Now consider something disruptive — a complementary online experience that can penetrate and engage the same target audience as your social software platform but that periodically produces comparatively huge spikes of online audience for 1-2 days. I’m talking about virtual event platforms. These software platforms let organizations create large online gatherings – kind of like a Webex meeting on steroids – for internal meetings, conferences, exclusive briefings, product launches, lead generation, online learning/training, job fairs, and more. What if you could periodically drive spikes of online audience like this into your niche online community? You might wind up with site analytic reports that look kind of like the chart below, and that ramp audience penetration and engagement for your community much faster.
Additive, Synergistic Technologies
No matter which piece of the combined social-virtual solution you start from, integrating the technologies yields business benefits and improvements in audience penetration and engagement that are greater than the sum of the parts. Online communities running on social software are vivified by the energy and sense of “happening” of a virtual event. Streaming video presentations that contain unique, well-curated content, wrapped in persisting social activity streams may be the magic formula for increasing audience penetration and engagement, collaboration, learning, and loyalty to the community.
The synergy is just as strong when flipped to start from the virtual event side. Generating social activity streams that are based around the participants, presentations, documents, chats and virtual spaces of a virtual event environment would not only increase participant engagement during the live days of the virtual event, but provide a more viable platform for building 365-day virtual business communities. In general, the confluence of the technologies makes sense because communities naturally coalesce into events, and events naturally disperse into communities. Events are simply the Super Bowl culminations of communities where audience spikes.
Today’s Loosely-Coupled Social-Virtual Integration – A Starting PlaceFirst steps toward social-virtual integration already have been taken by both social software and virtual event vendors.
On the virtual side, features like real-time chat, messaging, buddy lists, vCard exchange, attendee roster, and people search arguably represent social functionality. But they lack the activity-stream-based view of Enterprise 2.0 social software — follower/following capability and real-time streams of activity by people and entities you are following.
Virtual event platforms rode the wave of social API integration, and many now incorporate Twitter hashtag widgets, the Facebook Livestream social plugin, and elements of the LinkedIn Platform API into the virtual environment. Industry leader INXPO was among the first to market with an integrated “social suite” offering these features thanks to the insight of product marketing director Dennis Shaio. Intefy and Ustream both provide similar, less feature-rich, ways to mashup live streaming presentations and Twitter hashtags. A great example of one such Intefy-powered hybrid live-virtual event was Event Camp Twin Cities. Cisco Systems’ CiscoLive is a 365-day hybrid-virtual-social community for Cisco engineers that runs on the INXPO platform. Although it lacks the Enterprise 2.0 social software UX of, say, Cisco Quad or Jive, it pulls its audience back in via regularly scheduled pulse virtual events containing freshly curated content. Q&A sessions integrated within the webcast presentations, real-time chats and Twitter hashtags provide the collaborative interaction between attendees and subject matter experts and between attendees and other attendees.One startup deserves credit on the virtual event side for taking the convergence of virtual and social software to the next level — Bellevue, WA-based startup Social27. With Social27 it’s possible to follow attendees in the virtual environment and view social activity streams on their updates. Social27 is a startup social CRM agency that has developed and shipped a cloud-based SaaS virtual event product. The company’s founder and CEO, Ike Singh Kehal, positions Social27 in the “enterprise social computing” space. The company offers both a virtual event product and an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, and appears to have fused elements of the two. It looks like a harbinger of things to come.
The Social Software Side
On the social software side, first steps toward social-virtual integration have been taken by Cisco Quad, which integrates Webex online conferencing into the Enterprise 2.0 environment, and by the Brainshark app in the Jive Apps Market, which lets participants create, manage, deliver and track on-demand multimedia presentations from within the Jive social platform. Such online conferencing tools lack the feature functionality of a full virtual event platform, but they’re a step toward wrapping online meetings and gatherings in social software UX and activity streams.
Engage365.org, a niche online community running on the Pathable social platform, regularly launches live streaming webcasts with thought leaders via an embedded UStream player on its site. Participants can start a native discussion thread about the webcast by simply clicking the “start a conversation” button at the top of the page, and that threaded discussion will persist on the native Pathable platform. Alternately, participants can Tweet about the webcast using the webcast’s Twitter hashtag.
BrazenCareerist, a career social networking site for people in their 20s, has also injected a form of virtual event into its activity-feed-based social platform. To be sure, BrazenCareerist’s Network Roulette events which have been described as “an online speed-networking service that lets young professionals build their network” are a unique departure from the experience of the commercial virtual event platforms. But BrazenCareerist CEO Edward Barrientos credits these virtual events with driving new waves of audience penetration and engagement into the BrazenCareerist online community.
Where It Needs To Go
What’s the end game for engaging an online audience with a combined virtual-social experience?
The roadmap probably lies in tighter integration between the unique content of virtual events and the social activity streams of persisting online communities. To give users the maximum opportunity for engagement, they should be able to follow, share, comment on and rank any entity in the virtual environment – including other participants, webcasts, documents, chats, blogs, and user-generated content uploads like YouTube videos. Each participant, content entity and group in the virtual environment should generate its own feed which can be subscribed to by any member. Feed posts should link directly to the virtual event content asset or profile of the user that is mentioned. These features exist today in social software platforms like Saleforce.com Chatter. Extending such features to virtual event content would drive engagement during the live event days, catalyze a high volume of crowdsourced social discovery of that content, drive a wave of viral sharing, and launch true social-virtual platforms into the marketplace as a competitively differentiated 365-day collaboration solution. It would be particularly effective for driving audience penetration, loyalty and engagement in niche communities with relatively small numbers of unique visitors per day/week/month.
Virtual-Social-Mobile
Needless to say, any evolutions of a virtual-social combined solution need to go mobile. Social software platforms like Jive and Salesforce.com Chatter, as well as virtual event platforms like Social27, already have mobile versions of their apps. Online conferencing apps from Cisco Webex and other vendors also have mobile app versions. Putting emerging virtual-social communities on smartphones and tablets is another essential in expanding their audience reach, engagement, and frequency of touch.
What You Can’t Measure You Can’t Improve
Leading commercial virtual event platforms have strong integrated metrics. Social software platforms are beefing up their reporting with social media monitoring tools, as Jive did when it acquired Filtrbox. A social-virtual combined solution needs to track and report on behaviors on a per-user basis across both the virtual event and social software user experiences. The aggregate metrics would give a more complete view of each participant and be more actionable than either social metrics or virtual metrics on their own.
Have you used or considered using platforms that combine virtual event and social software? What has been your experience? How do you see the fusion of the technologies evolving?
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