Manufacturers attending Infor’s annual Inforum customer conference later this month won’t have to worry about lining up corporate travel approvals in advance or filling out those pesky travel and expense forms. That’s because Inforum, scheduled for Oct. 20 and 21, for the first time will be conducted exclusively online in deference to customers’ recession-impacted travel budgets.
“This year, our customers have a limited ability to be outside of the office,” said Julie Thompson, the company’s director of corporate meetings and events. “But we still wanted to provide the educational content that they want, so we decided on a virtual conference.”
Infor’s virtual conference will include video webcasts of keynote speeches and sessions consisting of audio and PowerPoint presentations covering 14 different content tracks. Customers also will participate in online “birds of a feather” discussions and chats, much as they would at a physical conference, Thompson said.
Infor isn’t the only software vendor canceling its in-person customer conference this year in favor of a virtual event that combines webcasts, online chats, and Web-based themed discussions. Syclo, a provider of mobile field service applications, also transformed its fifth annual customer conference in July into a virtual event. Officials from both companies said they decided on virtual conferences as recession-inspired travel restrictions threatened to significantly reduce on-premise attendance.
“We saw attendance at other events being cut in half due to tight [travel] budgets,” said Joe Granda, executive vice president of marketing at Syclo. “But the last thing we wanted to do was cancel our event altogether. We wanted to make sure we got as many people participating given the economic climate.”
At the same time, even vendors that have continued with traditional customer conferences have been investing more in virtual extensions. Enterprise software giant SAP AG, for example, mounted a major virtual component to its Sapphire customer conference, which took place May 11-14 in Orlando, FL. The virtual Sapphire offerings included live keynote webcasts, a virtual show floor, and selected session content online. While attendance at the physical Sapphire dipped from about 13,000 in 2008 to 10,000 in 2009, the online Sapphire content has so far attracted more than 15,000 visitors, said Marty Homlish, SAP’s chief marketing officer.
Besides saving travel expenses, virtual conferences offer other benefits, vendors say. Customers, for example, can access keynote speeches and other content over a longer period when they are posted online. Keynote sessions and industry-specific software demos from Sapphire, for example, are still available on SAP’s website.
Vendors can also attract a larger and more varied audience to an online conference, they say.
But virtual conferences can’t match physical events in some important respects, vendors acknowledge. Virtual keynotes and other presentations must be shorter, Syclo’s Granda said, because online audiences often have shorter attention spans. But, perhaps most importantly, virtual events don’t deliver the marketing punch or networking opportunity of live, physical events. For SAP, Homlish said, Sapphire is important as an opportunity to bring the company’s substantial customer and partner ecosystem under one roof.
“Marketing is about winning the battle of hearts and minds, and when you see 700,000 square feet of exhibition floor covered with our eco-system, there’s a groundswell of influence there,” Homlish said.