Innovation in the Events Tech Space — Carlos Doughty // MarTech Alliance

Quotes

• “I think if you’re like myself who run events, they’re not as good as in-person. They’re simply not.” - Carlos“There’s been an avalanche of virtual events especially if you work in marketing. I run the MarTech fest virtually but it wasn’t as good as in-person or anywhere near because you can’t deliver that same experience.” - Carlos “As the world returns to some level of normality, I’m hoping that there’s gonna be some level of innovation in the virtual events space that will keep us wanting to do some level still virtual.” - Carlos  “Virtual events are not in-person events and trying to replace them is like sticking a square peg into a round hole. I also think that the events have become more compelling and more interesting.” - Ben “The bit that I’d love to see more of are instances where you can interact more with people. The networking is where we see that’s a bit missing. I’ve seen some interactions where you can actually do more virtual roundtables which I think is decent.” - Carlos “There’s really not enough innovation in there where something really unique and engaging and different. I’m not talking about sticking on a VR headset. I don’t think that’s the answer and I don’t really know what the answer is but I’m expecting from the level of investment that we will see something interesting and dynamic.” - Carlos “I’m interested about the data that’s been collected in all these events and how the businesses start to do a better job converting the people that are attending the events.” - Ben “The problem is, going from what used to be, the handshake and a direct conversation, is now, “okay, someone consumed more media from my company, hopefully in an interactive way and I don’t know if they enjoyed it, I wasn’t able to meet them personally so what’s the follow up from all these event?” - Ben “What’s the way to get somebody from this retention-type activity into my sales funnel and so gleaning data. How much time somebody spent in the event, how engaged they were, are they in the market? Like all the intent data connecting all of those dots, I think is the area where the events space is best suited to focus. It’s not necessarily, how we create an experience” - Ben“Concurrently to this, we were accelerating a lot of aptitude learning production plans. We’ve been planning to release it and given the pandemic, we need to move a lot quicker. I think there is a gaping hole between the events space and the learning space.” - Carlos “On the learning side of things, there are a lot of parallels actually between learning and events so there are learning management systems (LMS) and then there is a learning experience platform (LXP).” - Carlos “So that’s why I don’t necessarily believe that the events space is where the innovation is gonna happen. Because I think people go to the events for three reasons: business development, education, and networking. And if we’re moving to a purely digital experience, I don’t think those will end up all being solved.” - Ben“I think the networking is a virtual something, meetup or exchange, swipe right to meet the next CEO to see if your criteria match, like Tinder for networking. I think that business development, we’re seeing more automation, more outreach. I think that’ll be an advertising-driven and content-driven solution.” - Ben“Then, the learning platform, I think people are sitting at home and they’re gonna be trying to learn not necessarily from the events but through things like courses and classes. That’s why I’m interested in the certification stuff that you do at MarTech Alliance.” - Ben“I think there are different lenses on this and if you step back from all of it, there’s a million different ways you can learn. And there’s all sorts of more formal structured learning which I would put in the category of certification and then there’s more of a community-based or social learning. There’s a lot of micro-learning community and informal and more social learning types of things.” - Carlos “The more awareness, the more you package that together, you might start saying, ‘can’t you find ways in which you can learn more from events. So, in-person, the primary reason to go is networking followed by business development. But then, there is learning in there as well. If you could package together what you can learn from an event, it can start to serve a stronger purpose.” - Carlos “I think maybe one of the root challenges that we have is trying to think and translate an in-person event to an online one instead of just going to actually, “Is this just a delivery of some information?” And If we think of that we stop trying to make it “tick the boxes of what we do in person” and we might treat it differently and we might make it more learning focused or we might make it less business development and less networking because you can’t fulfill that in the same way..” - Carlos “One interesting thing that I think might play out in the events tech space is LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn has expanded its offering and its features around events so it obviously introduced live streaming and it also made virtual events more part of the platform.” - Carlos “Potentially, we can start to see LinkedIn double down on its events tech offering and starts to push that heavily to a great and more interactive experience on the platform. There could be way where people could meet a larger audience because you’ve got access to the world’s largest CRM.” - Carlos “I think the replacement for what happens in events ends up being communities and I think a lot of them are gonna be on Slack and I think that’s one of the big contributing factors why Salesforce was interested in Slack. It’s not just a company communication tool. We’re also seeing these pockets of community and so flashing out that experience, integrating the CRM data with those communities and being able to convert them into business prospects, I think that’s really the future of the online event where it is an ongoing AMA style.” - Carlos