Events 2.0: The 4 Secrets of Fully Engaging Your Attendees

Yes–I’m going to share some secrets with you!  So remember, this is all just between me and you and your colleagues, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends/fans, kids, neighbors and anyone else you feel like chatting up.  Of course then it won’t be much of a secret, but that’s okay with me.  The more, the merrier!

But let’s start with a question: What is it that makes great live events better than just getting the same content some other way?  Think of some examples–like the difference between a truly memorable dining experience and the thought of just having the meal delivered to your home or hotel room. Or watching a DVD of a music festival compared to actually being in the middle of it all.  Or reading the minutes of a business meeting vs. participating in it.  How about watching a well-produced YouTube video of a keynote speaker instead of being there?  (Hmm…I bet that last one was not so obvious. But you get my point.) Why do I suggest that the last example is the weakest?  Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of dynamic and inspiring keynote speakers out there.  But the question is: what do you really get out of the experience of attending an event that can’t be substituted with some kind of copy? 

For some reason, this reminds me of that term “Web 2.0”.  Now, for those of you who haven’t been indoctrinated to this terminology yet, Web 2.0 refers to the second “version” of what we call the Internet.  If you’re old enough to remember as far back as the Clinton presidency (yes, that includes you, Millenials), Web 1.0 was pretty much a new form of one-way information distribution.  When you visited someone’s webpage, you could read whatever information they had prepared for you, sort of like an online brochure.  Heck—they even had photos and stuff.  But it was pretty much a static experience; you viewed it and moved on.  There is still tons of Web 1.0 content out there, and it’s not likely to go away. It’s flexible, convenient and it definitely serves a purpose.

Not too many years later, Web 2.0 took things to a different level: now, instead of being limited to whatever the webmaster of each site puts on display for you, much of what you see on the Internet is “user-generated” content—and the “users” are us.  Pretty big paradigm shift, actually.  Easiest example?  Facebook. Think about how much of what you see on Facebook has been created by Mark Zuckerberg and the massive staff down at FB Headquarters.  Other than the ads on the sidebar, the correct answer is “very little”.  It’s just a shell created in order to allow people to share their knowledge and creative ideas.  By definition, every social media tool does pretty much the same thing.

So what is Events 2.0?  Same idea, basically.  Any time you go to an event and just sit there and take it in, you’re in Event 1.0 mode. Nothing wrong with that necessarily; you can still enjoy and maybe learn a few things from it.  But take it up to V2.0 and now the participants are not only involved, they’re actually contributing much of the content.  And that’s engaging—just as much as going to that amazing restaurant or contributing your ideas and solutions at a business conference.  But like Facebook, someone has to design the structure of the event so that it will get people engaged in the first place. And that’s where the secrets come in!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a sponsor trying to build relationships with your target clientele, or a corporate trainer bent on raising the skill level of your employees, or an activist trying to inspire people to your cause.  To fully-engage your audience, you’ll need to build these four components into the experience you provide:
   

1. THE HOOK. To get people engaged, first you need something that initially attracts their attention and draws them in.  This doesn’t just distract them; it also gets them into a receptive state by shifting their attention, so they can leave behind whatever else they were focused on before.  A slightly goofy (but effective) version of this: Flash Mobs.  Take a look at the example below and see what I mean. Notice how the “attendees” respond towards the end.
    
2. CONTENT RULES!  Of course, you need to present something that’s relevant or otherwise fascinating to this particular audience; otherwise, their attention will quickly move on.  Ideally you’ll have something that answers a question, need or opportunity they have or–even better–introduces them to one they didn’t know they had.  In any case, none of these secrets apply if you don’t have something that will be of significant value to your audience.  So plan on spending a big chunk of your time on this one. Otherwise, none of this matters.
    
3. DESIGN FOR INTERACTION.  This is really the Events 2.0 part. Getting someone’s attention and delivering fresh content is just getting started: you also want to create an experience where everyone needs to participate on some level, whether it’s physically, intellectually, emotionally, or all three.  That’s the main thing that interactive events can provide that can’t be substituted by one-way communication.  Put people in a situation they’ve never been in before.  Provide the opportunity to experience and respond to something new and learn from not only the “expert” presenters, but from each other. This is the power of bringing people together. In the end, engaging experiences usually leave us changed in some way, but it doesn’t happen by itself–you need to create the context.  And remember that in many cases, your presenters will not have the skills and experience to create this, so you may have to help (or get help). 
    
4. CLOSE THE DEAL.  Here’s the Big Finish: it’s not enough to get people thinking.  In order to convert the event experience into useful take-aways, it’s critical to build in time for participants to individually process, reflect on and plan how they might use these new ideas and experiences.  This is the real work, but it’s the part that will lead to concrete results.  People need some time to think on their own, but it can help to provide the opportunity for discussion, collaboration or even hands-on group activity. We know enough about how our brains function to expect that, without this step, most of what we’ve encountered during the event will dissipate fairly quickly.  This is also the time for committing people to action, to ensure that the event has a lasting impact.

If any of these steps is missing from the design of your experience, you’re probably stuck back in the time of Events 1.0.  And I would bet that your event is not getting the impact it could, or should. 

In future posts, I’ll be expanding and providing specific examples of how people are really applying these principles to take their events up a notch and you’ll have the opportunity to share your own stories and secrets.  For now, feel free to leave a comment about anything that this post brought to mind!

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Why Customer Satisfaction Doesn’t Mean Loyalty: 10 Prescriptions

 

 

 

 

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP.
Everyone talks about it: “We’ve got to make sure our customers are satisfied.” Some businesses go to great lengths to define what they think it takes to satisfy their clientele and then spend lots of time and money on comment cards, online surveys, focus groups or just in-the-moment chats with customers or clients to measure how well they have done at delivering what was expected. What’s wrong with that? Well, it turns out that just because you’ve satisfied your customers doesn’t necessarily mean they will be back. And isn’t the normal assumption that, if you have satisfied their expectations, they will reward you with their loyalty?

The problem is that too many people use the terms “customer satisfaction” and “customer loyalty” to mean the same thing. They don’t. And consumer behavior research shows why this distinction is important: Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Co. found that, in a series of studies of a variety of businesses, between 65 percent and 85 percent of customers who “defected” — i.e. switched to the competition — reported that they had been “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their original provider, but they left anyway!

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not suggesting that you don’t need to be concerned with satisfying your clients, attendees, or sponsors. On the contrary, if the goal is to inspire repeat business, you need to go beyond merely meeting expectations and consider what really motivates people to be loyal. After all, satisfaction is just an attitude or opinion a customer has, but loyalty has to do with the customer’s behavior. And their behavior is what we’re ultimately interested in, not just what they think of us.

Loyal customers do more than just come back again. They are also less price-sensitive; they are more forgiving of occasional slip-ups in the product or service or experience you provide; they are more resistant to the allure of new competition and, perhaps most important, they provide crucial word-of-mouth advertising, whether it’s face-to-face or online.  Clients or guests who are only “satisfied” do not. In an era of increasing competition, we need to be looking at customer satisfaction as merely the entry fee for playing the game — sort of like the ante that allows you to sit at a poker table. If you don’t deliver satisfaction, then you don’t get to play. But “satisfying” your customers — i.e. delivering what they already think they should get anyway — only avoids chasing them away to the competition. If you want to truly inspire loyalty, you have to build a lasting bond with them.

So why do people develop loyalties to a particular company? A few years back, I conducted a study on the issue of customer loyalty at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. After studying a group of “loyal” restaurant customers, it became clear that loyal behavior is closely related to feelings of affiliation and personal connection that the client establishes with a business and its employees. These loyal customers were satisfied customers, for sure, but they also consistently expressed an appreciation for being recognized, for receiving personalized service and for being treated like valued individuals. Individualized attention like using the guest’s name, offering their regular drink, providing personal recommendations that you think this particular guest might appreciate or delivering a swift and sincere response to any problems that might arise all appear to go a long way toward establishing a sustainable relationship.

10 PRESCRIPTIONS FOR LOYALTY
I think we often put too much emphasis on hiring “experienced” customer service personnel, rather than on selecting people who are natural rapport-builders. Then we spend most of our training time on the mechanics of service, instead of on activities that will really promote loyal behavior. What kinds of action could we be taking? Here are a few suggestions:

(1) Raise awareness among both staff and management. Employees can’t be expected to appreciate loyalty’s importance on their own; it is management’s job to make them aware of its impact on everyone’s success and how their own behavior can increase loyalty. Use stories of “legendary” service incidents to help illustrate the kind of behavior you’re looking for.

(2) Hire people who have natural rapport-building skills. If it’s part of their job to build relationships with clientele, then management should be careful to recruit, hire and retain staff who have a natural talent for it.

(3) Teach and reward the learning and use of guest’s names. Bring in a memory expert to instruct your staff in memorization techniques. Build a list of guest names and personal preferences. Provide financial incentives for staff who collect new names for the list. Coach staff members on how to incorporate individual guest names into normal service encounters.

(4) Train employees to “read” guest needs and to personalize each service encounter. Stress the fact that suggestive selling should be used to make personal recommendations of items that the server thinks the client might enjoy or appreciate. Your staff should be encouraged to get creative; try to anticipate things that might appeal to the client before they ask.

(5) Go out of your way to respond to service failures or guest complains. Problem situations can be exploited for the opportunity they offer to provide a highly responsive, personalized service experience to the client, which reinforces feelings of being noticed and valued as an individual. A weak or nonexistent response will produce the opposite effect.

(6) Expect and empower employees to respond to problems without waiting for management’s approval. Data collected by the Technical Assistant Research Programs show a close link between resolving the client’s problem on the spot and their intent to patronize your business again. Staff members need to receive instruction in handling a variety of scenarios, and they also should be given clear parameters to define what corrective actions they are authorized to take.

(7) Reinforce relationship building through employee incentive and reward programs. Recognize and encourage employees who demonstrate success at building repeat patronage. For example, restaurant servers who are most often requested by guests at the door deserve credit for it. Likewise, employees who are skillful at collecting the names of repeat customers or attendees can be rewarded for their extra contribution. In both cases management is pointing out the kind of results they want their staff to be shooting for.

(8) Invest in employee retention. Studies have shown a strong correlation between high customer ratings and low employee turnover. When an employee leaves, any relationships they have built with clients are in danger of being broken. Consider taking steps to protect your best “people people” by earning their loyalty.  (By the way, these same principles apply to employee loyalty. They’re human, too!)

(9) Adjust your customer feedback tools to measure for loyalty indicators. Instead of just asking clients whether they were satisfied with their experience, find out if they would be willing to recommend your services to others. Why or why not? Do they know any of your staff or management by name? Did they feel as if they received personal attention? Were they made to feel like they matter? These may be the kinds of things that will determine whether loyalty will be produced.

(10) Provide clients with opportunities to “connect” with staff members beyond normal business transactions. Inviting guests to receptions, seminars or public-relations events will offer the possibility for social interaction not possible during normal business interactions, enhancing the potential for social bonding. You will build closer relationships by getting to know your guests as individuals, rather than as relatively anonymous consumers and providers.

Where loyalty is concerned, it’s not just what we do for people; it’s how we treat them while we’re doing it. The key question is, how do they feel when they’re walking out the door? One thing is for sure: to the degree that your clientele are allowed to feel anonymous in their interactions with you, you’ll have a hard time inspiring their loyalty.

“Are we making any difference?” Engaging Events Series, Episode 2

What can an event planner learn from a couple of physics professors? 

In his book What the best college teachers do,  Ken Bain tells the story of two physics professors at Arizona State University who wanted to find out if all of the time and effort they put into planning and delivering their courses was really making any difference in the way their students thought about things.  So they set up a very simple experiment: they would choose one fundamental physics concept and measure whether their physics course made a significant impact.  They decided to focus on the principles of “motion” and their students’ understanding of how motion actually works.  They pre-tested their students, did their normal 15-week semester gig and then re-tested everyone at the end.  And guess what? They found that, despite all of the time and effort expended by all, when it was all over their students thought about motion pretty much the same way as they did before they took the course. 

As a professional trainer and college professor myself, that story scared me half to death.  If you’re in the business of planning events, you should be, too.  Because it suggests that much–maybe even most–of the event experiences we create (and a classroom is definitely an event) may not be making much of a lasting impact and, if that’s the case, then we’re wasting a whole lot more of our time than we are aware of–not to mention forfeiting tremendous opportunities to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives while we have them gathered together. 

What can we do to help ensure we’re having an impact? Well, it appears that one key element of effective event experience design is a variation on the “less is more” rule: make sure you’re focusing on just a very few critical points or objectives—or maybe even just one.    Of course, this requires some consideration of what your most important outcomes are.  What do you want to be different once the event has concluded?  Which goals are must-haves, and which are just nice-to-haves?

Now back to that physics class: one lesson learned, according to Ken Bain, is that it’s better to focus on just two or three main concepts or competencies and hammer the hell out of them, and not worry so much about covering everything in detail.  Often the mistake we make is to try to cover too many bases at once, because we’re afraid of leaving out something important.   In the case of a college course, this can take the shape of trying to get to the end of the textbook before the semester is over, even if it means that we don’t fully lock in the most important ideas or skills along the way.  There’s nothing wrong with accomplishing multiple objectives at the same time, but not if it means failing to nail the most important ones.

We live in a world where it feels like there is never enough time to do what we need to do.  But remember that old time management adage: “there’s always enough time for the things that are most important.”  The next time you’re planning an event program or experience, don’t worry too much about doing as many things as you can with the time you’re allowed.  Instead, start by making sure you get the most important outcomes really right.  Because in the end, that’s what will make it worth the time and money you’re investing!