Keith Keller recently did a Twitter poll of his audience about the future of events and he got the following result.

While "hybrid events" are clearly ahead, I'm not sure you can see a clear winner, .... yet

It's worth reading Keith's conclusion on this ...

Now, I'm not sure that anybody has a clear view of what a "hybrid event" is, but events certainly seem to be changing.  Regardless on what happens, the above data clearly shows they are not going back to the way there were before.

How Virtual Do We Want Our Future to Be?

Keith also shared with me this research from Zoom, well it actually came from a tweet from Noel Davidson, which shows that globally, people want hybrid events.

Noel said "We asked 7,689 people across 10 countries how they used video during the pandemic and what they wanted the post-pandemic world to look like.

Hybrid seems to be the way forward."

Now you are probably say, that's Zoom, of course they are going to say that, but part of my job is to look at the data and spot the trends. 

Keith also shared with me this article, written by Robin Knowles, which goes into the details of why you should go virtual and here are 10 benefits from that article. 

What is a virtual event?

I'm not sure we actually know what a virtual event is yet and it's going to take experimentation and evolution over the next few years.

I asked Keith this question and he said 

Check out Keith's Twitter as he is running a number of online (of course) events around this. 

A couple of examples are Shoreditch Virtual they have made a whole business out of Remo

Thank you to Keith Keller for all of this insight and screen shots. 

Content or experience

This is a question I am asked many times, and I think people are still getting mixed up as to what hybrid means.  Mark Schaefer the well known Marketing thought leader posted this on LinkedIn this week. 

Conclusion

The pandemic has changed many things and I'm sure after a year of lock down, people will want to get back to seeing each other face-to-face.  That said, people have got used to not travelling, both the people and the Finance Director.  Many of us enjoy not travelling for meetings and have been able to increase our work efficiency and speed.

In my podcast #TimTalk I recently interviewed Frank Cottle, the interview is here, and it is his view is that we will all be having meetings in a virtual reality mode in the next five years and it will be the gaming industry that will be the "Zoom and Teams" of the future.