The Evolution of Virtual Conferences

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hey how's it going to ski thousand from the CTO of Weiser we it's been a long time since we've had Greg Farrell from the packet pushers on one of our platforms we're recording this as a CTO dose problem pretty sure we recorded as a podcast because I was too lazy to be core one independently last week and I saw this on my calendar hey Greg how's it going I'm doing really well you have your own calendar what Dave what day is this now today is Monday

that today is day 74 of lockdown for me I've been here in the house except for very few excursions about you know to the shops however I did go to the shops today and refresh my alcohol supply and kind of frighten myself with how much I bought but that's okay that's that's my therapy at the moment so the great outputs you know there's this Creighton Creighton I mean I'm Clayton Christensen I think is the one who this concept of creative destruction out of this Kolb it

19 lockdown period we're gonna have two great industries born one a bunch of babies yeah and then to a bunch of alcoholics I'm falling in one of those two categories and let me just tell you we're a little bit too old to have babies now so yes exactly what I thought my children of left home as well and so I've been taking a little bit extra time for self-care I think would be their way to summarize it and part of that is in the evenings where

before I might have skipped having a drink because I've got work the next day or I'm taking time out you know whatever but now what I'll do is in the evenings I'll take time to have a couple of drinks instead of none or one and just relax at the end of the day and try and put it all behind me so that I got I'm ready for the next day and and and that's what I wanted to talk to you about cuz I pitched you about

what we wanted to talk about today and of course covert is seen the death of the physical conference and I was one of the first people to pick out in that it was going to be we're not going to see a physical event in 2020 at all and it's hard even to pick out whether there'll be events in 2021 and so you and I started talking about virtual events way way earlier and in you held your CTO advised our virtual conference and I said to you

I really want it to sit down and talk to you and debug that because this covert nineteen and virtual because I've been a vocal speaking out about not going to conferences to physical conferences because it takes so much time and so much energy to get up and go and I'd much rather see virtual events take off and that's I wanted to talk about the successes and and the lessons learned from them so you're absolutely right I remember you talking about virtual conferences a couple of years

ago actually you know you your honor your all the way on the other side of the pond and most conferences are us focused so and our business which is creating content we have to kind of go to these things I see you way too often and conferences versus our pull up in the downtown of UK like the worst thing that should happen is that you have to come to London downtown London to have you know a couple of beers so let's talk about kind of those

two aspects of a virtual event the first thing that I learned from doing this virtual event is that one I can move way faster doing creating the event it took me six weeks to cook the from thought to execution I move at the speed of the internet so that was kind of lesson one from the event is that it just it was way quicker to plan execute and then to it is a great equalizer one of the things that I wanted was to have a diverse

event I'm pretty vocal about racial diversity on Twitter and it's really hard to be diverse when you're asking someone to spend thousands of dollars or take time off of work or take time away from their family to fly to San Francisco or to be intimidated by a of crap I mean I've been in rooms where I'm the only african-american in the entire room I have this running joke if you want to find me at a conference I'm the tall bald black guy and that's pretty easy

to know because you are that only you are the only person yeah and so what we wanted to do was we wanted to be inclusive of having not just racial diversity but gender diversity I'm pretty proud to say that 50% of our speakers of the editorial content the content that I selected the call for papers 50% of those speakers were women and that's not something that we can easily do at physical conferences so the inclusiveness gives you two things first of all I'm sure it gives

you it gave you the the diversity of people who could present and gave truly equal opportunities for those people to actually turn up but it also gave them the ability to participate when they wouldn't be able to so I've been trying to do more and more virtual events and we actually started organizing that packet pushes a couple of years ago with very modest success I think it's a great amazing to think that anybody can now get up and speak but also you are pre recording some

of the presentations so these people could they didn't have to have the stage fright or the I could make a mistake and look stupid they can actually speak up and know that they were in a safe place no you make a really great point about the pre-recorded piece of it one of the things that I've learned you know I've done a lot of the cues I've done a lot of live content and I'll spend a couple of minutes or few seconds talking about the cube format

in general the cube format works because you're on premises live and there's an energy and a vibe that comes off the stage with saying our good friends through minimun and up and interviewing Pat Gail singer or whomever so people can stop by and seeing it and in real life there's not many people watching that on the live stream but at the conference it creates a great vibe there's no reason when you're talking about a virtual event there's no reason to have the content live like you

can't read the audience you can't react when questions come in you know we've done webinars long enough to know that you know what they do they throw these canned questions in that are questions from the audience that aren't real questions so what we do self nice to tell you right now yes you write yourself to generate us you know and if there are no questions I think I think the first thing is that pre-recorded presentations are better because people can prepare they can make mistakes you

can rerecord something if they goose it and that's better for the audience right and it doesn't the second thing is is that people who would not otherwise be like that getting up on stage is a very scary emotional mental thing like I can remember the first time few times I got up on stage you know and it was in a small room at the back of a conference and there was like 30 to 50 people and you know the fear that I had of being and

then you know and then later on I can remember standing up on stage in front of a keynoting at four to five thousand people and thinking it's not any different to that first time like but it's the same thing but it makes much more sense if you're trying to reach an audience to not be coming up like one of the things that you see so much at conferences is people just getting up and coming off the cuff' unprepped loser you get bad speech patterns you get

unprepared responses you get you know panels as a way of filling the hours at a conference and it's just a bunch of experts reacting to each other not even as organized as a podcast because podcasts are very heavy well our podcasts are heavily planned you know we structure the format we have the questions we have a flow we have a story are prepared I think the potential for virtual conference is to out perform physical conferences is substantial if you consider from that angle yeah I think

I attended the redhead conference and they they they had a day 0 event no 7,000 people at Pete 7,000 people at a Red Hat day 0 conference no slight to redhead but redhead is no you know AWS etc and you enter that you you I think you you engage a completely new audience and so I want to talk to you I want to ask you a couple of questions around this audience do you think the audience for virtual events it's necessarily the same audience for in-person

events I think - there's an overlap I don't think you can say you can't be absolute it's a spectrum so some of the people attending would be the same people who would be at physical events would also be but for the first time there's a lot of people who go to physical events who actually don't attempt so for physical events a lot of the time we send the junior people along and we say if you do really well this year you can have a free kit

you'll have a free trip to a vendors conference and you're meant it's meant to be a reward and a bit of a party and a bit of a good time and because it's a conference you can write it off as a tax deduction as a training thing so I I wouldn't actually make the point that a lot of people who attend conferences physically are actually all that engaged sometimes they are sometimes they're there to sit in sessions and to learn and absorb and train but there's

also a fairly large group of people there who are there just to have a break away from work because job well done here's a little like mini break a little reward for being great right and I think for virtual audiences you're also seeing and one of the things I've seen with some events is because I've been made I've been forcing myself to attend as many virtual events as possible partly because I can attend them for the first time ever I don't have to get on a

plane I'd have to go to the airport I'd have to get to the other side I don't have to have go through jetlag I don't have to spend two days so if I go to a two-day conference I lose six days at least two days to get there and to be prepared I lose two days coming home to jetlag and so forth so you know just for two days worth of physical face to face is six days of worse loss like not just workdays but personal

days like I lose all my social life all right so yeah so there's a unique value free you and I I've only gone to a couple of conferences in Europe but in general I'm not going to a conference to attend a session but no that's not the value for me the value for me is that you know what I get to spend an hour with Greg Ferrell in person and we can either create some content together we can do some BD etc because that's a unique

time to be able to do that the conference is just an excuse that we have shared clients any any conference so there's value for us attending that matter of fact most people who attend their first conferences I tell them you know what don't bother with the with the sessions no don't be recorded unless there is just something you want to ask a speaker then you attend that session but for the rest of it spend the time reaching out to the Gregg the elders the Ethan banks

and Chris walls of the world go and meet those people search them out they're very approachable and this is a chance to really network so that piece is missing what's not missing because now we're doing it over zoom like you and I today a recording and we're spending time face-to-face so what we're doing is we're substituting what we used to do in-person by actually reaching out to each other over twitter or by email or in slack rooms and then getting together face to face over videoconferencing

so what we're actually doing is even digitally transforming for lack of a better buzzword a whole idea of relationships so we don't need to be face-to-face to sustain our relationships anymore if you take the time to think about what you're doing and the context you're having it spend time you know you and I occasionally spend time just talking about stuff right which is exactly the same as being face-to-face at a conference and so it's about thinking about what you're doing and changing your habits your habits

are I know how to talk face to face because I've learned it all my life if I'm now getting to learn how to face to face over zoom or some intermediary I just have to reiterate myself conference goers have to change like this isn't if you're used to going to in person conference if you if you're like us and you can't even count the number of conferences that you've gone to there's habits you have to change one of which is kind of this networking thing you

know we could always go to the bloggers lounge or the meet the the press a media session or the got space to find each other for my virtual conference I had a lounge and that louse had a link to a Z zoom and if you wanted to just spend the whole conference hanging out and not going to any sessions you could do that you could just go to the zoom and there was 20 people just sitting there hanging out you meet new people and you see

good good old friends so what other habits do you think conference goers have to change traditional in-person Conference Board's have to change to consume virtual conferences and how does the conference's have to change to adapt so there's two things one is if you're in the room it's really easy to focus your attention on what's happening you could watch the stage you can see the speaker there's a personal immediacy to that so even if you're only giving person someone 50 percent of your attention because they're not

a very good speaker or they're not very interesting or the contents a bit tedious you know like when a vendor engineer stands up and just goes into the spiel and you can hear it right you can hear the blah blah blah blah like this is practice this is not his first real real Saint giving this very very same topic yeah and you know this person's just turned up pulled out the standard deck and they press play right so there is there you can't replace that so

if you're going to have a virtual conference and you're taking away the smell and the travel and the stimulation of being there in person you have to amp up your content your content has to be so interesting that my email doesn't take me away from your event your speaker has to be so good that I'm not inclined to open up Twitter over here and check to see if anybody's slagging him off in the background you know or going to slack to say this guy is a

banana job you know this guy has no idea what he's talking is right your content has to be blisteringly good it has to be visually rich your speaker has to be good audio like some of the conference's we saw recent Sarver chill Vince I've been on the audio has been a poorly like people turning up and you know it's like yelling at a laptop on the other side of the room you know and it's just they don't take time to do what you and I have

done a little bit investment in a camera a little bit of investment in an audio system to make it so because if I can't you know when you go to a physical event we spend tens of thousands of dollars for every room to make that audio absolutely perfect right why do microphones the rooms are built for perfect audio all that sort of stuff and yet on a virtual conference people expect to pick up their crappy mobile phone and a $10 microphone maybe you know if you're

very lucky they're using Apple earpods which is still bad audio by the way right and better than the laptop if that's fine yeah your laptop microphone is like a just a tick box on the tender it's got to have a microphone well let's put in a five-cent microphone and away you go that and so I just think people haven't made the transition and thought about you know if I spend a half a million dollars hiring a hall to do a presentation in all that audio work

was done for me and they didn't even know you know people don't think about how much has done for you but if you're doing a virtual event you have to get people investing in decent microphones good lighting like you and I've got the same thing you've got some good lighting in the room I've got lights all around me shining on me not expensive lights by the way just you know 100 bucks worth of lights and adjustable colors and little tiny things that require just a little

bit of preparation and effort and that's something that used to be done for you at a physical event that you now responsible for so there's a flip here right good content and basic hygiene around the mechanics of the video comments so talking about debugging the event I won't spend at least a minute talking about that very topic it was if you've ever been in a conference you've put on a couple of congresses in virtual conferences and whether it's virtual whatever getting the content in is extremely

extremely difficult even when you're paying who are independent speakers so people who aren't working for vendors we paid them honorarium not a lot of money but the hey you know what I'm making a couple of dollars off this conference so there I'm not gonna sold you I make money you should make you should I'm not making yep so but even with that creating content is for us who create content nearly daily is still extremely difficult so for someone who's not accustomed to creating content we we

went over and board we hired a AV person we offered them out we said hey you know what they will come on do a zoom video with you and we'll magically produce your slides etc etc barely no one took us up on it and we end up getting the the content the weekend before the event the event was on a Tuesday we got most of the content in on that Friday Saturday and Sunday and I hired Jeff powers of geek Azim to actually produce the content

so that file that they gave us that local file that they gave us we went in and then we put an additional investment in to make sure that the audio was acceptable to make sure that the picture was consistent and that you know I I hired a person who just took every hand shot and make sure that every headshot looked similar to each other so they had the same theme these are details you have to take care of to have a virtual event so that people

don't you know I pull weeds out of the garden the other day and no one ever notices that there's no weeds in the garden but everyone notices if you have weeds in a garden and a virtual event is the exact same thing no one notices that the sound is great until you have bad sound with and I can back that up with analytics so on our podcast when we have a sponsored podcast where a client comes a vendor comes in sponsors our show and we talk

and the vendor despite all of our preparation and encouragement and you know decent they turn up with bad audio what we see is that that there's a chart that shows the engagement through a podcast right that you get from Apple's analytics and for most of our podcasts 60 to 70 % of our audience is listening at 60 to 70 percent of the way through the show now that's phenomenally high engagement that's very odd yes right if you've got bad audio and a sponsored podcast with a

bad speaker it's 30 30 only 30 percent of your audience is still listening one third of the way through so I was just if you've just got better it doesn't matter what the person's talking about it'll go 5050 people will go for it at the halfway point only half is left but if you've got bad content and bad audio it's one third of the audience is listening one third of the way through yeah that's our bad at ramps off so let's say that there is a

good virtual event and you're consuming the virtual event as a virtual event consumer is your expectation to spend the whole day at the virtual event like when you're looking at the agenda are you saying you know what I'm gonna lock myself in for the whole day for this well the whole in the case of IBM feat last week it was three days to hold three days of the virtual event I think that's unrealistic I think the reason we used to do full-day events in person was

because you have to once you've shifted yourself from wherever you are to being there you want the event to be running for 10 to 12 hours a day because you've got nothing else to do but sit in a hotel room anyway right or get maybe if you're lucky have a nice meal and you know something at the bar if the company's covering your expenses so is it realistic to expect people to give up an entire day if you've got the ability to not do an entire

day then that's what you should do because now you need to adapt to the medium so the question is not whether you should do days of content that's absolutely a fundamental flaw you've just said I'm just gonna repeat what I used to do in person and forget that I'm now in the digital world that I'm on internet time and I'm not gonna change I'm just gonna do it again right I'm gonna take it that is completely wrong in my view the way that you should be

doing it is thinking I should be running tracks and I should be running them 52 weeks a year so I should be doing it for two hours a day because I can get two hours a day of someone's attention because the rest of the day he's got a real job or she's going to be in meetings or the they're going to be away with their family so the idea that you're going to promote an event and build it up to a one so you know eight

hours of content and this is what we found with our shows we tried our first one was four hours our second one was three hours our third one was two hours and even at that we were still struggling to maintain attention and engagement and the mistake that we did was actually turn it into an event it should I think ultimately it's got to be a podcast something that happens every week so instead of having an event jammed in the middle it's got to be something that

just happens all the time yeah I absolutely good that some stats from out of my I had about 620 640 registrations peak login I think we had or the we had 280 people actually log into the event and just from a practical the way that I tracked the attendance throughout the day was the number of people in tech so I started out the day the peak during the keynote 140 hundred and fifty people in check that stayed pretty consistent for the first two hours of the

event the fourth and fifth hour and the event was a five hour event the fourth and fifth Valerie completely fell off the cliff 6070 people and I don't know how many of those people were actually well I do have know how many people are engaged because I can go look at the the the tracks and sessions to see how many people attended the sessions but definitely the sweet spot for this type of event that I put on and I'm about 85 percent sure that the next

time I put on an event is not gonna be this format in my mind it was a success but it wasn't a sustainable way to put on any branded event there I absolutely agree with you that it should not be you have the capability for it to be a weekly thing and you have the capability for it to be a one two you know maybe three or four micro 15-minute sessions a week and and that zoom engagement before and after so that you're getting the social

mix mix of it I think that's the format that I'm gonna go for next the the challenge and both men you have this is paying for this like you know this this is not a you know art our time our speakers time the platforms all these things cost money and that model and I want to end this the conversation kind of like how how do you how do you pay for it even if I to did it I have this wild idea that I'm going to

treat this as just overhead for my business as opposed to going out and getting straight-out sponsors that changes like the the in user experience the richness of the experience but he trade-off that without will not haven't have to trade your information to tend to attend one of my events what's your thoughts like the financial side of this so the financial side is really really difficult and I think what we'll see is the cycle of let's take the physical event turn it into a digital event and

see who turns up right and they're going to be disappointed because a lot of people will have other things on they won't be available because they're not putting their lives on hold and sitting down for the three days of virtual events and because the content so there are some vendors who do brilliant jobs of producing amazing content Cisco and VMware the two that come to my mind if you sit in their sessions they are outstanding in and both companies then record it and then publish it

into a library so you can then go and see those sessions and the content is almost universally especially the technology content I mean the keynotes that these people produce have been doing downhill for years they're almost unwatchable these days right once when a time a keynote was a way to celebrate and to people to you know feel whatever now it's mostly like the CEO gets up and goes god so great I'm here to talk to you and hang on for a sec we're going to get

someone on the stage and somebody comes on the stage this guy is the CEO of company X and he stands up on stage and reads the legally binding stuff our company has cars with wheels on the side they have very good cars and we use company X's products you know and it's just it's just this show of people congratulating each other on how clever they are about being uncharged and getting on stage the keynotes aren't the celebration or they didn't they don't resonate with me like

they did five years ago when it was much more of a genuine user group feel like this is what we did this went great much more the keynotes have turned into a cross between financial analyst messaging bragging slagging off your competitors indirectly and then getting customers to come up on stage in the idea that it would actually be fresh and invigorating and in fact they're just tedious and dull and so really I think we actually have to find a way to generate a new form of

content that is engaging and worthwhile and that's not what we're seeing we're seeing people transplant the legacy event straight into the virtual event and then finding that it's you know crashing up against irrelevance because what you're presenting works when someone's in the room but doesn't work when they've got other distractions around them and other things that might be impending on their attention and the chances of you grabbing those people's attention for two hours is yes you can do that for hours you want to have something

amazing to hold onto an audience for four hours but you're not going to publish three times eight or three times ten hours and get people sitting there for three days going through it and indeed what's the value of that even if they did what am I getting for that three days like people don't even spend you know if you think about it there are people out there have built entire careers on training courses of five days of training right so there's not this everything we're talking

about here applies equally to the educational process if you think about people doing micro certifications for any of the vendors they used to fly to a place and sit in a room and have you know and a curriculum thrown at them people aren't going to do that after covert that curriculum is going to have to be delivered online in some way because people are going to refuse to get on a plane I'm thinking particularly VMware's Mike certification program where if you want to be a certified

administrator or a certified professional in the VMware products you forced to go and sit in a room for somebody to deliver you a standard curriculum that's not going to happen for another year yeah I'm super excited to see how innovation happens after this there's a lot of things that we didn't talk touch one on one was platform I'm just not impressed with the virtual platforms and the options available to make a rich experience you know right after people I had a couple of people who say

like some of the feed that fact that we ran from the show was outstanding I have one guy who said keep this felt like at vmworld no no that blew me away I'm like okay that's that's great but that's you you know you you've put on content you created video I've seen that the types of videos that you create and you're very particular about the lighting the sound etc so there's an experience you want your customers to have and while I was appreciative that I was

able to put on the virtual event it still wasn't the experience that I had in mind and that I want my customers to have and that's a hundred percent the platform and it it's it's giving me pause to put on another virtual event and he's gonna be hot and I think one last comment before we run away don't forget that we as members of the audience have a responsibility to change ourselves right because when you go to a conference and city in the room you choose

very easy to pay attention very easy to listen if you're sitting at home and you know or at the office and you're joining into a virtual event you have to retrain yourself to pay attention to the screen to listen to the speakers to not go to your email to not not to invoke the daily habits of sitting there and and thinking about I've got to write this report I've got to do this I've got emails and no turn off all your notifications stop them from being

in embalming while you're watching them because if you're not making a point of sitting there and consuming that content you might as well have not turned up at all and so we have a responsibility one of the ways I'm doing it is when I'm watching a virtual event I write notes as I go and at the end of it I tear the page out throw it in the bin but cuz you know it's just make me yeah so this is how I'm retraining myself to focus

on I did the same thing just for the just the highlight that this isn't new this is the same same when I went to school I was taught to read from a book right I had to take a book and I learned to read left to ride and down the bottom you know and when we 10 years ago when I started reading from a computer screen when screens got good enough to read from when they got to written a class sort of stuff I had to

relearn and teach my brain how to read from a screen so now I find it very difficult to read a physical book because I read everything as an e-book or a PDF for yeah I find it super difficult too because the e-book you can swipe up cycles right right and it's just much easier to read to find the content that you really want versus a book if I'm on vacation and I just want to fall asleep at the beach I'll bust out a physical book and

get through about two or three pages and fall asleep so you know virtually keep in mind you went to school for 20 years to learn how to read and write like the first thing they teach at school how to sit down and shut up and the second thing they do is tell you how to teach you how to read from a book like read from a page and now you're telling me that suddenly you've got to read from a screen that is a different experience you

need to be consciously adapting your thinking and taking time to say okay I'm struggling to read from the screen but this is the new way all right and so the same applies to a virtual event you as a consumer need to read don't sit there and say I'm just listed I mean the lecture theater listening to this so that you've got to adapt yourself to it and remember we just at the front half of the show of course we was saying the speakers have to adapt

to the medium but then so does the audience and so little always so speaking of audience for those of who weren't watching this as a video presentation because easily see the lower thirds of where to find you on Twitter and and how to find the packet pushers how did he find you how do we find the packet butchers now you can find me at the packet pushes which is packet pushes net we've been doing a podcast we're in our 10th year we just finished our 10th

anniversary so we started in May 2010 now Maine 2020 mm podcasting now for ten glorious years I guess the way to talk about it and you can find us on Twitter is that packet pushes and I'm I personally if I my personal Twitter account is at ethereal mind where I tweet quite regularly throughout the day and often quite shall we say provocatively and in gay so I listen to that 10th episode and as a Esser you guys mentioned how people have followed you follow certain listeners

careers and how they rise to the ranks funny at my last job and this is me fully knowing you and having beers with you and you and my wife flipping each other off in a bar and in London one of the senior network managers at my last full-time employee job who's like oh yeah Keith the Greg Farrell fanboy it was it was hilarious I've never shared that story with you but you know I mentioned the content from the packet pushers so much throughout my career and

the work that you guys do that I've thought that that was just a validation a data point for the point that you guys made on that 10th anniversary show you can find me on the web the web site is the CTL advisor comm and maybe when this publishes CTO a DCE CTO visor data center what we're doing with the hybrid infrastructure sponsored by question mark will be up and running talk to you next CTO visor podcast CTO dose video