Are Events Best Online or Off?

New Technology brings new opportunities. Some of these opportunities are welcome, others are greeted with a collective scratching of heads. At Matizmo, we firmly believe that advancing technology is a good thing and therefore we tend to embrace it whenever we can. There is however, one area that we are not entirely convinced has been made better by new technology.  That is events and conferences.

Innovations such as Skype and GoToMeeting have made it easy for video conferencing, meetings and events to take place anywhere in the world. As such, are we losing the face-to-face skills that business in the 20^th Century was built on?

Online Events

Pros 

Facilitating your event online means you can invite participants from around the world to take part. As they get to stay at home and participate it makes it easier to join in.

Costs of staging an event are minimal. There are no venue costs, food costs and even the speakers will only need to be paid an appearance fee – no accommodation, expensive flights and other riders here.

Cons

There is no pressing of flesh. Never underestimate the chemistry that human beings can establish by meeting each other. Online events or business meetings cannot replicate this.

Events and meetings any time of the day or night is not going to appeal to clients or colleagues who have to get up at two or three in the morning to appear on your screen.

Face to Face Events

Pros

Conferences and Events are not just about the content that can be streamed to every corner of the globe – they are very much about the peripheral meetings, drinks and dinners that go on around it. The majority of business deals and conversations happen here, not in session.

Networking is all about being visible and being accessible. You can only do that by being at the conference.  Establishing relationships can only be done well if you are looking someone in the eye when you do it.

Cons

Once everything is added up it can be very expensive to go to Events – especially international events. Many of these costs cannot be justified in today’s economic climate.

Tracking what business you get from it can be problematic, again making it difficult to provide an example of what value your attendance had.

Often the usefulness of a particular event or conference is overstated because individuals within an organisation a) Like a jolly and b) want to justify spending money on it.

There is no easy answer here. Some events – like an online discussion or webinar – are going to be useful staying as an online only tool. However, it would be folly to migrate other conferences and events online at this stage. Either as an attendee or an organiser, the best advice we can give is to look at each event or conference on its individual merits and judge it against what your own business objectives are. If it meets those, regardless of the format, it is worth pressing ahead.