Enter Your Virtual Booth and Webinar Marathon

What COVID-19 has taught me about the future of fairs

2020 is a difficult year for the MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) industry anywhere. The COVID-19 pandemic took its toll on tourism, hospitality and virtually any context of physical encounter from F&B, entertainment to ordinary business conduct. When public gatherings are criminalised, events as we knew them have to be cancelled, rescheduled or go digital.

As someone previously in the business of international trade exhibitions and now a hustler of networking events big and small, and also having attended (sometimes hosted) numerous webinars and virtual events since early this year, I feel deeply both the power of telecommunications in transcending our traditional fairground experience, as well as its limitations in mimicking real-life exchange.

Some of the more developed virtual event experiences I had came from:

not to mention many more webinars and panels over Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Facebook or YouTube live, online classrooms over Cisco Webex and BigBlueButton, and podcasts over Zencastr.

Navigating these digital platforms has taught me very interesting things about how their developers conceptualise a fair, or broadly, a networking happening. What features are foregrounded and what are foregone? Who is empowered to do what? How do people move about? When the walls are gone, the information architecture builds the entire experience, and it is how us as avatars and data populate and deal in the cyber space that measures its success.

In the following, I am going to share three main factors that contribute to an effective digital fair experience in my view and from my observation.

For conventional fairs, the prior research attendees can do is basically what can be found on fair websites — who are exhibiting, who are speaking — but they rarely know who else are visiting, let alone connect with them in advance, except in more sophisticated events with pre-arranged business matching.

After the fair, people also have to painstakingly lay out the business cards, brochures (and freebies) collected, and systematise them into databases that inform targeted sales and marketing.

Virtual fairs fill this gap as they can now collect, disseminate and export information of their participants as well as their flows in an instant and curated way. Such information includes profiles of exhibitors, speakers and visitors, what events they bookmark, traffic and engagements. With everyone brought together on the same screen, and their involvement closely monitored and tracked, fair goers can unlock vast insights into who they are meeting simply by a few clicks, and reach out for and create much more purposeful conversations.

The experience of a virtual fair indispensably hinges on how intuitive the interface is and how smooth everything runs. Even with simpler solutions of video conferencing, there could be serious issues of navigation and connection, which take up time and dampen the quality of discussion. For a whole fair of thousands or millions of business leaders to move to the cloud, it requires much more efforts of testing and debugging to make the tool an enabler, not a hindrance.

Technical seamlessness not only comes down to clear guidance in advance (by way of demo, training or rehearsal), but also minimal reliance on technical support. A platform is not mature enough if participants cannot discover booths, people and events, and strike and drive conversations, all on their own. It is not mature enough if technicians always need to step in to fix hiccups and direct participants’ whereabouts. In a well-developed virtual fair, the tool is transparent, whereas people are capable of building relationships, making the digital locus itself a journey as much as what they get from it.

After all, a fair is just a mass happening with multiple sites of encounter and moments of exchange simultaneously, whether public or private. You stand in the periphery of a seminar, go up and talk to the speaker beside the stage, follow him to his booth, meet his team there, move along the aisles and run into someone you met last year here (and ignore the broadcast about the next forum), and come across your client while waiting for coffee. The ultimate fair experience is, to me, to replicate the essence of being live, where encounters and dialogues of any level can happen.

In virtual fairs, each of the above “meetings” may become segregated video conferences or chat threads, but the ease with which we join one and leave another, and how we decide to do so, is key. This is something not many platforms can adequately address yet.

The above three factors are of course not exhaustive, and only what I generalise broadly from the few virtual events I attended. I have also roughly imagined the icing on the cake — what else are good to have that I have yet to see and that may make current virtual fairs even more efficient and engaging:

Imaginations aside – the gist of going to an event (whether a fair, a forum or a webinar) is to be there. Preoccupation. Attendance. Because, at the end of the day, what is a fair without people, investing their attention? Nothing dull a virtual fair more than phantoms who hover above the digital exhibition hall carrying only placards of their names, but no souls that genuinely engage with all the exciting programmes and people there.

So, here’s a toast to fairs becoming larger than life in the days to come, and to all of us staying online together to savour the best of virtual experiences!

Related posts:

Every day someone is accumulating a million subscribers on YouTube. It’s the same with Instagram or FaceBook. And we want a slice of that cake cause it’s the new wave of media. We are now waving…

First Strike Given. “Apple Bitten” is published by Kira Dawn in The Intoxicating Unhinged Mind.

The other voting systems I’ve discussed in this series so far have been well-known in voting theory circles for at least half a century. The STAR voting system is a newcomer. To the best of my…