While we’ve all been staying home and being virtual, Paul has done some original research and I have written this white paper for Network Solutions on helpful tips and tricks for IT pros that are involved in supporting virtual events.

The results of Paul’s informal census is that folks can’t wait to get back to F2F. We all have been in our pandemic bubbles for far too long and the urge to have human contact and serendipitous hallway meetings is a big reason to return to the rubber chicken circuit. But we’ve all learned a lot in the meantime about what makes virtual events successful. At its heart, you are putting on a live TV show with a very small staff to handle the production. You need to plan accordingly on the mixture of live and pre-recorded segments and figure out what tech you are going to use, including the video conferencing and the event management tool. (The two are different and you should understand the differences, which I explain in my paper.)

But virtual events have their purposes, including creating content that can be archived and used for marketing purposes long after the last attendee has disconnected. Unlike physical events, this content can be helpful in bringing in new customers and supporting new marketing campaigns, as well as supporting existing customers with FAQs, for example. And they can be very cost effective to produce, since you aren’t picking up huge travel and event hosting fees.

Listen to our 17 min. podcast here:

Mitch Ratcliffe is a business, product and content marketing leader with 35 years of experience in local media, technology marketing, online and broadcast publishing. Among the successful businesses he’s helped launch are the ON24 conferencing platform and BuzzLogic influencer marketing agency. He’s also served on the founding board of directors of Match.com. Mitch shares our publication lineage with roles at Ziff-Davis, CMP and numerous other publishers. And he has a bionic neck! 

We spoke to Mitch about this recent post on Metaforce, his current digs. It touches on the changes that COVID-19 has wrought with modern B2B marketing. The new rule, he asserts, is to let no communication be wasted but also let no message waste your customer’s time. Engagement is an exercise in listening and serving, not selling.

One of the lasting effects of the pandem is that customers are embedded in their lives, not our brands.  That means the last marketing mile matters: The local network of SMBs and service providers associated with your brand creates a base of deeply engaged influencers who can work on your behalf. All marketing is going local in COVID’s wake. 

Listen to our 20 minute podcast here.

This week we discuss the Facebook ad boycott. Well, it really isn’t a total boycott but more like a brief pause by hundreds of major consumer brands in their advertising programs with Facebook and all of its social media platforms. CNN is keeping track of who is pulling their ads this month. However, the protests aren’t expected to hurt Facebook very much since most of its $70 billion in annual ad revenue comes from smaller businesses, something that Andrew Yang discusses on his podcast with cybersecurity pro John Redgrave and is worth listening to (after you listen to ours).

The effort was created by a group of anti-hate speech advocates such as NAACP and ADL under the banner of Stop Hate for Profit. That website lists their demands for changes to Facebook’s operations. We wonder why more B2B companies haven’t stepped up to this effort. I wrote a blog post with his point of view last month here. Shortly after we recorded this episode, the results of an internal audit were released, finding that Facebook’s “approach to civil rights remains too reactive and piecemeal.” Clearly the company still has a long way to go, particularly since top executives appear to be in denial that anything is wrong in the first place. I will post more about the audit results soon.

Facebook has also been criticized for some sloppy programming with its API, allowing discontinued mobile apps to still access private data. The company has made a lame and half-hearted response.

Speaking about other worthwhile podcasts, the NY Times tech columnist Kevin Roose has been producing a series called Rabbit Hole about how social networks in general, and YouTube in particular, suck people into echo chambers through their recommendation engines. It’s an unsettling series and well worth a listen if you want to know how Gen Z and  younger use social media.

You can listen to our 17 minute podcast here.