NETTING IT OUT 

Using a template-based approach to design an event, event sponsors, working with Unisfair professionals, can personalize the templates and add multimedia content. Within the showcase venue (trade show floor), booth sponsors can customize the look and the content available within the booth using an easy-to-use design wizard.

Participants can attend sessions, both in real time and on demand, downloading all relevant information, such as presentation slides, collateral material, and virtual business cards into a briefcase, which can be easily downloaded.

All participant activity is tracked, providing event coordinators and booth sponsors with detailed metrics on such activities as who attended what sessions, what questions were asked, and what information was downloaded.

In a time when travel has become too expensive for many organizations, and people have limited time to devote to these types of events, the Unisfair solution should appeal to organizations looking to spread their messages and encourage professional networking among their customers.

STANDARD CONFERENCE/TRADE SHOW ATTRACTIONS

Think about the last trade show you attended. What attracted you the most? The conference sessions and presentations? The exhibit hall booths? The opportunity to network with your peers? The great parties? For me, it was “all of the above.”

Now think about the worst part of attending. For me, it was the long flights, the hotel stay, not having “my stuff” available, missing important events at home, overindulging at those parties, and the hit to my company’s budget to pay for me to be there.

And have any of you ever planned/hosted a conference or sponsored an exhibit floor booth? The good part was educating attendees on the topics at hand, getting your marketing messages across, getting qualified sales leads, and meeting all sorts of potential and existing customers (not to mention those parties).

The downside? The cost. The personnel investment. And you never know what might muck up your success. Bad weather usually means low attendance. The soaring costs of travel and restricted budgets many companies have instituted further reduce attendance. And then there are the frustrated attendees who didn’t get to see everything they hoped to see and who are stuck with suitcases full of PowerPoint presentations, brochures, business cards, and other forms of collateral materials. Finally, at the conference, you may be able to tell how many people attended a session or visited a booth, but you don’t have detailed information on who they all are, how long they stayed, what materials they picked up, and who asked what questions.

Virtual Attendance

Founded in 2000, Unisfair, backed by Sequoia Capital, is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with R&D in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The company is trying to make it easier for (primarily) B2B businesses to put on large-scale events, with multiple educational sessions and tracks, trade-show floor booths, networking opportunities, and other sponsored activities. Taking advantage of advances in virtual environments and online collaboration technologies, combined with the willingness—nay, eagerness—of business people to interact via online professional networking, Unisfair offers a multimedia environment for hosting, participating in, and attending virtual events, applying the benefits of collaboration, social networking, and virtual environments to business gatherings (think Webex + LinkedIn + Secondlife).

Types of Events

The Unisfair environment is being used by different clients to offer different types of events, primarily marketing and recruitment events.

MARKETING EVENTS. This is the traditional conference model, designed for increasing brand awareness, lead generation, and improving current customer relationships and loyalty. Companies such as Quest Software, Cognos, and National Instruments are using the Unisfair environment to conduct lead-generation events.

RECRUITMENT EVENTS. Unisfair also provides an environment for job fairs or higher-education recruitment events. Virtual job fairs have proven successful in competitive industries such as health care, financial services, and retail, and in global recruiting efforts in industries like oil and gas and high tech.

COLLABORATIVE PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING ENVIRONMENTS. Clients, such as Cisco, have worked with Unisfair to take advantage of the virtual event capabilities to create both real-time and persistent professional communities for information sharing and networking. The Cisco application provides the virtual environment to enable its 40,000 global channel partners to meet and exchange information with application providers and device manufacturers.

Real Time and Persistent

Most virtual events that leverage the Unisfair environment are actually live, with “manned” booths and real-time presentations. Just like a physical event, attendees can ask questions, enter into conversations, and get help as they participate.

But past the live event date, the conference is available in on-demand mode for a period of time determined by the event sponsor. All content is still available and questions/help/etc. can be conducted with asynchronous messaging (such as email).

Target Customers

Unisfair targets B2B organizations for its solution. Originally, media organizations, such as CMP, McGraw-Hill, and Penton Media, were the primary target segment for Unisfair. And this is still a very lucrative audience for the company. But large corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Cognos, RIM, National Instruments, and Quest Software are also using the system for their own virtual events to drive revenue and generate qualified business leads.

DESIGNING YOUR EVENT

Multiple Venues (Marketing Events)

Unisfair Virtual Events provide all the same facilities of a physical event. These include:

• A Main Hall, which is the navigation point to other venues and which can include sponsor branding.

• A Conference Hall, where participants can attend keynote presentations, panel discussions, tutorials, and other conference sessions.

• An Exhibition Hall with branded, interactive vendor booths.

• A Resource Center of general (not booth specific) downloadable material.

• Professional networking lounges are designed to foster interactions among attendees when the event organizer wants this type of professional networking capabilities, such as participating in open forums and public and private chats.

These venues are shown in Illustration 1.

The Multiple Venues of a Virtual Event

© 2007 Unisfair

Illustration 1. A virtual event mirrors the venues of a physical event, using graphical depiction to great effect. In this illustration, the Quest Exchange Virtual Trade Show, sponsored by Quest Software, the Main Hall (the greeting and navigation starting point), the Conference Hall, the Exhibition Hall, and the Resource Center are shown. This event did not offer a lounge area for professional networking. The lounge depicted is a generic illustration provided by Unisfair. Note that navigation is available from all venues via the left-side navigation panel. Also note that a list of current online attendees is also available at all times.

Template-Based Environment

Unisfair offers a number of predefined event templates, each of which offer the same basic venues and features, but which have different looks. (See Illustration 2.)

Templates for Different Looks

© 2007 Unisfair

Illustration 2. Three different templates for event design. The first in the general Unisfair format; second is the format used by National Instruments for the company’s Automated Test Summit; the third is an upcoming new UI to be available soon.

The templates provide a variety of categories from which the conference sponsor can choose what features, venues, and content is offered. The templates can be used out-of-the-box with some minor tweaking (putting in the proper logos, etc.) or they can be heavily customized. At this point, even the minor tweaking requires working with the Unisfair professional “event manager” staff. We’d like to see the basic ability to add logos and to do other minor customizations to be made available as a high-level function that doesn’t require Unisfair’s involvement. The company is planning to provide an open API to accept client design elements in the near future. This will help with real design modifications, but we’d still prefer a very easy, straightforward way to personalize an event on the most basic level.

BEST PRACTICES IN EVENT DESIGN AND PLANNING. Unisfair does point out the advantages of working with the event manager. The company has done more than 400 events and knows what works and what doesn’t. Providing this best practices advice is invaluable, even for clients who are in the event planning business or have run events extensively in the past; although they may know how to run exquisite physical events, there are new and different challenges when bringing an event online.

Creating the Event Content

UPLOADING CONTENT IN THE CONFERENCE HALL AND RESOURCE CENTER. The event sponsor can upload any type of file—text, PowerPoint, video, audio, etc.—and can use Unisfair’s Webcast functionality, which also handles streaming video formats and product demonstrations via shared desktop capabilities. Remember that events can be both real time (synchronous) or persistent (asynchronous). And some capabilities, such as shared desktops and live demos, are only available during a live session.

During live sessions, you can do “Simulive” presentations; these combine prerecorded (and, therefore, editable) presentations with live presenters or moderators who are on hand to support real-time Q&A.

POPULATING THE EXHIBITION HALL BOOTHS. Booth content (and design) is handled by the individual booth sponsors without requiring any interaction with the sponsor or Unisfair. The environment includes a Booth Wizard, which is an easy-to-use, step-by-step, fill-in-the-blanks application with which booth sponsors can define the following:

• The look of their booth (template, colors, design elements such as logos, and messaging which can be constant or can change based on time or activity in the booth)

• Content, uploading the information on products and downloadable collateral information

• A list of representatives (booth personnel) who are responsible for responding to visitor inquiries, both in real time (during live events) and afterwards when the event is available in an on-demand mode

• Reports and statistics, which provide management of the booth sponsor to have a complete record of who visited the booth, what information was downloaded, and transcripts of interactions with representatives

This report continues...

To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pp12-13-07cc