Domo Inc. scheduled its sixth annual Domopalooza conference for March 18, expecting more than 3,000 people to travel to Salt Lake City for four days of hands-on technical training, rubbing elbows with company executives and evening entertainment, culminating in a performance by the Black Eyed Peas.

By mid-February, “we had hotels booked and we were printing materials to go in the lobbies,” said John Mellor, chief strategy officer at the business intelligence software firm. That’s when Domo Chief Executive Josh James returned from Asia with some disquieting news: The coronavirus was looking to be a much bigger problem than many people thought.

“The big enterprise companies weren’t shifting their events yet,” Mellor said, “but it was becoming clear that a lot of customers were going to face travel restrictions.” After much debate, Domo announced on Feb. 28 that the conference would go 100% online. There were just 12 business days left to make the shift.

That meant 12 days to completely rethink the agenda, find a virtual conference platform, reconfigure the registration process, notify registered attendees and speakers of the changes and cancel contracts that have been in place for months.

“We all held hands and cried a tear for all the work the team had been doing for nine months,” Mellor said. The revised plan was to shoot video of the virtual event at Utah’s Snowbird ski resort. “We figured if we couldn’t bring the audience to Utah, we’d bring Utah to the audience,” Mellor said. But on March 14, the first case of community spread was documented, and all area ski resorts shut down.

Recast as a fully digital event, Domopalooza opened on March 18 just as the Salt Lake City area was hit by its worst earthquake in nearly 30 years. Nevertheless, the conference, which had been scaled back to a single day, attracted 9,000 registrants and more than 12,000 viewer in the first 24 hours. The operating cost was about 30% less than that of the physical event, even including forfeited cancellation fees.

“I don’t think there’s any way we’d do a Domopalooza again without a heavy component of virtual attendance,” Mellor said.

He isn’t alone. In telephone and email interviews, executives from 20 technology companies that pivoted from in-person to digital events in the first half of this year unanimously said that the experience has been positive. Up to seven times as many people attended some virtual conferences as had traveled to past in-person gatherings. Costs were as much as 90% lower. And many organizers said the volume new business opportunities that grew out of their digital interactions were far greater than what they had seen previously at physical events.

Sudden shift

The shift to online events in the first half of this year was massive. A member survey by the Professional Convention Management Association in early April found that 87% of organizations had already canceled events and 66% postponed them because of COVID-19.

No one is writing a death knell for crowded convention halls, but it appears that COVID-19 has done what more than 20 years of experimentation with virtual events failed to achieve: Get people to come. Every organizer who was interviewed agreed that their future events will have a heavier virtual component than the past, although none is planning to abandon in-person events.

“I’m often asked by partners and team members if HPE will do physical or virtual events going forward, to which I simply respond, ‘Yes,’” said Jim Jackson, chief marketing officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inc.

HPE’s Discover conference was one of the larger tech events to make the shift. Last year’s confab in Las Vegas drew more than 10,000 customers and partners. The company’s April 8 decision to go online with the event scheduled for late June – including more than 100 sessions – required “reimagining everything,” Jackson said.

“We had to think like television producers, tailoring programming, content and speaker delivery to accommodate a 12-inch screen, where attention span is shorter and the option to exit is just a click away,” he said.

The payoff was in the more than 900,000 views of the recorded keynote speech by CEO Antonio Neri that have been logged to date, “more than eight times what we expected,” Jackson said. The event also had a longer tail than the physical conference “as attendees continue to engage with on-demand content in the weeks and months to come,” he said.

Virtual events have occupied a niche of the conference industry for more than 25 years but never achieved mainstream status. Some early efforts that attempted to mimic the experience of a trade show floor with virtual reality fell flat. More recent efforts have mainly consisted of streamed video of live sessions.

Engagement factor

What’s different about the 2020 vintage is that large numbers of conferences have been reconfigured specifically for online consumption. There’s also the unprecedented factor that no one has a choice. That has forced organizers to get creative about attracting and holding people’s attention in an environment in which abandonment is just one click away. A survey by business-to-business content marketing consultancy Markletic found that 49% of marketers say that audience engagement is the biggest contributing factor to a successful virtual event.

Program designers have shortened sessions, added interactive elements like games and audience polls and attempted to interject entertainment into technical sessions. “At an online event, the attendee is in complete control,” said Alex Amado, vice president of experience marketing at Adobe Systems Inc., which staged the virtual Adobe Summit in March.

Measuring engagement is easy when speakers can make eye contact with audience members, but it’s nearly impossible to duplicate that feedback loop with a faceless crowd. “Audience engagement still remains a challenge in the minds of event marketers,” said Abhishek Vanamali, chief marketing officer and head of alliances at Zensar Technologies Ltd., which held a global three-day internal conference virtually earlier this year.

Still, some conferences report even higher engagement on some measures than in-person conferences. The recent Dockercon conference put on by Docker Inc. reported more than 75,000 registrations as of the day of the event — compared with just 4,000 person at the in-person Dockercon last year — and more than 30,000 live event logins. There were also as many as 24,000 concurrent viewers and about 22,000 chat posts from some 11,000 unique users chatting. And thousands more registered after the event to watch the content.

“In a normal conference you might be a certain small percentage of people come up with a question after — there’s a certain sort of social distancing, like people just don’t want to go and ask questions,” John Kreisa, senior vice president of marketing, told SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE, whose CUBE365 event platform hosted Dockercon. “[In a virtual event] they’re sort of free to ask whatever question they want in the chat, and it really has unlocked a lot of knowledge sharing and exchange of ideas.”

In some ways, virtual events are easier to pull off than physical ones. With travel considerations minimized and registration free in most cases, organizers reported that they could shorten promotion schedules and still generate large attendee pools. The Markletic survey found that the average time companies spent promoting events was 3.5 weeks.

Historically, “the process for recruiting attendees took multiple months,” said Dmitry Risukhin, customer engagement leader at F5 Networks Inc. For its Agility conference in May, “We had a little over a month and ended up with significantly more attendees.”

There are also a lot fewer people to move around and equipment to ship. “Engaging in virtual conferences has reduced our logistics workload by more than 50%,” said Bhuvana Ramakrishnan, head of events and field marketing at Yellowbrick Data Inc., which has hosted or participated in more than 30 online events this year.

The flip side is that registrants who don’t need to pony up a credit card or book a plane flight have less incentive to show up. Three quarters of organizers don’t charge for virtual events, according to Skift Inc.’s EventMB research arm. As a result, about half the people who register for free events don’t show up, estimates Eventbrite Inc.

“You certainly end up with a lot more no-shows,” said F5’s Risukhin. But even with a nearly 50% dropout rate, the company still booked five times as many visitors online as it had for previous in-person shows.

Efficient education

Virtual events are a godsend for attendees who care less about the destination than content. “I choose to attend exactly what I need and I’m not wasting time on stuff I don’t need freezing in a huge hall somewhere,” said Mihai Strusievici, chief information officer at Colliers International Group Inc., who said he has attended more events since lockdowns began than he does in a typical year.

Organizers also say people who watch online are more serious about content. When Collibra NV decided to take its June Data Citizens ’20 conference virtual, organizations worried that “our community could feel burned out from digital events,” said Chief Marketing Officer Fleur Sohtz. “The reality was that the enthusiasm was absolutely there and stronger than we expected.”

Process automation vendor K2 Software Inc.’s FastFWD conference in April drew 1,700 registrants, nearly double the expected number. Engagement was high as well. “I thought people would drop off after the first or second session but over 70% stayed through four or five sessions,” said Chief Marketing Officer Carlos Carvajal.

Virtual delivery has helped resolve one of the conundrums of conference management: Events sited in resort locations or Las Vegas convention centers must constantly fight competition from the swimming pool or casinos. In contrast, anyone who sits through an hour-long technical presentation online must be interested.

Chief information officers have long used conferences in Las Vegas or New Orleans to reward the best employees. “I know you’re going to bring your spouse and stay over in Vegas but that’s OK because you’re a good player,” said Colliers’ Strusievici. But he’s found people are nearly as grateful to take time off from the daily grind to educate themselves virtually.

If one approaches a virtual event with the right attitude, the format is more conducive to learning, Strusievici said. “When you’re in a dark, crowded room you can’t take notes and your phone is distracting,” he said. “I have my screen, my coffee and I prepare myself mentally to absorb everything I can.”

And like anything on the internet, international reach is a freebie. U.S. conference organizers count themselves lucky if they can attract 20% of their attendees from overseas, but this year’s virtual gatherings are drawing a diverse global crowd.

Redis Labs Inc.’s RedisConf Takeaway 2020 registered people from 103 countries, according to Mike Kwon, vice president of demand generation and growth marketing. Databricks Inc. said its Spark + AI Summit in June attracted virtual visitors from 130 countries. Adobe logged attendees from every sovereign country on Earth, Amado said. Despite using a variety of virtual platforms at all times of the day and night, organizers reported that capacity and performance were never problems.

Whole new ballgame

Not that the shift was easy or problem-free. SAP SE, for instance, saw the site for its mid-June event crash, leaving many unable to get in. The event still attracted more than 200,000 people and more than 1 million views. But glitches like that can annoy and drive away participants.

And digital events still take massive planning. “We were surprised that the virtual format was even more time-intensive to prepare for than our in-person events,” said Rick Shultz, chief marketing officer at of Databricks. Producing engaging virtual sessions and keynotes “posed more challenges in both technology and performance than having speakers simply walk on stage.”

“I thought the logistics would be easier for a virtual conference but in fact they were much harder,” said Kate Lohian, global head of marketing operations at robotic process automation vendor Blue Prism Group plc. Among the physical elements that were challenging to duplicate online at Blue Prism World in June were pointing people to sessions and setting expectations for what they would find when they arrived. “From having the right software installed for sign-in to navigating a virtual agenda, attendees encounter entirely new processes that may invite questions at every step,” said Lohian, who has coordinated 11 previous conferences for the company. “Managing 2020 as a virtual event was the most challenging yet.”

Organizers noted some stark differences in way they needed to prepare, promote, stage and measure the success of virtual conferences. A particularly welcome one was the dramatically lower cost. The price tag for K2’s FastFWD was “less than one-tenth that of the physical event,” Carvajal said. Instead of paying for food, beverage and drayage, the company spent on website designers and video contractors.

RedisConf Takeaway 2020 was presented “at one-quarter the cost of last year with four times the number of attendees and 10 times the number of registrants,” Kwon said.

The total cost of flooring Red Hat Summit in April came in about 70% lower than past physical conferences, according to Leigh Day, vice president of marketing communications and brand. The event, which drew just under 9,000 attendees to Boston last year, was expected to attract about 30,000 people but 80,000 showed up, with nearly two-thirds attending at least one live session and consuming three hours of content on average, she said.

Like most organizers, Red Hat put a lot of thought into designing its online sessions for the unique delivery medium. “We shortened all the sessions to make them more engaging; we didn’t want virtual fatigue,” Day said. “One of larger technical challenges was to record hundreds of sessions in a way that they wouldn’t fall flat.”

Instead of arranging flight schedules, organizers had to shift to the logistical challenges of sending computers and webcams to speakers who lacked the needed equipment. Speakers also needed coaching on appropriate dress, background settings, strategies for tightening up presentations and how to stay focused without the benefit of real-time audience feedback.

Okta Inc. had to scramble when it took its Oktane20 event virtual in early April, barely three weeks after lockdowns began. “In a live event you practice on stage. Now we were shipping video cameras, setting up Zoom calls and working through with speakers how to record to their laptop and produce a video file,” said Alyssa Smrekar, vice president of corporate marketing. The silver lining: “It was a great opportunity to think about how to become better content producers,” she said.

The reward was 20,000 virtual registrants, more than triple the 6,000 Okta organizers had hoped would trek to San Francisco. The event also added 4,000 names to the company’s database and nearly 10,000 visits to virtual sponsor booths, Smrekar said.

The virtual format had the ineffable bonus effect of humanizing executive presentations that are typically scripted and distant in a cavernous conference hall. CEO Todd McKinnon opened his keynote with a tour of his house and sang “Here Comes the Sun” with his family. “It was remarkable opportunity to say we won’t back down, we will be resilient, and we’ll find a way to do this,” Smrekar said.

Early start

Scheduling parameters are different with a non-captive audience. For in-person events, “it’s easier to get someone to attend during their lunch hour or after work if they happen to be nearby,” said Stephanie Roulic, founder of Startup Boston, which has conducted both physical and virtual events. In her experience, the best times to attract locals to a conference venue are Monday through Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

“Online, it’s a whole different ballgame,” Roulic said. “People are exhausted from sitting in front of a screen all day so the time they would typically spend networking in person after work should move to the beginning of their day before ‘Zoom exhaustion’ kicks in.”

No two companies fielded their programs the same way. K2 and Red Hat recorded nearly all their sessions in advance and brought speakers back for live Q&A. “Doing it all live would have been a nightmare,” Carvajal said.

Others opted to risk going live. Redis Labs fielded 30 real-time sessions, believing the experience would be more authentic and speakers energized by the pressure. “Every production company told us we were crazy,” Kwon said, “but ultimately we felt the attendee experience would be better.”

Some tried creative ideas to keep attendees engaged. Redis created a custom three-dimensional environment based on multiplayer video games, hosted a live theatre stage and even set up a virtual lounge where visitors could play ping-pong.

K2 used the infinite virtual stage to invite customers to tell their stories via video. “We decided not to turn anyone down,” Carvajal said. “Any customer who wanted to tell their story could do so.”

Rubrik Inc. hosted presentations by customers from around the world at its Rubrik Forward conference in May. “In this virtual format it was much easier to get our customers involved,” said Dan Rogers, Rubrik’s president.

Success metrics change considerably when organizers can measure with precision when people arrive, how long they stay, what actions they take and even how their attendance leads to new business. “Dwell time becomes a vital statistic,” said Blue Prism’s Lohian.

And while organizers don’t like to tout it, one of the primary values of customer conferences is the new business opportunities they generate. Most firms gave their virtual events high marks for unearthing new sales leads, but they also said closing deals is harder when the face-to-face element is missing.

“These events generate more leads compared to physical events and the cost per lead has gone down significantly,” said Yellowbrick’s Ramakrishnan.

Okta collected 4,000 new sales leads from Oktane20. “Our in-person conferences are mostly existing customers,” Smrekar said. “This blew our previous stats away.” K2 booked a deal worth $1.4 million within 90 days. “There’s no way it would have closed that quickly [at a physical event] because the customer is in Australia,” Carvajal said.

Back to Vegas

Given all their advantages, do virtual events pose an existential threat to physical ones in the future? The answer is no, at least not for now. The PCMA survey found that 70% of organizers believe that virtual and physical platforms will coexist for the long term, but only one-quarter believe that in-person conferences are threatened by their digital counterparts.

MariaDB Corp. commissioned a survey of information technology professionals during the early stages of the pandemic and found that only 8% said they don’t miss meeting in person. Nearly three quarters said they miss physical events “very much” or “extremely.”

“We will certainly continue to do more online events, but we will get back to holding at least one large physical customer event per year,” said Franz Aman, MariaDB’s chief marketing officer.

“There’s something about walking into an expo hall and seeing the giant booths,” said Redis Labs’ Kwon. “We believe physical events will be with us for the long term.”

“We would not replace physical events with virtual counterparts, but can very well imagine hybrid events, where we cater to both worlds,” said Frank Katzer, director of field marketing at Allot Ltd., whose Allot Mobile Virtual Conference in February was one of the first to go virtual.

Despite the success of Domopalooza, Mellor said, “we’d still prefer to do it in person and hang out with our customers.”

The fact remains, though, that COVID-19 has prompted many executives to question the need for the volume of business travel their companies used to do. As the quality of technology platforms used to host virtual events improves, it’s conceivable that the kind of attendance declines that high-definition television has inflicted on the National Football League could put pressure on large conventions.

K2’s Carvajal said he has a soft spot for old-fashioned meeting halls, but you can’t argue with numbers. “Even if I wanted to do a big live event, the CEO will be asking why we would ever do that again,” he said.

Photo: shameersrk/Pixabay