PART 3
Leading Large Virtual Meetings and Conferences

As meetings exceed 50 people, new and different challenges are created. Professional meeting planners know how to plan for meetings that engage 100, 1,000, 10,000, or more attendees. They have years of experience and thousands of systems to do everything from registration to feeding people to engaging people in keynotes, breakouts, and workshops.

Those systems don't exactly work in virtual meetings. Many conferences are being forced to move online. Many planners are suddenly declaring themselves virtual planners but don't have the skills to back up the claim. Many do not have the experience to take their face-to-face skills to the virtual conference world.

One conference attempted to do exactly what they would do in the real world, but all online. The virtual conference was two days long, eight hours per day. A variety of speakers presented sessions from 30 to 90 minutes all day. The conference trusted every speaker to be great virtual speakers, so they didn't give any training to them. They ran three sets of simultaneous breakouts after the morning keynotes and lunch. They turned chat off so they could save on staffing.

One attendee of this conference said it was painful to listen to speakers with bad audio, having trouble presenting their slides, and having no ability to connect with other people attending. One speaker moved and talked so fast that the attendee could not keep up. She said that after the last presentation on day 1, she went straight to bed and passed out until the next morning. If you are put in charge of a virtual conference, do not let this happen to you and your career.

There are professionals who have been practicing technology and engagement for years. I am in awe of many of those pioneers in the technology and meeting professional industries. They have been experimenting and learning the best practices of what works and what doesn't work.

The Green Meetings Industry Council's 2011 conference is one of the early conferences that I attended that explored what was possible. Elizabeth Valestuk Henerson and Mitchell Beer worked with an extensive team to create a fully gamified conference that was half face-to-face and half virtual.

During the planning process, then at the conference itself, organizers adopted a motto, first stated by Samuel J. Smith, co-chair of Event Camp Twin Cities 2010:

“Experimentation is our get-out-of-jail-free card. If we weren't having tech hiccups, we wouldn't be innovating.”

The entire conference was gamified, dividing attendees into teams and competing to create a case study using knowledge gained at the conference. Every team was assigned an iPad, which at the time was in its first generation. Every session was live-streamed and used Twitter to allow attendees from around the world to attend and create new communication channels that the conference designers never anticipated.

One was that Samuel J. Smith (remember the quote above) was attending virtually from his home in Minnesota. Our team tweeted that we wanted more team members. Sam replied that he'd like to join and he immediately became a member of our team. I helped Sam engage in our team by setting up a computer on Skype and playing it through a set of speakers so everyone could hear Sam. We used Google Docs and Sam contributed significantly as we were simultaneously editing. Sam and I even recorded an interview on Skype and the organizers asked me to play it at the morning general session. Sam said it was one of his most engaging virtual conferences to date.

This is a conference that nine years after I attended it, I'm still talking about it. People remember exciting meetings.

Go to bit.ly/evmgmic to read the case study of the GMIC conference.

Go to bit.ly/evmgmicvideo to see an interview with a remote attendee who was recruited into a team by chat and became a valuable member of the team. Part of this interview was played in the opening morning keynote.

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