With the recent global quarantining procedures affecting daily life for many office workers, the value of webinars, video conferences, online demos, and so on, has increased quite a bit.

Businesses who may not have used virtual means of doing business in earnest are now discovering not just their value during a global work-at-home situation, but it’s highly likely that this event will leave virtual meetings to be even more in-demand once the situation settles down.

With this in mind, it’s important to find out what events should fit such a new medium of business communication, and surprisingly, they’re quite similar to in-person events you might already be hosting. Let’s dig in.

Workshops

Workshops, courses, academies, and training sessions you would normally have held in-person are one of the easiest events to translate onto the digital world. Entire universities offer courses that are entirely online, and it’s really not that hard to do it yourself for your business purposes.

But what if you never held any sort of coursework before? If you haven’t noticed, it’s actually becoming more and more popular for businesses to offer free courses, certifications for their products, and other training sessions that can cover a wide range of products and services.

It’s a great way to generate leads, engage your network, and share knowledge that can help them.

As workshops and courses go, university systems were the first early adopters of this technology, and you can even find entire accredited universities that are completely online. No physical classrooms or in-person meetings.

This has become even more in-demand as far as other examinations go, including certificates so that you can become certified in other tools, products, and services through online work.

Your own business can easily offer something similar by identifying a piece of knowledge you want to share and teach to others that are related to your offerings. A webinar is the perfect medium for classes as it can be offered privates but to scalable audiences as well as be recorded for future classes or for review.

Interviews

Interviews can be done live with industry leaders or influencers that should help out while everyone is back home. In fact, live streaming and media streaming skyrocketed during the coronavirus quarantined areas in the US.

People working from home are looking for entertainment more than ever, and an interview with someone popular may just be the thing that puts attention on your brand.

Simply set up a webinar with a lot of pre-promotion, and have your guest dial into the call for an interview.

Obviously, a real in-person interview level of care will still be needed for a webinar version, so make sure your questions are well informed and relevant to the speaker and the topic of discussion.

Panels

Like interviews, panel discussions are easy enough to host as webinars, this would need some cues from the host, and so we recommend that there be a webcam for each speaker so the small visual cues they can give will aide in the flow of the conversations. Small gestures and hand movements can help “pass the mic”.

If this isn’t enough for a chatty group, depending on the type of webinar host you use, you could even force-mute other speakers in a quasi “virtual gavel banging” to help other speakers get a chance to speak up.

Check out our guide on how to host webinars.

AMAs

AMAs, otherwise known as Ask Me Anything, are basically a Q&A event, which may not be a typical in-person event, but they’re quite a new online-only event that was started via Reddit threads where people of notable, popular, interesting, or niche positions or experiences lead a thread of public Q&As.

This can be developed for businesses that are now working mostly online these days.

This means either finding someone within or outside of your organization who would be an interesting individual for your audience.

Almost like an Interview, an Ask Me Anything topic gets the audience involved. Instead of a host asking questions, a webinar version of AMAs would ideally have the audience members chime into the call with questions of their own for the speaker.

Again this will require some administration from the webinar platform, but if done correctly, it can create a very engaging event and it lets your audience get involved, so it’ll likely stick out to them compared to other competing webinars that are swamping inboxes these days.

Office Hours

Office Hours are a strictly in-person, and someone school-oriented, ‘events’. But the reality is that this a great time to get some one-on-one time with customers. Now that you’re working from home, why not create a public webinar where single users can call into you for a quick chit chat.

“Office Hours” for you could be a link to your webinar where only one attendee can come in at a time and it lets them speak freely with a company or organization’s leadership to speak freely and ask questions.

While not public, these events are something that can be personal, intimate, and accessible. Since you’re at home, it’s unlikely you’ll need to run around an office, and so taking the time to let customers or members dial-in can leave a lot more transparency to your organization during times of distancing from each other.

Take the reigns

There are probably other events that fit in a webinar format, and if you’re comfortable with physical events that you’re used to, try to explore how those can be translated into webinars that are engaging and use some technical help to make it actually even more scalable.

Maybe your events sell out, where now you can handle any number of attendees. Maybe you have problems with speakers joining for logistical reasons who can now guarantee to join since they’re always going to be at home now on. There’s a lot of opportunity lying in wait during social distancing, and it’s up to you how to best make sure of everyone new time found at home.

If you’re looking for help to not only host webinars, but to present them in a way that’s professional, promote your webinar, and even ticket for them, contact us at Glue Up and we’ll show you how you can get started with our all-in-one event management software for both events in person and online.