Virtual Environments in your HR Practice

In any survey of HR professionals that ask the question “What are the biggest problems that face today in your practice” you will usually find a combination of these three issues:

• Leadership Effectiveness
• Talent Acquisition & Talent Management Challenges
• HR Capability and Capacity

So in laymen’s terms, find good people, train and foster good people and have the capacity to service good people. Here are 3 quick ways that Virtual Environments can help you with these every day struggles.

Finding good people:

It all starts with attracting good talent. Recruitment firms, representation at job fairs and online tools all help attract resumes but many HR professionals believe they have issues getting their companies story out to attract the right talent. A Virtual Job Fair is a 24/7 online environment that acts as a destination for recruits to learn about your company, see what positions you are looking to fill and even allow you screen recruits during live days!

Read the IBM Destination Africa Job Fair Case Study: Click here.

On-boarding good people:

The experts say that the employee churn costs approximately 150% of the employees annual salary in lost productivity. Employees that are on-boarded effectively are 83% more likely to remain with your company for better than a year. With HR and Training capacities stretched proper on-boarding can be a challenge and Virtual On-Boarding Centers act as a starting point for all new employee training and ensure a consistent message is heard every new hire!

Marriott combined the Virtual Job Fair with a Virtual On-Boarding Center using the technology throughout the early stages of the employee’s career.

Click here to navigate a demo environment fashioned after the Marriott site. (Login: info@marriott.com)

Leadership Effectiveness and Talent Management

E-Learning is nothing new and most organizations use some form of online learning to supplement training and leadership development. The fact remains that there are a lot of pains that go along with online learning including:

- The adult learners resistance to change
- Problems with users and technology
- Motivating learners
- Evaluating effectiveness

The use of an Online Learning Environment or Virtual University within your organization can address many of these challenges with conventional E-learning strategies. The Virtual Environment is intuitive and easy to navigate, provides little to no technology hurdles other than signing in and boasts a number of proven adult learning strategies aimed at motivating learners including gameification, leader boards and even price giveaways.

Participate in the The Virtual Learning Edge to learn more: Click here.

Attention Marketers: Want to make your CEO Happy?

A study conducted by the Fournaise Marketing Group in 2011 found that 73% of Chief Executives believe their Marketing team “lack business credibility” and are not the “business growth generators they should be”.  This study surveyed 600 CEOS at large and small companies in several countries with the same overwhelming trends.  Your fellow marketers did not help matters in this survey when 69% of them believe their strategies do have an impact on business…..though they cannot prove it with empirical evidence.

But you want to make your CEO Happy, right?

In a recent Globe and Mail article authored by Ryan Caligiuri entitled “Moves to drive sales you CEO will applaud”, he strives to provide some tactics that help bridge the divide between what you and your CEO believe.   Among the strategies put forward, Webinar and Live Event programs were recommended (obviously we would add virtual or hybrid events to the list!).

What can Webinars and Virtual Events provide you as a Marketer?

Webinars and Virtual events can expand the reach of your message and are especially important early in the sales cycle for lead generation, or nurturing efforts that take someone with a passing interest in your product or service and turn them into a qualified lead.  Leads and lead quality is exactly what your CEO is looking for and to ascertain the lead quality, your sales engine needs data! An effective webinar program provides you with a number of benefits that still cannot be effectively pulled from social media and other digital marketing strategies:

• The webinar or virtual event will expand the reach of your message beyond any geographical limitations
• People provide a great deal of real data when they sign up for a webinar or virtual event, allowing you to quantify the number of solid leads you are generating
• The speakers you put forward on webinars and virtual events put your company’s best foot forward, and are generally rehearsed and on-message ensuring those prospects early in the sales cycle are hearing the message you want them to
• Unlike live events, a good webinar or virtual event platform will allow you to gain data on your audience during the event, finding out where people lost interest, what documents were downloaded most and what calls to action were taken

The Streaming Network has produced thousands of dynamic virtual events for marketing professionals looking to generate, nurture, and convert on prospective leads. Contact us if you would like to chat about how you can use these tools to impress your CEO!

Related Article:  Contemplating Going Virtual? Get beyond the fears of Audience Cannibalization

Related Article: Getting with the program – The Webinar Road Map

Contemplating going virtual?

Adding a virtual event to an existing physical event (called a Hybrid event), can be a scary proposition the first time around. At the Streaming Network, we often find ourselves presenting our services to traditional event planners who have been struggling to reach attendees due to the overall state of the global economy. Reductions in corporate travel budgets and other cost cutting measures means we’re asked one question more than most:

Will adding a virtual event cannibalize my physical event attendance?

Honestly, the answer to this question depends on your audience demographics and the particulars about your event. That said, in 2011 the second Hybrid Event study conducted by ROI for Engagement and the Virtual Edge Institute found that when virtual attendees of hybrid events were asked: “If there had been no virtual option, would you have attended in person?” 93% of those polled answered NO. The accessibility of a virtual event can actually increase your audience by bringing in viewers who would not have been able to attend an exclusively physical event.

Who are these new audience members who will attend your virtual event?

Many of them are not new at all, they are the people who subscribe to your newsletter or e-blasts, or visit your website but aren’t located near you. Others are past attendees of previous events who failed to return for logistical or monetary reasons, but have still maintained interest in your content. Even more are of a younger generation, who have become more accustom to, and prefer, to engage online.

The rest are new territory who come through referrals from other registrants or invitees, with as much as 22% of virtual attendees finding out about events via social networks.

Additional benefits to going virtual:

• 18% of virtual attendees said after attending virtually, they would consider attending in person the following year
• Virtual events allow you reach out to secondary markets for attendees (i.e. international audiences or less invested verticals)
• All virtual events have an online archive for a minimum of 90 days, allowing your content to continue to be accessible past the live date (24% of all registrants for free virtual events attend the archive and not the live event!)

The most compelling reason to plan a virtual component? Price.

The cost of putting on a traditional event with travel, food, hotel rentals and guest speakers can be significant. The aggregate cost of adding a virtual component can actually increase your ROI, and lower your cost per head through virtual viewership. When considering a virtual event, factoring in your potential (virtual) audience can drop costs per attendee by as much as 75%.

Try it out for yourself by using our virtual event ROI Calculator.

To download the white paper Measuring and Maximizing the Impact of a Hybrid Event and other great thought leadership on the virtual events industry visit www.virtualedge.org

And you can check out this infographic for more insights into Virtual Event/Physical Event trends…

Entertainment and Marketing in a digital age

In 2011, the average marketing webcast generated just over 450 registrations and about 275 viewers; while our broadcast of the Mr. Olympia Competition for BodyBuilding.com reached over 300,000 viewers in a single night! I know-tough to compare your next marketing webcast against an internationally recognized event that used be broadcast live on ESPN … but the kernel of insight here is that in a digital age, content is still king and if you can make it entertaining, you can drive even more viewership.

A great example of this sort of entertainment based marketing was a project we worked on last year for Canadian Living. This event was presented in conjunction with Transcontinental Media who invited The “Chef at Home” Michael Smith in for an exclusive online event driving thousands of foodies to the Canadian Living Website.  The speaker was geared to the target audience (which is key for any virtual event) with attendees ranking guest speakers and the agenda as the number one reason they sign up in the first place.

If you are a marketer reading this, you may be thinking “Great…..I could hire a world famous chef get lots of viewers but that won’t help me drive leads for my company’s new software…” And you are right! But creating an entertaining event with a unique concept will drive an audience. For instance, on February 29^th 2012, WALMART is conducting the Green Student Challenge where university students will battle head-to-head in front of a panel of Canada’s top CEO’s for $100,000 in prize money. Big name speakers, with a unique and entertaining format to earn viewers for this landmark online event!

Click here to register to view the event

Catch Phrase: Sales Force Acceleration

The term “Sales Force Acceleration” was definitely coined by a sales person, and  at some point was meant to sell something, to someone, somewhere… Despite its suggested buzzword origins the term actually means something  of value.  Sales teams are the hunters and providers of an organization. Without an educated and motivated sales team companies cannot sustain themselves let alone grow. To “accelerate” a sales team you need to do more than simply educate them, you need to motivate them to ensure they understand the full message.

With travel budgets being slashed  organizations know that the opportunity to address their sales force in person may only come once or twice a year while campaigns continue to change on a quarterly bases. To succeed savvy organizations have learned supplement physical meetings with Virtual Event technology to deliver effective sales training and sales acceleration  without yanking sales reps from their territories for in person events.

In October, SN was selected by ITCAN to launch a new marketing initiative for their 300+ sales reps across Canada. Presenting the content virtually was new to the organization so they needed to ensure that the delivery mimicked or improved upon the past  conventional face to face training sessions. The event included a number of professional services wrapped into 5 custom webcast events which were broadcast during one Friday afternoon to all 5 regional sales teams.

The Streaming Network provided:

• Pre-Production of video assets to be used as accents to each presentation
• Production of a custom branded presentation PPT
• Agenda Design and Speaker Training
• End user and speaker support during the 5 live broadcasts

SN improved on the traditional format  by making presentations available  for on-demand viewing  following the event. According to recent research from the IDC Sales Advisory Service, salespeople spend 7 hours or more a week looking for information to help them prepare for sales calls (usually without success!). 50% of the information needed by the sales organization is pushed through email and only 10% of the information is made available in a self serving format.  Sales reps often end up  spending too much time searching for information about prospects and customers rather than engaging in true call prep activities. IDC calculates that saving a single enterprise rep 60 minutes of prep time per week can result in additional revenue generation of $300,000 or more per rep!

What if every sales training session was available online in a dynamic virtual way? What if your National Sales Meeting was archived in an easy to use and engaging online experience?

The result of SN’s work for ITCAN was a motivated sales force who embraced the given message and demanded that a well done virtual event become the new gold standard for Sales Force training events!

That, my friends, is what you call “Sales Force Acceleration”.

Don’t just chat when you can ScribbleLive

Without flaws and without delays, ScribbleLive enables real-time journalism and audience engagement, giving you the ability to always have full editorial power and reader retention within your branded web site. Think of it as “live-to-air” for the web with the immediacy of Twitter and the professional control of a CMS.

In September of 2011, the Streaming Network integrated the ScribbleLive platform into our live Webcast and Virtual Events. Allowing our clients producers to engage directly with their virtual audience during an event in a fully moderated two way conversation. The tool is easy to use and allows for full social integration with Facebook Connect and Twitter. Audience members can make text, photo or video posts while the event producer is given full control on what comments are posted to the live feed.

For special events, like the opening of the Vaughan City Hall, ScribbleLive allowed members of the Vaughan Community to interact with event producers while watching the ceremony live via webcast.

Click here to view the Vaughan City Hall opening

SN awarded MaRS RFP

In September 2011, we were awarded the RFP for in-house webcasting services at the MaRS Discovery District. This enables MaRS to compliment their world class meeting facility and studio with best in class Video Webcasting Services. With their own New Media Department, and MaRS AV team, they produce up to 3 events a week for their internal and external clients.

Click here to view an example