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How to Prepare Speakers to Use Audience Response Apps for Greater Attendee Engagement

Preparing speakers and presenters to use Audience Response Systems and event technolgy for greater attendee engagement

The greatest advantage of event apps and audience response apps is to give your attendees a voice.

Instead of passing around microphones in a large audience of 1,000 attendees, an event app or audience response app can be used to capture hundreds of questions instantly from curious attendees.

Equally important – activities such as brainstorming can be scaled up to hundreds and thousands of participants with the same rich participation that you get from groups of 8 to 10 people. While these technologies are loaded with capabilities – it’s very likely that most of these technologies will be new to your speakers. This post provides a guide to help you prepare your presenters to use these tools in their presentations and workshops.

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Realistic and Improved Lead Capture for Small Trade Shows Staffed By Field Sales Reps

improved lead capture for small trade shows combines game with lead retrieval app

We’ve had very similar discussions recently with several exhibitors who have big trade show programs with big booths, but also lots of smaller shows with 10 x 10 booths that they, as the trade show manager, never get to.  Those small shows are staffed by field sales people or channel partners who have no face-to-face contact with the trade show manager.

And while it doesn’t happen every time, far too often the sales people staffing the booth don’t send the leads back to the home office.

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What Is Audience and Attendee Engagement? That Depends On Who’s Asking

Attendee engagement at events and business meetings

Audience and attendee engagement have become the gateway to success for events.

If your meeting or event has a prayer of justifying its costs, you can’t settle for passive audience participation – your attendees must be fully engaged so they emotionally bond with your company, group, or message, and retain that memorable positive experience after they leave.

But as I work to increase audience engagement with our clients, I’ve found that there are three distinct groups of stakeholders, who have different viewpoints on what is audience and attendee engagement.  And that matters because these three groups are joined at the hip, and thus need to better understand their different viewpoints, to enable better collaboration.

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Fun Trade Show Games Ideas with Your Logo to Play in Your Booth

trade show games

Trade show games are a proven, yet dramatically underused activity to get more potential customers into your booth.  After hundreds of client game implementations, we know games attract a crowd and get attendees engaged with your booth staffers.

But, if using games in your booth is a new idea for you, you understandably need more info.  So, in this article, I will share with you several kinds of games and game aspects to consider in your decision.

Fun Games to Play To Attract Customers

fun trade show games to attract customers

The first factor is that your game must be fun!  You want people to be magnetically drawn into your booth because you are hosting a game that looks like fun, that their friends have told them is fun, and that they can see people already enjoying to play. And, not just any people, but your target customers.  Be mindful that what you think would be fun as a 25-year old man may not be fun to your target audience of 45-year old women – or vice versa. Make it fun for your customers, not you.

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Digital Fishbowl: New, Entry-Level Trade Show Game Made Powerful With Improved Lead Capture App

Digital Fishbowl enter to win screen on kiosk for trade show lead capture

SocialPoint has added a new interactive game to its suite of trade show games.  The Digital Fishbowl provides exhibitors another fun way to digitally collect leads at a trade show.  Attendees enter in their own data because they want to win a prize.  Attendees also fill out digital surveys and declare their interest level, helping qualify leads.

While the Digital Fishbowl joins our product suite as the lowest-priced game (at only $1,000 for first use and set up, and $750 a game after), it still includes the advantages of our other interactive games:

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How the CompTIA “ChannelCon” Hybrid Event Keeps Growing 4 Years In A Row

CompTIA ChannelCon Hybrid Event Studio

Four years ago, CompTIA contacted Interactive Meeting Technology/SocialPoint to help them deliver their first online event. The goal was to deliver an online, educational event to at least 100 attendees and have them remain online for at least two sessions.

CompTIA had nearly 1,000 registrants and over 300 attendees that first year.  Four years later, their attendee numbers have skyrocketed to well over 4,000.

This is how we did it, through a strong collaboration between us, the vendor, and an engaged and motivated client team.

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10 More Ways To Increase Event Attendee Engagement With Event Technology

10 more ways to engage event attendees with event technology

Last March, I shared 10 ways you can use event technology beyond polling to create more attendee engagement.  Recently I gave a webinar on attendee engagement and came up with 10 more ways, which is good, because your event audiences continue to expect more engagement!  Here they are:

1. Display and Accelerate Social Conversations

Display and accelerate social media conversations at events

At a large event, you can accelerate the social conversation by putting attendee social media posts on big visual displays. When you showcase social media messages on a big screen, attendees will naturally be more motivated to share more of their own social posts, because they want to see their own message up on the big screen, too!  The more they post, the more brand reach your event. You need big screens to make this happen.

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MEA Quickly Adapts To New Marketing Strategy With Easy SocialPoint Trade Show Game Platform

Interactive trade show game for MEA with happy team and great exhibit signage

New Marketing Goals Prompts Desire for New Interactive Trade Show Game

When Midwest Energy Association (MEA), a consortium of energy delivery industry organizations, decided in 2017 to completely change their go-to-market strategy, they decided to retain SocialPoint games – but with a different SocialPoint game to fit their new goals.

“We had success in 2015 and 2016 using SocialPoint’s Challenge Bar Trivia game,” said Lindsay Robertson, MEA Marketing and Communications Director. “The Trivia game worked well to attract and retain attendees, when our goal was to present everything we offer.  But, in 2017, we made a strategic shift at trade shows, so we needed a different approach.”

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How To Combine Gamification with Content and Experiential Marketing

Gamification Content Marketing and Experiential Marketing Combined For Trade Shows and Events

Pardon the sports metaphor, but our interactive trade show games are a marketing buzz word triple play!

If your marketing department has plans to implement Gamification, Content Marketing, or Experiential Marketing, 3 of the hottest trends in B2B marketing today, you can get the benefits of all three at once with our interactive games.

Let’s look at how our digital games are at the convergence of all 3 trends:

1. Gamification

According to Wikipedia, “Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts …. to improve user engagement …”

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What Is Audience Engagement For Events?

what is audience engagement for events

At their best, events are an explosion of content and ideas where we craft meaningful stories and create community.

However, events are also where we too often load everybody up with as much coffee as we can give them and then send them into a big, dark room with rows and rows of chairs to watch the CEO’s presentation up on a big screen!

Most attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes

As an event professional, you probably know that most attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes! We polled event professionals at a recent webinar, and 85% of the participants knew that attendees lose their attention after just 10 minutes.  And yet, so many meetings don’t seem to take that key fact into account when creating their conference content and agenda. (Read 20 reasons people attend conferences)

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