The rate of technology change is accelerating with thousands of ideas, apps and innovations bubbling up to help meeting planners, exhibitors, venues and other meeting participants do their jobs better. Here are seven event technology trends to monitor.
1. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will see major growth at exhibitions and events.
The usual roll call of high-tech and audio-visual kingpins — Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony,
GoPro, etc. — are investing billions of dollars into AR and VR technology. With so many major technology companies making deep investments in this space, VR and AR will continue to improve in quality, will get less expensive and much more prevalent in the next few years.
These new, creative immersive visualization tools are beginning to work their way into events in a number of ways:
• VR headsets will be used to demonstrate products at tradeshows in a more realistic, interactive and engaging manner while minimizing the need to ship physical products to a show.
• VR will be used to engage attendees at booths with
games and other immersive experiences.
• VR will be used to provide a much more engaging and realistic hotel/venue site inspection experience — compared to browsing hotel websites.
2. Mobile event apps will mature into full-featured event intelligence and data analytic platforms.
Mobile event apps are now widely used at events. The next big step is that they are moving beyond paper replacement and logistics management.
Modern smart phones have an array of sensors. When combined with mobile events apps, every touch in the app (and soon every movement) can be trackable. They can provide a goldmine of information about participants’ likes, dislike, interests, movements and more that can be used to improve future events and to provide customized marketing content based on the participant’s individual needs.
3. Second-screen technology and other mobile participant engagements tools will flourish.
Second-screen technology refers to the use of a mobile device to provide an enhanced viewing experience for other content usually with interactive features. This is seen most often on television, but increasingly so at events. Presenter content, such as slides, polling, video, notes and social media links, can be pushed to any device in real-time during a presentation.
This technology uses participants’ mobile devices to help them to focus on the presentations rather than distracting them away for other things.
4. Images and videos will dominate social channels at events. A picture or video can be worth a thousand words.
Consequently, a variety of emerging social apps using photos, videos and video streaming are working their way into events to increase attendee engagement and significantly broaden the social footprint of events.
Savvy users of Twitter know that a tweet with an image is nearly twice as likely to be retweeted. Similar statistics apply to other social channels. Instagram has doubled in use in the past three years with over 300 million users. As this social channel is inherently mobile, it is a natural to use at events. Twitter walls commonly include Instagram feeds as well as Twitter images.
Snapchat, Vine, Periscope and other apps will be forces to reckoned with for events. Meeting planners should prepare for even greater Wi-Fi and cellular bandwidth usage as well as increasing copyright challenges.
5. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and beacon technology will continue to evolve and be deployed at events.
BLE sensors can track attendee movements throughout a meeting facility and local area to provide a wide range of assistance such as location-aware information and directions. Although still in its infancy, we are seeing strong examples of continued development of beacons (also known as iBeacons):
- The San Diego Convention Center and the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center have deployed beacons throughout their facilities to assist in navigation and area information.
- Beacons have been used the last two years at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for scavenger hunt gamification.
- This year’s SXSW music/technology conference in Austin (noted for significant technology rollouts such as Twitter) deployed more than 1,000 beacons across some 265 venues in the city. Attendees used these beacons through the mobile app for hyper-local networking, push notifications, event messaging based on location and more.
6. Event Intelligence will be the next big thing.
The onsite meeting used to be known as the “black hole” of event data management. Planners used computers to gain insights before and after events, but during an event they were flying blind. For example, paper surveys were handed out, but tallying wasn’t completed until after the event — not in time to make mid-course corrections.
Now, it is possible for every touch on a mobile event app to be tracked, scored and rated. Social media channels can be monitored and incorporated into the mix. Onsite “likes” and mobile polling and survey tools can be scored in real time. Meeting planners and event marketers can know immediately answers to the following questions.
- What are trending hot topics?
- Who are the top speakers?
- What exhibit booths have the most attendance?
- What speakers/exhibitors are “liked” the most?
- Who are the key connectors/influencers?
- What are the attendees’ ratings on specific survey and/or polling questions?
Coming advances in geo-positioning and beacon technology will make it possible to precisely monitor attendee movement. That data will help identify hot spots (and the “not-so-hot spots”), where lines are forming for food or registration (to send reinforcements), and other information that can assist with event improvement or midcourse corrections.
7. Despite the increased use of virtual meetings technology, face-to-face meetings and tradeshows will remain viable.
Webinars and other virtual meetings are great for short information exchange. However, in today’s multitasking and often distracting work environment, attention spans are short. Meetings take people to a more focused environment with fewer distractions. As long as attendees are informed, entertained and fed, event hosts can keep them engaged for days.
The opportunities for networking, brainstorming and relationship building are usually far greater at face-to-face events than online. For an exhibitor, it is often the best way to meet so many qualified buyers in such a short time. For buyers, it is a great chance to meet vendors of interest — all together in one location, categorized and mapped for your choosing.
Meetings provide a vastly richer, more targeted, and more focused learning experience than nearly any virtual meeting. To put it succinctly, there is no such thing as a “virtual beer.”
Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP, is a professional speaker and consultant focusing on meetings technology. With 20 years of experience running international citywide technology meetings, he now helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity. He can be contacted at CorbinBall.com and followed on Twitter @corbinball.
