Hybrid conferences and events

If you’re not entirely sure what a hybrid event is, it’s basically a conference which combines both a live, face-to-face event and an online virtual experience. You have your usual audience attending your conference and an additional online audience participating remotely. Hybrid conferences are a great way to increase participation in traditional events by engaging a much wider audience.

Many people can find travel, time constraints or cost a barrier to attending traditional conferences, so turning your event hybrid is a perfect way to be able to make your event more accessible and reach new delegates. You can turn your conference hybrid in some really simple ways. Traditional video conferencing still works best for small meetings but different techniques are needed for larger conferences.

Integrate Twitter into your event. If you’ve read our post Organisers: using Twitter to enhance your conference, you’ll already have some ideas of how you can combine the two. You can have someone at the conference tweeting the main points and content of your presentations to your virtual audience. In return, your virtual attendees can use Twitter to pose questions and interact with other delegates – both virtual and live.

Encourage the delegates attending your live event to share content and opinion via their own networks. Getting your live attendees to interact with your virtual audience gives your conference greater integration.

Stream your keynote speakers and presentations live via your website. If you can’t quite run to video and audio, provide live blogs or transcripts instead. Make supplementary material, such as hand-outs, available electronically. Used in conjunction with Twitter or a live website based forum, this will make your conference fully accessible to your virtual audience. It’s usual for virtual attendance to be free but require registration. This ensures you can capture contact information and that your full conference material is only distributed to those who have registered.

Virtual attendees can also interact with each other ‘face-to-face’. The new Google+ Hangouts tool is perfect for this. Up to 10 people can participate in a group video chat using their webcams, making it perfect for virtual attendees to meet and discuss your conference in a similar manner to your live audience. You could also reserve one of the places for a video link to the live event and have a booth where live attendees can pop in for a chat with their online counterparts. Consider setting up a dedicated networking session using Hangouts allowing both live and virtual attendees to interact.

If you’re hosting an exhibition alongside your conference, you can also make this accessible to your virtual audience. Provide a dedicated page on your website where you have all the exhibitors listed alongside their websites and contact details. Add photos and video clips of the live exhibition to make it feel more accessible. You can even go as far as to create a replica exhibition space for virtual attendees to look round and offer live chat links direct to the exhibitors.

The possibilities for hybrid events are endless and while they’re still quite new at the moment, it will be interesting to see how the concepts develop over time. Let us know if you’ve got any good tips or ideas for turning conferences and events hybrid.