COVID-19 Crisis Virtual Conferences… a Digital-First Approach
Google Cloud cancels biggest conference out of COVID-19 caution, plans virtual version
COVID-19 has affected populations around the world and threatens many more, there is no way to know how long the crisis will persist. Our hearts go out to all of those affected, their families and their communities. Outside of those touched directly by the tragedy, there are many knock-on effects across a range of industries, especially Conferences and Events.
Even in the best case scenario, if our worst fears are not realized and with a rapid reduction in the spread of the virus, most events or conferences between now and the end of June 2020 have been cancelled or postponed. The effects might drag on longer into the second half of the year. It is impossible to know. What is certain – is that organizations that have cancelled events or withdrawn from attending conferences due to the COVID-19 crisis need to replace those events with – Virtual Conferences, Digital-First Communication, and Video Content and Presentations.
“Communication is an even higher priority during uncertain times, updates on the COVID-19 crisis need to be shared with teams, travel restrictions, business updates and changes to operations need to be delivered, content has been prepared for cancelled meetings, launches and conferences, organizational goals need to be shared, team alignment is more critical than ever.”
There is no doubt that innovative solutions are called for and alternatives to get this content to employees are urgently needed. Great production partners experienced with these complex challenges will be crucial. If you need to produce a Virtual Conference, or Digital-First Communications to replace a COVID-19 affected event, here are some thoughts on production challenges and solutions.
“Summer of Streaming”
Like it or not, we are headed into a “Summer of Streaming”. It’s not a question of whether or not live streaming and digital-first communication will replace conferences and events, it is a matter of how-to produce compelling, engaging video and media content.
Staying connected to your employees, users, clients, business partners, communities and the public has never been more important.
Repertoire Productions is the leading pioneer of live streaming production in the Bay Area, and we support our clients wherever we are needed. We have a range of solutions ready to deploy for producing virtual conferences. Repertoire Productions is a highly scalable creative and production partner, capable of fast responses to these pressing challenges, we can deploy nimble teams to livestream or record content and presentations across the United States and around the globe.
Repertoire Productions and Production Line Studios in South San Francisco have unrivaled advantages in keeping your presenters communicating, while safe and minimizing exposure to large groups of people. PSL are taking extraordinary precautions, cleaning and sanitizing, and steps to ensure production teams, studio, green room, executive lounge and offices are the lowest possible risk.
Virtual Events
When the Pope is live streaming to avoid the masses, it might be time for you to consider going virtual too.
Coronavirus: Pope Francis delivers blessing via videolink
Repertoire Productions can create High Quality Production environments quickly with fully supported multi-cam production and live streaming across a range of different location options. Producing a Virtual Event presents different challenges to producing in front of a LIVE Audience. Keeping an audience engaged and connected with your message and your content requires different exposition and different techniques. Live Audiences provide energy, excitement, immediacy, and reaction in a unique way. How to recreate that buzz and that urgency of a LIVE Audience? Repertoire Productions can produce a range of different setup designs, styles and tones for presenters, integrate Slides and Presentation Media, Facilitate Remote Presenters, Panel Discussions and Informal settings.
Coronavirus: Ted conference to go virtual or be postponed
How to make sure the audience gets the value for the time investment? How to spark engagement, interactivity, real connection between presenters and audience? How to collect registration information? How to track who is watching? How can you monetize video content? How to measure ROI? Conduct Surveys and Polling? Read on for more info.
Engagement, Measurement, ROI
Engagement!
Private or Public, Internal or External Viewers, B2C or B2B, Guest Keynote Speakers or C-Suite Presenters, keeping your audience interested and connected to your content is key. Engagement and interactivity tools are the best tools to make sure of it. Can your Online Video Platform Support Q&A? Audience Polling? Can your Audience react to your presenters LIVE? Can you regulate and control those features and manage the environment? Do you want to facilitate chat? Do you want to figure all this out yourself? Or do you want to partner with experienced experts who can outline your options and execute? Repertoire Productions and Production Line Studios covers the entire range of possibilities.
Engagement, Measurement, ROI
Measurement!
We don’t know how long we will need to use Virtual Conferences, Digital-First Communications, Live Streaming and Virtual Events in place of conferences and travel. This may not be a one time project, repeatability and improvement will be expected. Measuring return on investment will be required. This may become your only way of communicating with distributed teams and employees for many weeks and months to come. You need to know who is watching. How long they are watching for. Their viewing habits. If they found the content, style and presentation relevant and valuable. Polling, Surveys, Registration and all critical data points need to be collected and reported.
Engagement, Measurement, ROI
ROI
We’re looking beyond engagement now, we want to know if we hit the center of the bullseye! Did we get the results we wanted? Do we have the data to analyze that question? Benchmarking, tracking results and knowing which KPI’s you should set up ahead of time is critical. If you’re setting up a secure private live stream internally for your organization or a restricted audience on a deadline due to the COVID-19 crisis, configuring Registration, Page Design, Player, Content, Schedule, Promotion and Marketing are a challenge, you want to know that you’ll have rich data to review the results.
The question again is, “Do you want to figure all this out yourself?” Or do you want to partner with experienced experts who can outline your options and execute? Figure out your content, schedule, line it up and hit go. Repertoire Productions and Production Line Studios covers the entire range of possibilities. End to End.
COVID-19 Next Steps…
Repertoire Productions and Production Line Studios are already focused on next level production, live streaming, digital communication, effective marketing content. We can help with COVID-19 Virtual Conference Production and Distribution with end-to-end solutions. We’re ready to get creative, solve problems and guide our clients through difficult decisions in the coming months.
