Archives for February 2009

A survey released a couple of weeks back by virtual event solutions provider, ON24, shows again the momentum in virtual worlds for enterprise. ON24 surveyed ten thousand or so enterprise executives – no details are provided on the survey sample demographics or method. We’ve contacted ON24 to clarify that and will update this story with any response they provide.

Update: ON24 have responded with the following: “The survey sample included 10,000 decision makers of corporate events and marketing within the Fortune 2500 segment in North America. The sample included all industries.”

ON24 provide four key results from their survey on trends in meeting attendance:

42% expect participation in physical trade shows to be down by as much as 50%
64% expect to have fewer physical sales kick off seminars – or none at all
60% expect training, management and other internal events to be down 20 – 50%
A full 76% said their company has already begun using virtual events (53%) or plans to begin using them (23%) to supplement some of their physical events in 2009

The promising findings in regard to views on virtual meetings were:

While 61% said they would miss seeing people in person, less than half felt they would miss traveling to other locations (34%), enjoying the social activities (36%) or seeing speakers in person (20%). Respondents found several aspects of virtual participation to be particularly appealing:

75% appreciated that there is no travel required
64% liked that they can attend the virtual sessions on their own time schedules
58% found it useful to be able to “forward” to their colleagues virtual sessions that they thought would be of interest to them

More than one third of respondents cited the social networking benefits of virtual events, including the ability to see a list of all attendees in advance (35%); to contact other attendees online throughout the event (40%) and to get information on people (32%) and companies (34%) they meet electronically.

Essentially, the argument is that the economic difficulties business faces at present will make virtual events more desirable from a cost viewpoint. This is a very valid argument, but one that needs to be made in combination with a well-integrated virtual meeting solution. Those are already hitting the marketplace, so perhaps virtual worlds for enterprise will continue to defy the economic trends in the real world.

Locally, Ross Dawson’s Future Exploration Network is running its Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum again this year. I had the pleasure of facilitating a small-group discussion on virtual worlds and business last year and I’m looking forward to doing something similar again this year by facilitating a 20-minute mini-workshop.

Thanks to VW News for the heads-up on the ON24 survey.