photo by kzeni

One of the best new strategies for making conferences more audience-friendly and less carbon-intensive might soon be dead on arrival—not because the answer is incorrect, but because event organizers are asking the wrong questions.

Over the last couple of years, hybrid meetings have been burning bright as a way to spread larger conferences across multiple locations, combine face-to-face and virtual audiences, reduce the cost and inconvenience of travel, and bring in whole new groups of participants who never wanted to cross three or more time zones to go onsite. Technology companies like Cisco and SAP have led the way with high-end hybrid meetings, while grassroot events like Event Camp Twin Cities 2010 (ECTC) showed how smaller organizations could run hybrids on a budget.

But now, we’re beginning to hear that the technology behind hybrid meetings makes them too expensive to organize. Astoundingly—you’d better sit down before you read this—we’ve even heard it from audio-visual reps who should be only too eager to send more gear onsite.

It isn’t that meetings technology comes cheap, and the second edition of ECTC did show us the risk of cutting budgets too far. But this is another one of those stories where the answer you get depends on the question you ask—and disaster awaits if your hybrid meeting plan isn’t grounded in a solid content management strategy.

But now, we’re beginning to hear that the technology behind hybrid meetings makes them too expensive to organize. Astoundingly—you’d better sit down before you read this—we’ve even heard it from audio-visual reps who should be only too eager to send more gear onsite.

It isn’t that meetings technology comes cheap. But this is another one of those stories where the answer you get depends on the question you ask—and disaster awaits if your hybrid meeting plan isn’t grounded in a solid content management strategy.

Asking the Wrong Question

It’s easy to see why most organizations, and most event planners, start out asking the wrong question when they begin thinking about a hybrid meeting. The virtual platform is the big, obvious difference between a hybrid and a traditional, face-to-face event, and it’s also the newfangled element that is unfamiliar to many planners. So the technology is the first item to receive careful attention, and it’s often one of the first major decisions the organizing team makes.

The logic looks unassailable. The problem is that it’s also dead wrong.

When you pick a technology platform for a virtual meeting before making basic decisions about the program, the target audience, and the results you need at the end, the strengths and limitations of the platform determines what you can and can’t do onsite. The cost of the platform is built into your budget, whether or not you need all its capabilities. And if that cost is high enough, it forecloses design options that may have given you a better, more effective meeting.

The other problem is that, without early attention to the design of the meeting, most organizations end up always doing what they’ve always done. That usually means treating virtual and remote audiences to compelling, verbatim video of talking heads at a podium, shot at a distance from a single camera at the back of the hall. Then organizers wonder why virtual participants kept dropping off in the middle of sessions.

Next: Back to Basics—How do we organize hybrid meetings as though participants and budgets mattered?

(Photo by kzeni)