Insights From Coming Clean With Cindy
Summary lead. || Photo Credit.
If you follow our social media closely, you’ll know we launched a new video series this year called Coming Clean with Cindy. We had a total of seven (7) powerhouse female guests and all of them represented a different point of view on what they did when the need to pivot was essential in 2020; they openly shared what worked and what failed.
I thought it might be helpful to share my own insights from having these authentic conversations with them and even explain why we chose to push out this series in the first place.
IT STILL MAKES SENSE TO KEEP IT BRIEF
Many attending commented that 15 minutes was not enough time for the segment. While we can agree in sentiment and even in reality (as each ran about five-to-seven minutes over), we’ve quickly learned that everyone attending/watching live or on demand later is likely only able to commit to around 15 minutes for this type of content, so this time felt more reasonable than asking for 30 minutes or more. We continue to see huge drop offs the longer the program is across a range of events we all attend, and so we wanted this one to be just long enough that one would actually watch the whole episode, take away the important highlights and hopefully share it on their network.
THE LIVE VS. PRE-RECORDED ROUTE IS A TOSS-UP
This has become the black and blue vs white and gold dress debate of virtual events. And there is NO right/wrong answer as it depends on what you the CLIENT are trying to achieve. So for us, early on my goal was to get as many live questions from the audience as possible and allow a way to easily watch the video without having to register since we were looking to help vs. do a hard sell on our company’s services with this video series. Facebook Live and LinkedIn Live seemed the natural choice for this. We did initially want to push out to Instagram Live but when we learned about Restream and the ability to do this with Facebook and LinkedIn, but not Instagram (due to some blocked features), we decided to stay focused. This part was probably the most technically challenging as there were several live recordings where my video would freeze but my audio kept going. The only way around this was hardwiring my internet connection and pre-recording so we could edit out any of the bad frames. Due to the timing of things, I was not able to get the hard wire done until after the series was over. And of course pre-recording was out of the question as our goal was to have live questions. So take it from me - be sure to secure a hard wired line for any live streaming events to ensure best results.
CONTENT IS KING
This is nothing new as this was true even before the pandemic, but there’s even more of a spotlight on it now. Take the time to really get to know your audience and figure out what they want to hear and NEED to hear. If we were NOT operating on a scrappy budget, we would have equally promoted all seven (7) post-videos to ensure our fellow meeting planners and event marketers had an equal opportunity to revisit these conversations; we all know these have a short shelf life before they are obsolete because that is how fast things are changing in our world. I am happy with the results of our conversations because I felt we were able to shed light on previously hush- hush topics and during a time like this, we all felt we needed to share what we’ve learned to help our industry recover.
If you’ve been on the fence about pivoting, we hope you’ll contact us today because we can help - we want to ensure you are not alone in this journey. The great news is that the digital event space has dramatically improved over the last nine (9) months because people are finally getting used to what it means to attend a virtual event.
Need some strategic insight for your next brand activation? We’d love to hear from you.
