OK, there’s been a seismic change in our industry. It was probably a matter of time.
Disruption, followed by digital transformation. We’ve been there before – as a user (Healthcare, transportation, advertising). Now it’s our turn to be the service provider.
Good thing we learned the lesson from other industries, right? To transform without drowning, first you redesign your business model, and then find the right technology to enable it.
Except, our disruption came so abruptly that we forgot this was what we were meant to do.
As the Covid dust settles, two types of conference providers are emerging: Those who can’t wait for in-person to come back and those who’d happily embrace virtual-only.
What happened?
As much as we would like to take credit, some of us just happened to be in the right place. If your B2B conferences were mostly vendor-driven, of a certain, intimate size and focused on niche topics, you didn’t know it but you were already primed for virtual.
Most likely, you are also a smaller business whose client and budget-consciousness prevented you from over-reliance on platforms promising to “replicate the in-person experience”.
Unknowingly, you probably also took the time to ask the right questions. Why are you attending? What outcomes are you expecting? You didn’t make assumptions.
Then, you felt that familiar pang of anxiety about how an off the shelf virtual experience would play out, damaging relationships that took you years to build.
So, you unwedded yourself from your traditional format. You injected humour into your events, you focused on production value, you reduced time-commitment. You reshaped the whole experience.
And it paid off.
COVID-19 has been a great leveller for smaller companies, allowing us to compete against the giants of our industry. Giants who denied reality and raised doubts about their competence through major flaws in their virtual events.
A new ecosystem is forming, and our industry will look very different in a technology-enabled world. The perfect virtual or hybrid conference has yet to arrive, but it will be those who dare to ask the following, simple question that achieve it:
What if virtual was better than in-person?
