SAP Virtual Events: A Work in Progress

With the economy still more sluggish than inspired, virtual SAP events are gaining real traction. ASUG's recent two day "Virtual Summit" had more than 1,000 people online at one time. For the first time ever, SAP is virtualizing its TechEd Community Day. Instead of the traditional on site Community Day event at SAP TechEd, SAP is holding a series of virtual events throughout the month of September, called Virtual Community Day (VCD). (You can see replays of prior VCD events and track upcoming events via the RSS feed of SAP's Craig Cmehil)

But there's a problem with virtual events: limitations in technology and bandwidth create challenges for those who conduct them. A properly held virtual SAP event can serve as a valuable educational medium and/or a very effective pre-sales and marketing tool. But there are challenges to overcome, and not all of them are technical. In some cases, the problems with events trace back to a misunderstanding about what the real value of these events are (interaction!) versus pre-packaged information sharing.

In this blog entry, I'll share some resources about ongoing SAP virtual events. I will also share some guidelines I've drawn from my own experiences (and those of fellow participants) about the good (and bad) of such events.

1. Event replays are a must. It is amazing how many live events are not taped and/or not made available after the fact. With interested parties in time zones across the world juggling all kinds of schedule conflicts, it's a big missed opportunity not to make replays of events and presentations available after the fact.

2. Interactivity is the "killer app" of virtual SAP events. Whether it's getting a nagging question answered in real time, or making a new connection with a fellow participant, the best online events and webinars are interactive. Treating webinars as a one way broadcast medium reflects a profound misunderstanding about why participants are there in real time. You can easily find recorded SAP events to watch at a later point. Whether it's SAP.com's webinars (free with registration) or Virtual SAP TechEd (which has free samples as well as a paid subscription) or SAP's own Learning on Demand site (which also has free content as well as a paid subscription), there's plenty of online SAP educational offerings available on demand. You can consume all this content at your convenience, so when listeners take the time to sit in on an event in real time, they are looking for more than a lecture.

3. There is a difference between a collection of webcasts and virtual events. Some virtual events I have attended are really just a series of simultaneous webcasts. A virtual event platform should provide opportunities for networking and virtual "birds of a feather" sessions. Simply showing webcasts and product demos misses out on the critical mass of participants that has been assembled.

4. Stand-alone webinars also have value, especially when they are presented in a carefully facilitated, interactive format. Too often, there is an element missing: maybe the webinar takes phone calls, but no one is paying attention to the chat. Or the questions from the chat are not being queued up properly. Or the presenters drone on too long, overloading the audience with slides and not coming up for air until there is a few minutes left and the participants are too burned out to even attempt a last minute question. Webinars that incorporate reader chat and questions throughout the broadcast, rather than exiling them to a shrinking time slot at the end, are much more effective.

5. The platform matters. Some platforms have terrible quality recordings, others are weak on necessary features. Budget is obviously a consideration, but for webinars, I'm partial to Adobe Acrobat Connect. Mark Finnern, leader of the SAP Mentor Initiative, has been putting on a series of public SAP Mentor webinars, called "SAP Mentor Mondays." You can see replays on the previous webinars already held on the new SAP Mentor Monday webinar wiki. If you watch one of them, you'll get a feeling for the flexibility of Adobe Connect in terms of managing chat, user questions, incoming callers, and presenter webcams. Giving users a chance to chat amongst themselves throughout the webinar is valuable for them, and incredibly useful for identifying technical problems and the real sentiment of the participants. Not all webinar providers have this feature.

Another advantage of Adobe Connect, which we see at use in SAP Virtual Community Day presentations: there's no registration required, so you can get folks to join up quickly on the fly, even on the same day. Yes, gathering registration contact information can be important, but there are tradeoffs there to weight out carefully. Good platforms don't have to be expensive, either. Craig Cmehil, SAP Community Evangelists, runs his Friday Morning Report sessions via ustream, and there is a good mix of video, audio, and chat. Replays are archived.

6. Live integration with Twitter matters. Live integration with Twitter can make a huge difference, both leading up to the event and during the event itself. Some live events are promoted on Twitter, but the live Twitterstream potential is not taken advantage of. One great example of the right way to go about this was SAP's recent special pre-TechEd webinar featuring Ray Kurzweil (TechEd keynote speaker) and SAP CTO Vishal Sikka. During the event, those who used the #sapteched09 hash tag could see their comments posted in real time in a sidebar next to the event video, and questions posed via Twitter during the sessions were asked and answered, facilitated by SAP "on stage personality" Ian Kimbell. (You can see a screen shot of what this looked like from the blog of SCN Chief Operating Officer Chip Rodgers).

7. Better to let the webinar run long than to blow off participants' questions. One thing I have never understood: why webinars always end abruptly on the hour, even when there are many participant questions that have gone unanswered. This is especially irksome when the speakers get bogged down with a bloated slide deck, run over on time, and leave only a few minutes for questions at the end, as opposed to the fifteen minutes that had been allotted. When there's obvious questions that need answering, why not say something at the top of the hour along the lines of, "Those who need to move on from our webinar at the top of the hour are welcome to do so, those who would like to stay on for ten more minutes to ask questions are welcome to stay."

8. Multiple voice are better than one. It's more engaging to hear from multiple speakers during the course of a webinar. Live action debate between speakers is an even more appealing option. People who attend live events are looking for a live experience, rather than just a hand-the-baton series of Powerpoints. PAC does a nice job of bringing in two or more voices, often from different geographical regions, during their webinars. This gives a global feel to the webinars, which makes us as visitors believe we are attending a significant "can't miss" event.

And last but not least:

9. People go to trade shows to further relationships and make new industry connections. Virtual events are no different. In many virtual events, the emphasis is on canned presentations - talks which are going to be available on demand after the event. The best of a trade show experience is the informal discussions that take place in lounges and networking rooms after the keynotes and seminars; a virtual event is no different. In some cases, there are limitations with the community software being used, but that's all the more reason to pressure developers of this type of software to understand that these events should be about networking first and foremost.

I've been to a number of virtual, day long SAP events where there were hundreds of people assembled online, but no real way for them to connect, except for private one on one chats - and even those were limited, as you had to scroll through long lists of attendees to find someone to chat with. Forget about meeting new people with that setup, if you're lucky, you find someone you know on the list and chat with them.

Why not empower participants to create "birds of a feather" rooms on the fly based on their interests in topics like SAP MII or SAP in the Utilities industry? If there is concern over allowing ad hoc rooms, then creating ten or fifteen topical networking areas would be an improvement over putting a bunch of people in a virtual event and trusting them to find the right place. Too often, you log into a virtual event platform and it feels like you are the only one there. Then you poke around and see a banner proclaiming that there are hundreds of others online, but there's no way to meet others who share your interests. That's a missed opportunity.

SAP virtual events are here to stay. Even in flawed formats, they deliver value to the participants. But with more thought to the right platforms and more emphasis on interaction, these events can do a better job of capturing the trade show experience. After trade shows, we always come home with a bunch of new business cards. When the same happens virtually, we're on the right track.