to better support internal collaboration beyond just positional voice and slides etc.

Our ultimate goal is to find ways that we can make web.alive collaboration more effective than face to face. The seams ambitious, but there are a number of challenges with face to face communication, let alone current telecommunication technologies that we believe we can address. The simplest example is knowing who you are speaking to or who is talking – this is often a challenge even face to face. More exciting examples include detecting and displaying emotion – there are people who don’t communicate very effectively because they are not skilled at detecting emotion (in the extreme, people with forms of autism) – we believe that over time we can augment and provide that kind of information.

Has there been any existing or planned consumer use of web.alive?

Nic: We are actively working on models to support low-end deployments of web.alive. I have always stated as a goal that my mother in-law should be able to embed web.alive in her personal web site. While technically we support a simple embed tag (in theory she could embed the eLounge on her page), we have yet to deploy a single environment built for this purpose. Most challenging of course if establishing the right business model for this, which is something we are actively working on. We will have something this year that will support small businesses.

What are customers telling you they’d like to see in web.alive?

Nic: This is a really difficult question to answer because we have talked to so many people, whether they be casual users in the eLounge or companies that we have talked with. Common themes would include a higher degree of interaction (e.g. shaking hands, more fluid and realistic animation, taking apart laptops etc.); more audio controls like the ‘cone of silence’ for private discussions; means to invite friends and better ways of staying connected.

What’s on the feature roadmap for web.alive?

Nic: We will be working to further optimize the new user experience (from client optimizations in size and speed to usability etc.), enable small businesses, enhance collaboration and make the whole experience much more immersive and interactive. We are also looking to start rolling out our community (user and developer) in 2009 to enable more contribution and an eco-system of value co-creation.

What does the future hold for enterprise focused virtual environments?

Nic: There is no question in my mind that immersive positional audio will fundamentally transform how we communicate. I believe we will start to see the kind of connectionless (from a user perspective) communications that happen in web.alive that enable “accidental collaboration” to permeate how enterprise users interact with each other, their suppliers and their customers. Eventually, calendar based meetings will become significantly less frequent as issues are resolved on the fly. Ultimately, I am convinced that virtual environments will facilitate this way of communicating by enabling rich immersive and dynamic collaboration. Just consider how an enterprise could use web.alive to improve their brand awareness by letting their customers hold virtual events or get-togethers with their network of friends, family and associates.

The best part if that we have a number of surprises (well, if you’re a techie like me they are surprises – features that have not been rolled out but that we have built and are playing with. I won’t expand on what they are just yet, but we will roll some of them out over the coming weeks and months, and I assure you they are exciting. These features will really help incentivize enterprises into taking the leap and jumping into this kind of technology by doing things that can only be done with the kind of architecture.

Virtual Events In A Wireless World

Some day soon: virtual event on PDA?

Whether it’s business use or personal use, we’ve begun to expect that applications on our PDA’s mirror those available on our PC’s and laptops.  For business, it’s largely corporate email today – the ability to read and respond  (around the clock, I might add!).  For personal use, it’s email (e.g. Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.), instant messaging, web browsing and (of course) interacting with our social media sites.

I recently purchased a BlackBerry 8830 – my first step (after verifying that calls to my cellular number were ported over to the BlackBerry) was to set up access to my corporate email.  After that, the series of steps I embarked on were not unlike the set-up of a new PC or laptop – downloading applications that I’ve become accustomed to.  The short list so far is:

1. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
2. A Twitter client (I selected TwitterBerry)
3. The Facebook client for BlackBerry

With this collection of apps, I’m able to be on the go, but stay connected with corporate and personal email, stay in touch with friends and colleagues via AIM and keep tabs on my social networks (next up: the BlackBerry client for Netflix).  Virtual events are a combination of business and social networking applications.  Thus, I believe that pretty soon, business users will come to expect virtual events to work on their PDA’s.

Attendees would be able to visit vendor booths and peruse vendor content (while on the go) and exhibitors would be able to interact with booth visitors via a wireless connection.  The “live date” of a virtual event is often planned months in advance – and often times, scheduling conflicts arise for exhibitors – whether it be an important client meeting or attendance at a physical event.  I’m sure that exhibitors would value the convenience of doing basic booth duty from their PDA.

But how do we get there? First, formats like Flash (Adobe), Silverlight (Microsoft) and even JavaFX (Sun) will need stronger support and adoptoin onto PDA devices.  From doing a quick set of Google searches, the adoption (and support) doesn’t seem quite there today.  Here’s hopinng for a better tomorrow – where I’ll be seeing you at a virtual event … from our PDA’s.

Hey Kids! I’ve Got a Virtual World For You

As a parent, their existence is virtually unavoidable – the online companion to a kid-themed product.  A Reuters article (published by MSNBC) titled “Disney’s Penguin spreads its wings globally“, describes Disney’s ambitious plans with its Club Penguin virtual world.  Operating out of Sao Paolo, Disney will launch the first non-English version of Club Penguin in Brazil.  There are additional plans to launch in other Latin American countries and France.  Forget the climactic limitations of the species – penguins will now be spanning the globe.

When Disney acquired Club Penguin in 2007, one may have thought that the strategy was around product/brand integration of Disney properties (and characters) with the Club Penguin world and audience.  While that possibility still exists, it seems Disney is looking to Club Penguin as a full-fledged brand in its own right.  Accordinng to the article:

Within two years of launch, Penguin claimed more than 12 million registered users, of which about 900,000 were premium subscribers typically paying $5.95-$6.95 per month for access to additional features and virtual collectibles.

If I’m doing my math right, 900K subscribers paying $6.50 a month (taking the midpoint of the prices quoted) amounts to $70.2MM in revenue per year (wow).  And here’s a clear sign of Disney’s plan to grow Club Penguin as its own brand:

Over the past year, Disney has been busy taking some of its most popular licenses, such as “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Cars” and Tinkerbell and creating virtual worlds around them.

But with Penguin, that strategy has been somewhat reversed, giving the property the chance to leverage Disney’s retail muscle. The recent launch of a toy line includes plush versions of popular characters, a set of figurines as well as an Igloo Playset. The brand was also extended into the lucrative game field with the introduction of “Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force” for the Nintendo DS.

So if you’re a parent paying for that premium subscription, the next thing your child will be asking for is the Igloo Playset, along with the Club Penguin game for her Nintendo DS.  Or, she’ll be asking you to buy the Nintendo DS so that she can attain Elite Penguin Force status!  Also mentioned in the article is a related, kid-themed virtual world, Webkinz:

Of course merchandising is not new in virtual worlds and has already proven to be far more than a branding play. Toronto-based Ganz is estimated to be earning more than $100 million annually from collectible plush toys and accessories kids buy that allow them to unlock virtual goods online at Webkinz World.

I’ve found Webkinz model to be quite interesting, as they’ve reversed the traditional marketing flow.  Instead of online promotions to drive product sales in the physical world, Webkinz employs small stuffed animals as a physical world “footprint” to drive kids (and their parents) online.  So the physical “product” is sort of a loss leader (or, promotion) to generate online memberships, where the online world is the true end game.

And once you’re in-world at Webkinz World, there’s lots to do (and buy) – collect KinzCash, play online games, collect Gems to exchange at the Curio Shop, etc.  Then there are additional toys that tie in to the world, called W-Plus Items (e.g. bookmarks, charms, body spray, lip gloss, etc.).  There’s also trading cards and a recently launched Webkinz eStore, where one can make purchases of virtual goods.  All in all, it’s not surprising that Ganz (parent company of Webkinz) generates $100MM per year.

By launching an online presence, toy makers seem to have the following goals:

1. Commerce (including subscriptions)
2. Branding
3. Both!

With Club Penguin and Webkinz, the clear focus is on commerce – but keep in mind that once you’ve established a strong footprint and audience, you will have opportunities for branding – imagine subtle tie-ins within Club Penguin to other Disney properties (including exclusive offers for Club Penguin members).  On the branding (microsite) side, I checked some toy brands (off the top of my head) and found the following:

1. Cabbage Patch Kids – Flash-based microsite.  If the original Cabbage Patch product launched today, I’m nearly certain they would have developed a full-blown virtual world
2. BarbieGirls Virtual World – This looks to be branding focused – but may have related commerce
3. Beanie Babies 2.0 – Flash-based microsite
4. Playtime in Ponyville – Microsite for the My Little Pony franchise

One notable exception – a quick search did not turn up any microsite or virtual world for the Leapfrog franchise.  Perhaps that’s in the works for 2009!  Anyway, as a parent who has enabled/used some of these sites at home (for my child, of course!), I see them as a powerful branding vehicle that builds customer loyalty and (potentially) spurs product sales (both in the virtual and real worlds).

I compare the microsite to banner advertising – but instead of having your creative agency design your next Flash banner ad, spend a little more and have them build out a Flash microsite.  Then, your destination becomes your “advertising” and instead of trying to reach your audience across the web, you find that your audience comes to find you.  This is much more efficient than running a large amount of banner impressions and television commercials.  Your microsite fulfills the advertising concept of “frequency and reach”.

And that’s a wrap for now – my daughter needs this computer to access Playtime in Ponyville.