Digital Media Solutions

By capturing your conference and broadcasting it to reach a wider audience through live webcasts, on demand video or vodcasts, a virtual event is created that can develop new streams of income.

There is an increasing business need for Conference and Event organisers to identify ways of making their events more memorable and to engage with a wider audience. Conference / Event sponsors are always looking for innovative ways of promoting their brands to increasing numbers of relevant people.

The content of any conference or simple presentation is extremely valuable and the traditional way of delivering the material meant that only limited numbers of people (those who attended the physical event) would get any value from it. There is a huge audience (comprising those people who were unable to attend the Conference) that remains untapped by both organisers and sponsors alike. This is very much like an iceberg – a relatively small audience sees the event with a far greater number missing out.

Capturing a conference is a great way to exploit this untapped market opportunity, extending the reach and impact of any given event. In turn, an event’s sponsor gets much greater exposure and an increased return on their investments allowing event organisers to attract higher levels of sponsorship.

By using live streaming video an online audience can share the experience of the live event. Once the content has been captured in this way, it can be turned into a vodcast or podcast (audio only) and can be made available as ‘on demand’ content to allow people who missed the live event to access it at their convenience.

I’d like to quote extensively from a blog that we follow, http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/  which is written by Ken Molay. Ken was recently at a customer summit where a presentation was given by Chris Gosk of Global Knowledge. Chris is in charge of delivering services and support to large enterprise customers and his company provides fee-based training to business students around the world. Much of their subject material is highly technical in nature. It is common for their classes to be five days of eight-hour sessions, with a 300-page course manual.Global Knowledge uses local classroom training, but it also delivers many classes remotely and they are running about 30 virtual courses per monthOne of the key topics in Chris’s presentation was a quantitative look at carbon footprints and environmental impact. He showed a slide with calculations of total carbon emissions associated with one of their average classes as delivered locally and remotely. Looking at impacts associated with facilities and overhead, physical materials, and travel, Chris came up with an estimated 15,941 pounds of CO2 emissions for a local class and 11 pounds of emissions for a virtual class. That isn’t 100% savings, but it’s close enough for most of us.He went on to point out that from a sheer profit perspective they find that their cost per session and cost per student drops dramatically (75-79%) when using virtual classrooms. But more than that, they get benefits from the green perspective. They are still relatively small in measurable terms… They are able to meet client RFP requirements for green sourcing strategies and they can show some market leadership that benefits them in publicity and marketing.But the interesting perspective is a look at the near term future. Chris predicts more legislation associated with the politics of global warming. Companies will need to show compliance and need to show measurements to get tax credits. A few technology vendors are now offering simplistic carbon calculators that will allow clients to gain a simple estimate of CO2 savings by having virtual presentations instead of physically attended ones. In fact we’ve commissioned one ourselves for a large virtual press conference that we’re webcasting from

Berlin later this month. So in answer to Ken’s question “is Green measurable?” – we at In Situ believe it is and will be taking further steps to help clients and all of us take positive steps towards environmental savings.