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USER CONFERENCE |
Company: Cisco Systems Inc.
Event: Cisco Live
Objectives: Bolster attendance despite users' anticipated cuts in travel and training budgets.
Strategy: Create a virtual event that would run concurrent with the live event.
Tactics: Supply the same content as the real-world event but with lower costs and online-only perks for virtual visitors.
Results: Attracted 35 percent more attendees overall in 2009 than in 2008. More than 20
percent of virtual attendees plan to attend the live event in 2010.
Creative Agency: George P. Johnson Co., www.gpj.com; The Active Network Inc., www.activenetwork.com; InXpo, www.inxpo.com; Bates Creative Group LLC, www.batescreativegroup.com; Splash! Events Inc., www.splashevents.com; Champion Exposition Services, www.championexpo.com; Nth Degree Inc., www.nthdegree.com; Donna Rutley Productions
Budget: $16 million
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 hen Cisco Systems Inc. held its first Networkers Annual User Conference for information-technology (IT) professionals back in 1989, the event was a pixel-sized training and education get-together for network engineers, sponsored by the manufacturer of networking and communications technology. The San Jose, CA-based company was a mere toddler then among tech companies: Barely five years old, it held the event in a cramped hotel conference room in Palo Alto, CA. That inaugural event drew 120 engineers and assorted IT professionals, which was nine more attendees than Cisco had employees at the time.
Fast forward to 2006, and the event had scampered up the same magic-beanstalk growth curve as the Internet itself. It had become a computer nerd's paradise that offered more than 400 it's-geek-to-me sessions such as "Translation DEN Based Object Modeling and Schema for Policy Based Networking," and the opportunity to earn credit toward the much-esteemed Cisco certification in various fields. Rotating the conferences between destination cities like San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Orlando, FL, to attract as wide a group as possible geographically, Cisco was drawing audiences nearing 7,000 to the annual event. With all these enticements designed to make the conference as indispensable to its users as texting is to a teenager, it's no wonder the number of repeat attendees topped slightly more
than 60 percent that year and every year since.
Yet even then, flushed with success, Cisco intuited that a change in event strategy could grow an already-large conference even larger. So for 2007, it rebranded the event "Cisco Live," added new programs geared toward managers and C-level customers, and instantly vaulted the attendance that year by about 43 percent to 10,000.
Such fortunes, however,
have a way of going from bountiful to bereft in nanoseconds. By the end of 2008, the tanking economy looked like it wasn't just going to rain on Cisco's 20-year-long parade of conference success; it was going to bombard it with hail and lightning, too. Stories about industry conferences whispered of heart-stopping plunges in attendance of 30, 40, and 50 percent, due to attendees slashing travel and training budgets. Those same cutbacks threatened to wreak a meteoric impact on Cisco Live where, as of 2008, Cisco's post-event survey showed 81 percent of attendees left planning to buy the company's products. A 50-percent drop in attendance, then, could translate into an enormous slump in sales as well. "We had to innovate, and we had to innovate fast," says Kathy Doyle, Cisco's director of global Cisco Live and Networkers Conferences.
To coax the audience segments that
were least likely to attend in person,
Cisco began introducing a virtual option.
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Let's Get Unreal
Facing down tough choices amid a struggling economy, the company brass made a pivotal strategic decision at the end of 2008. It would emerge as one of the most farsighted moves since Intel Corp. switched from making memory chips to manufacturing semiconductors - or the most myopic since Excite turned down a chance to buy Google for $750,000. Cisco decided to transform some of its internal events, as well as its flagship event - a global sales conference with more than 15,000 attendees - into completely virtual experiences. Meanwhile, Cisco's larger client and partner events adopted a hybrid approach, offering customers the choice to attend in the flesh, or in the online ether. Its strategy was twofold: Offer customers a less expensive, more convenient online version that would keep current attendees involved who might otherwise drift away, and attract a new audience that might eventually graduate from the virtual version to the real one.
Going virtual, whether entirely or partially, sounds like a no-brainer solution, especially when it seems like everyone else is doing it. For example, San Francisco-based ON24 Inc., which produces virtual events, surveyed 10,000 C-level execs in 2009 and found that 87 percent of the respondents were already using or planning to use virtual environments for events. Another study from Market Research Media Ltd., also headquartered in San Francisco, predicts the number
of online events overall will snowball at a compound annual growth rate of 56 percent through 2015. Those statistics make virtual events seem like one more technological inevitability companies would flock to, just as they did e-mail and personal computers back when Cisco Live was new out of the box.
But for Cisco, shifting gears to a hybrid model wasn't that simple. In fact, it was like asking the company to play Russian Roulette with one empty chamber instead of one bullet: Nearly
90 percent of buyers use face-to-face exhibits and events to learn about new products or to narrow down potential vendors, according to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR). On top of that, face-to-face meetings with a prospect increase the chances of that prospect becoming a buyer by 2.5 times, according to the 2009 Oxford Economics Business Travel Study. So shoring up the event with a virtual version might paradoxically be sabotaging it, too, if enough people simply migrated from the physical rendition, never to be seen - at least not in the flesh - again. "We didn't want to compromise the attendance at the real-world event," Doyle says, "but we knew we needed to create an online version that was appealing on its own, without making one or both suffer by comparison."
An Offer They Couldn't Refuse
Sending out the first of two e-mail invitations to the June 2009 event in January of that year, Cisco contacted a total of roughly 180,000 customers and prospects (the same number as in 2008) regarding Cisco Live. A large portion of that total included Cisco's target demographic of companies with 1,000 or more employees and with $50 million or more in annual revenues. Cisco didn't directly market the online version for almost four months, until the early bird registration date had passed in April. By then, Cisco figured, it had pulled in all those who could afford to come in person. Now it had to grab those who couldn't.
To coax the audience segments that history proved were least likely to attend in person, Cisco began introducing the virtual option. It dispatched one more e-mail blast in mid-April, this time dangling an online option it called Cisco Live Virtual. The cyber version came in two flavors: Premiere Access and free. Premiere Access cost $395 (about 19 percent of the total cost of a full-price pass to the live event), and allowed two days' worth of virtual access to the whole shebang - the keynote speeches, exhibits on the trade show floor, and hundreds of technical sessions. The second option simply offered no-charge entrée for the same amount of time with access to the keynotes and exhibits, but just slightly more than a dozen of the technical sessions. To supplement the campaign, Cisco placed banner ads throughout its Web site promoting the virtual options with a "Go West or Go Virtual" tagline. Together, the e-mails and ads offered an information- and networking-intense experience that would be, to paraphrase the famed AT&T Co. ad from the 1960s, "The next best thing to being there." It wasn't, though. In some ways, it was better.
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Cisco had to avoid letting the event's online segment seem visibly unequal to the real-world version.
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When Cisco Live opened in June 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, what greeted real-world attendees was a sensory overload of keynote speeches, four hour-long "super sessions" on the company's strategic vision, 400 technical sessions, 129 exhibitors, and customer-appreciation events. It was the standard Cisco Live format that attendees had come to expect, with a popular and respected template of offerings. But for the hybrid to triumph, Cisco had to avoid letting the event's online segment seem visibly unequal to the real-world version.
Once the virtual attendees entered the Cisco Live site using the login they created while registering, they could witness events the moment they unfolded, including the keynote speeches by Cisco president and chairman John Chambers and CTO Padmasree Warrior. They could sit in on the strategic super sessions, and attend technical classes through live and/or recorded broadcasts. They could explore the virtual version of the exhibit hall Cisco dubbed the World of Solutions, chat with booth staff, and watch demos of products. Cisco garnished the experience so that the real and unreal portions became as inseparably equal as ham is with eggs or Ben is with Jerry - and where those participating online even enjoyed dividends the offline attendees didn't.
Perhaps virtual attendees couldn't experience the contagious excitement of being among an energized crowd at the keynotes and sessions - but if they missed out on them, they could view the speeches and classes on demand a few hours later. In-person attendees might disseminate news and info by word of mouth, but their online equivalent spread it by word of mouse via custom blogs and discussion groups. When the real-life crowds wanted to circulate, they relied on
methods that were old when drayage was done by horse - navigating physical space, eyeballing plastic badges, and exchanging paper business cards. When the online contingent wanted to network, however, they had a space-transcending software tool the others lacked called Profile Match. A kind of hybrid between LinkedIn and Match.com,
Profile Match let users hunt for other virtual attendees by industry type, job function, and networking-technology interests. After compiling a list that fit their search criteria, users could view other attendees' profiles, add them to buddy lists, and then exchange electronic business cards, send e-mails, or chat with anyone on the list who intrigued them, whether they were tuning in from India or Indiana.
The difference between a live session and a virtual one might seem as huge as the one between a coal-oven pizza pie baked in New York's Little Italy versus an ad for Domino's on TV. Yet, once again, virtual attendees enjoyed enhancements their real-world counterparts could only dream of. Before picking a session, for instance, online guests could access a catalog of available classes, review session synopses, and check the average rating and any comments left by other cyber guests. When they decided on one, they clicked its link, which opened a video of the class, or a slide-show-like presentation. Similarly, the virtual World of Solutions exhibit hall offered choices no one trudging over the crowded plain of the Moscone Center could savor. Cartoon-like representations of the show floor, the online booths were a networking-technology who's who that included Tinley Park, IL-based Panduit Corp. and CA Technologies Inc. of Islandia, NY. By clicking on the list of exhibitors, the virtual attendees could sort them alphabetically, as well as access other cyber-guest ratings to see which booths were most worth entering. At Panduit, for example, they found content tabs that displayed what collateral literature was on tap within, while booth staffers were available for live or on-demand chats by simply clicking on a company-representative's avatar. Online guests also rubbed virtual shoulders in several live-video chat sessions with, for example, Cisco's senior vice president, Carlos Dominguez, in 30-minute talks that physical visitors didn't experience. Here, in several intimate chat sessions, the online attendees relayed questions to a moderator who in turn passed on the questions to the corporate and technology honchos. Allowing the online guests, but not the real-world ones, behind a virtual velvet rope gave them a VIP vibe that made Cisco Live Virtual feel first, not second, class. "This shows how well-crafted and executed the virtual event was," said one Corporate Event Awards judge.
Let Us Now Play
"When we play video games, we feel powerful," says Jane McGonigal, the renowned director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA. According to her, the best games inspire a blend of optimism, social fabric, productivity, and meaning. Like McGonigal, Cisco understood that games, like the sessions
and presentations, had a singular ability to not just involve attendees in Cisco Live but immerse them in it, too. Thus, the company offered attendees two different games, Virtual Scavenger Hunt and Virtual Show Prize.
"Cisco figured out how to make a
virtual event work without sacrificing
a live event in the process."
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In the Virtual Scavenger Hunt, attendees entered a lounge and "rolled" a pair of dice, after which their player icon moved over to an area where one of 25 questions
was revealed, such as "Which Business Video technology did Applied Materials deploy to enable employee collaboration and reduce overall travel budget?" The riddle came with a link to a virtual Cisco booth attendees could visit to find the answer (Cisco Telepresence, not too surprisingly).
The questions may have been simple, but if the online
players answered five questions correctly, they were automatically entered in a drawing for one of two Flip Mino camcorders (which, by the way, Cisco makes).
In the second contest, Virtual Show Prize, players competed to see who could rack up the most points by visiting booths, watching sessions, and attending chats. The rules were as simple as a game of checkers: For each activity or area an attendee visited, he or she racked up a point. After stockpiling 100 points, attendees qualified for one of
100 prizes of $25 Cisco Marketplace coupons redeemable for Cisco-branded apparel, Cisco Press books, and other collateral merchandise.
Nearly 3,000 virtual attendees took part in the first game and 4,500 in the second. Robust as the metrics were, even more important was the infinite loop of benefits McGonigal talked about and Cisco created. The more the online guests played, the more they learned (productivity) and the greater their chances of success (optimism) in winning a Cisco-manufactured prize. The more questions they answered and sites they visited, the more knowledge they all shared (social fabric), and the deeper they identified with Cisco (meaning). Thus, attendees were steeped in Cisco Live, as well as the company's products, the event's exhibitors, and even the corporate culture. "The social aspect of the games was awesome," judges said. "They motivated the users to learn more about Cisco and tie them even closer to the company."
Virtual Event, Real Results
Nearly 10,300 people registered for the physical side of the event while 9,058 actually showed up for it. It was a gentle dip of just 13 percent from 2008, not the feared stomach-churning sky dive of 20 percent or worse. Customers departed the real-world Cisco Live cumulatively scoring it a 4.3 out of a possible 5.0 on post-event surveys, just a statistical smidgen - about 0.1 percent - less than the previous year. Additionally, 81 percent reported that they planned to buy Cisco products within 12 months.
By itself, that was an impressive act of salvaging as well as salesmanship, but the shiniest jewel in Cisco Live's crown was the online version. "Cisco figured out how to make a virtual event work without sacrificing a live event in the process," judges said. With 4,500 people from 29 countries taking part, the online demographic mirrored almost perfectly the C-level, managerial, and IT breakdown of the real-life contingent. Overall, these cyber-guests' score for the event was almost a clone of the real-life attendees' ratings, coming in at 4.2. And impressively, 80 percent reported that they plan to buy a Cisco product within 12 months - almost exactly matching the purchase intent of physical attendees.
The virtual event's lasting legacy may be the way it made Cisco's strategy pay off like a winning Powerball ticket. Despite initial fears that offering a virtual alternative to in-person attendance could doom the live event, Cisco found through post-event surveys that 34 percent of virtual attendees were extremely or very likely to attend the live event in 2010. The same survey also revealed that an additional 20 percent of online participants were likely to attend the virtual event in the future, citing the reduced costs and nonexistent travel time as primary benefits. From the crowded confines of a single hotel conference room 21 years ago to the infinite reaches of cyberspace today, Cisco Live survives and thrives because Cisco decided to boldly go where it had never gone before. "This," Doyle says, "is just the beginning."E
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