Can virtual events still make an impact as the United States and other parts of the world are reopening? What’s the future of hybrid? We asked Social27 Marketing Director, Kat Murphy, about what Social27 is seeing work for their clients and what successful hybrid events may entail.
What is Social27’s role in virtual and hybrid events for your clients?
Social27 is a virtual event platform created with business acceleration and robust in-app networking opportunities at the forefront. We’ve built our platform on the three pillars that make any type of event a success: content, networking, and sponsor showcasing.
Marketing Director
Photo Credit: Bret Doss
But, we also have a team of expert advisors – skilled business acceleration and event professionals – who help our clients get the most out of our software to meet their business objectives. We’re among the few organizations with a comprehensive hybrid strategy to match our hybrid lives.
What business objectives does Social27 help clients meet via events?
There are many business objectives that can be met or accelerated with events. Many events are working toward multiple business objectives.
Often, they’ll have a main objective for attendees utilizing content to achieve it, such as education or training, brand awareness, or to attract prospective clients or students. Then, there will be underlying objectives such as lead generation, pipeline acceleration, ROI, attendee engagement, etc.
Sometimes, we help clients uncover those underlying objectives and advise them on how to get the most out of their events.
Ultimately, what we really want clients to understand is that – in most cases – an event strategy is more important than a singular event. Of course, it varies by use case, but when it comes to ROI, brand awareness, pipeline acceleration, and similar business objectives, an ongoing event strategy is the most effective route.
Are your clients more often doing a singular event or are they trying a comprehensive event strategy?
Our clients are smart and forward thinking. They have an existing event strategy, and we’re advising them on how to utilize virtual and/or hybrid events to enhance it.
They’re seeing that having virtual elements or incorporating virtual events is expanding their reach, decreasing costs, increasing ROI, and giving their individual events more longevity, which helps drum up excitement for their next event.
What I would personally like to see more of is the big, annual conferences utilizing an ongoing event site to deliver ongoing content, offer workshops and networking opportunities, and continue conversations between their annual meeting or event.
What are the strongest features on Social27 Virtual Event Platform that get the most use and excitement from your clients?
Our networking features are hands-down the most robust in-app networking available. Attendees can chat 1:1, video call 1:1, group chat, small group video calls, medium group video calls, post social media-like micro videos introducing themselves, etc. – all within the platform. Our Recommendation and Prediction Engine makes sure attendees get the opportunity to connect with attendees who share their own interests. Plus, we’ve gotten great feedback from speakers and sponsors who are thrilled with all the opportunities they have to connect with attendees to answer questions and hear the unique needs of their customers.
Our streaming features keep attendees extremely engaged. Clients are often surprised at how much engagement their virtual sessions receive. The session engagement features are intuitive for attendees and the speaker experience is easy and seamless.
Finally, our sponsor microsites and the rich insights sponsors have available are always well received.
It’s easy for them to set up which is great for event owners because they can give sponsors access to build their own booths (we call them microsites). Microsites give sponsors the ability to answer questions in a public booth chat, hold Roundtables (small-group video chats) where they can hold demos and answer questions, and they can create an intelligent Playlist filled with various content types that surfaces the most relevant content to each individual attendee.
On the insights side, event owners and sponsors get their own individual dashboards. Sponsors can see all their booth visitors in real-time and gather more information on leads via virtual badge scans and lead generation forms. Sponsors and event owners both get content-level and attendee-level insights. Event owners also get account-level insights which make all the difference for pipeline acceleration and ROI objectives.
Is there anything else you want to say about Social27?
I guess I just want to call out something that I think sets us apart from other software companies, which is our people.
Our company grew exponentially over the past 18 months, but we’ve maintained a tight-knit culture among our employees that carries over to our customer relationships. Every time I meet with clients after an event to get their input for a blog or I sit in on a debrief meeting, they are always raving about their CSM and their Account Executive, their production team who helps them stream sessions…
I think everyone can feel the family business mentality that Social27 started with, even though we’ve grown to nearly 200 employees and contractors in the past year and a half.
Our executive team values family and is always very supportive of our lives outside of work as well as prioritizing good relationships amongst our colleagues. Our clients benefit from this caring culture and they tell me about it.
If organizations are interested in Social27’s event strategies and how your platform can help them meet their business objectives, where should they start?
The easiest way is to go to https://social27.com/getstarted and we’ll contact them to get to know their business objectives and give them a short demo of the platform. They can also go to our website to get some more details on our top features and check out our new release blog to see feature updates and new releases.
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