Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Conference
Karol Kopanko
With that in mind, the rest of this article will help you increase audience engagement at your
next interactive conference.
1. Interactive sessions
A couple of weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion about Virtual Reality at Pixel Heaven
(Retro & Indie Gaming Fest) in Warsaw. I used Engagenow to bring the audience and the
panelists closer. How?
Introduced the tool to the audience, asking them to open their browsers on their mobile
phones.
Shared a simple link to type in: pixelheaven.pl/VR
Guided them around the two tabs: Poll (“What is the best VT device?”) and Chat
Asked them to submit questions via Chat or simply discuss what panelists are saying
I felt like the audience participated in 100% of our discussion, vividly commenting on the
highlights from the stage. More than half of the hall logged into the app via Facebook and
voted in the poll.
Interactivity is a rising trend in the event industry. So it’s good to add as many occasions to
interact with speakers and other guests as possible.
At the moment, interactive sessions are considered as a “nice to have”, but in the next
couple of years they will be a must!
Another way to empower your audience is to interact with them during the session.
For example, at a finance conference I was attending, the managers decided to use
Engagenow to do live polling. They started with a warm-up question about the background
of the attendees to move on to more specific questions during the presentations.
When the speaker was talking about the return rate of different investment options, the app
(exactly the same app as mentioned earlier) asked for the opinion of guests. The next time
the speaker discussed the trends in the banking industry, everyone could show the most
important trend in their opinion.
3. Moderating
The moderator is not only a person who introduces the speaker, a good moderator can
make the conference an unforgettable experience. The moderator also has to coordinate
the speakers in terms of how their presentations work together, who talks about what,
facilitate the discussion, avoid overlap, stay on track and run Q&A with presentations.
Let me expand upon the last one. Q&A is a vital part of every conference, because of the
interactivity component. The biggest mistake that you could make would be to force your
audience to listen to a prolonged talk without any interaction. Therefore, it’s always advised
to plan at least 30 minutes of Q&A for each hour of talking.
Take a look at the mockup below to see how I prefer to capture conversation at the
conference when I’m asked to moderate.
I’m starting a conversation by introducing the topic of the panel. Later on, attendees can
share their thoughts and comments over the app. It’s also a great way of crowdsourcing
questions. My work is to select the best ones and weave them into discussion.
A big advantage of employing technology (Engagenow in this case) to your Q&A, is a smooth
flow of your event. The moderator doesn’t have to ask around for questions, waiting for
raised hands, but can just look onto their smartphone.
4. Ice breakers
If you’re dealing with a small group of people (eg. in a workshop) you should introduce a
few ice breakers to start the meeting on a friendly basis. Your audience in most cases
consists of unfamiliar people and some activities will help them feel more comfortable.
Here is an example taken from a conference where I was involved. There were about 30
people sitting in a circle and the moderator was asking two people to step into the middle.
Their task was to say as many expressions as they could, connected to certain ideas, in a
limited period of time.
Ideas were like: Social Media, David Bowie, smartphones or McDonalds. All of the
participants had the opportunity to get to know each other just a little bit by discovering
associations coming to others minds.
Here are four of the best resources with ice-breakers that I found: 1, 2, 3, 4.
5. Social networks
The most important social network that enhances a conference is Twitter, but there are a
few things to remember to leverage its full potential.
There are a few things to remember when using Twitter at an interactive conference:
Hashtags make it easier to pierce through all the tweets published at the conference and
gather them together.
Ask your speakers for their handles and share them alongside their photos, so your guests can
engage into the discussion even before the conference.
Use photos. Tweets with images get 18% more clicks, 89% more Likes and 150% more
Retweets.
Tweet the essence of each talk to share the valuable information with your followers and
start a discussion. Keep the conversation going by responding to tweets and engaging with
other discussions under the common hashtag. You can use this phrase to connect your
online discussion with the real word: “Let’s continue with this topic at the lunch break”.
But as always – with great power comes great responsibility – people may unsubscribe from
the event if you are spamming them with irrelevant information.
Good practice is to show the social media discussion on the big screen at the event
using Social Hub. It can collect all of the posts from certain accounts (eg. official conference
accounts) or hashtags.
6. Networking
For many people, networking is the highlight of any professional meeting, giving them the
possibility to grow their business by attracting partners or customers.
Here are some tips to network like a pro:
Prepare a list of people that you want to talk to. Remember that quality comes before
quantity, so choose carefully.
Next comes a list of topics for a discussion (Live chat platforms like Engagenow or Twitter
feed will be helpful)
Calmly and confidently join a discussion or hook someone up. Coming early may be helpful
as there will not be a lot of competition.
Conversation: Listen to what people are saying and don’t interrupt. Remember as many
details as you can, especially a name.
Introduce someone you just met to other people.
Connect via LinkedIn or Twitter to be remembered.
To sum up
Applying interactivity to your conference will make it an unforgettable experience for the
audience. I hope my advice will help you plan your own event with the trend of two way
communication. If you give the voice to your audience, they will come back for more!
Still hesitating? I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you may have