Hybrid Meetings: Wave of the Future
How does a meeting planner get the maximum number of attendees to join an event? Hybrid meetings are a combination of live and virtual events working together to achieve an objective. Many companies cannot afford to send attendees to a face-to-face meeting but still desire the benefits of a corporate meeting. Hybrid meetings create a powerful environment offering enriched and dynamic visual displays allowing people to connect and build business relationships. They integrate social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook, into the corporate community.
Hybrid meetings can be fun. Companies like Cisco not only include a “virtual concierge” to their events, they include alternate realities games that entertain and reward players. In 2009, the Cisco Global Sales meeting (or GSX) included 20,000 people from across the globe in an event that informed, motivated, and acknowledge their sales teams. Keynotes presented twice a day preserved the feeling of “live events” and accommodated employees in many different time zones. Giving employees the option to view the event from their desk or from a conference room allowed them to continue the flow of their workday or interact and network with others.
The success of GSX demonstrates the value of large-scale virtual meetings and underlines the importance of hybrid meetings in the future.
