5:2 Building community through virtual and hybrid events

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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. My name is Lee Matthew Jackson, and today we have a wonderful co-host. It is Mr. Adam Parry, and we are joined by the one, the only. It's Baris. How are you, sir?

Baris:
I'm all right. Thank you so much. How are you all doing?

Lee:
We're wonderful. How are you, Adam?

Adam:
I'm very well, thank you. Well, typical weather in Manchester, it's raining, so I'd rather be somewhere sunny, but there you go.

Lee:
No worries. And Barish, you are from Turkey. I believe you- I was somewhere sunny not so long ago.

Baris:
So it just came back to this horrible weather. But what can you do?

Lee:
Welcome. We always talk about the weather. So you are the founder of Precision Communities. What I'd love to, first of all, find out from you both is how you guys met and what circles you rubbed shoulders in.

Adam:
Well, I feel, but it's like we've known each other for a long time now, almost to the point where I can't remember the first time we met. But I do feel like we were introduced through to a common mutual friend, Mr. Mccoy, maybe his time at visit N200. I think so. I'm pretty sure we've had you speak many times at Event Tech Live as well, mate.

Baris:
Yeah, this is what happens in the industry, I guess, because It's a very incest industry. It's called people don't change much. So you know each other for such a long time that you just lose track of who you met where because we attend so many events. And Adam, you do some of those events that we meet regularly. So basically, you lose track of where you started in the first place.

Lee:
So you've known Adam essentially just before his voice broke. That's amazing. So I'd love to jump in a time with you, Time Machine, Boris, and just find out a little bit about Precision Communities and what sparked the idea for it, and I guess how have virtual events changed since then?

Baris:
Well, absolutely. I cut my teeth in the industry working for the very big, let's say, companies like Hive, Tarsus, all those big ones, and I did big jobs with them. In doing so, I was always in charge of the, let's say, digital marketing, sales marketing, all those things for those companies. And I always was trying to emphasise that we could do better with the digital side of what we're doing on the customer experience and other things. So that was my overall background. And with the pandemic, that suddenly became a thing. That suddenly became the main thing. And so during the big pandemic shuffle, I created my own company. And you remember the time when digital was the only game in town because we were locked down and everything. So precision communities came into fruition back then because I had a thesis that there are a lot of communities out there that meet digitally all the time. Then they show up to events. And they do not belong to the event as a community because they're in a community in their own right. Maybe they're on Reddit, maybe they're in something else. Maybe it's a Facebook group.

Baris:
I have no idea. And these now, all of a sudden, during the pandemic, They had a level playing ground with an event organiser because the event organiser could not do its face-to-face big pitch, so they found themselves on level footing. So we created the company to give our years of know-how events to community managers and to communities out there and to partner up with them to build digital events, digital assets, media publishing for them. So That's how we created the first spark of the company.

Lee:
Yeah, that's amazing. And you mentioned, of course, the pandemic. Dare we talk about that season of our lives? Just off the record, I miss always being at home. It was great. I have to go out now. On that, we're actually seeing that people are going back into in-person events. What's the future looking like in particular for these virtual events, for communities, etc?

Baris:
When we started, We never envisaged that events were dead or this is why we're doubling down on digital. It's going to remain this way. We had another thesis that that phase would end, but it would leave virtual at a much transformed place. And I'll just use my hands to visualise this. Virtual was this before the pandemic. It went on to become the everything. Then it came down to that. But if you just forget the pandemic, between pre and post-pandemic, now, it's almost five, six fold bigger or maybe 10 times bigger, virtual events. Because the thing is, it was something of a ridicule, virtual events. Who wants that? Then everyone tried their luck at virtual events. Some did it well, some didn't. But the whole world got exposed to virtual events. It's not something alien to anyone anymore during the pandemic. And then, of course, we went back to face-to-face events, and we fully support face-to-face events. But the residual growth in the virtual has been exponential. So that's why we are now still continuing on virtual-only mode, because that's how we are set up as a company to for virtual events around the world or global audiences.

Baris:
But the market has grown exponentially. The blip during the pandemic was always going to be a blip. It was not ever going to replace face-to-face events or face-to-face instruction. But now I think we're in a place where it's incomparable to pre-pandemic levels. So it's much bigger now.

Adam:
If I could ask you a question around both communities and what we just discussed there with Virtual Digital Events Baris. Do you think there is more opportunity for the events market to capitalise on virtual events and communities, or is there more opportunity for those who run communities to capitalise on virtual events and physical events? I'm trying to understand, if I were to look three to five years into the future or maybe a decade into the future, where's the growth potential in the market? Is it the ones with experience or is it the ones with the communities? I'd be interested to see what you think on that.

Baris:
Yeah, you're asking me who's going to hit who's lunch? I think it's mostly the Currently, I think, at least, the advantage is with the event organiser, definitely. Because there's the experience, the community has, how do I put this, a tradition of being there. And it's a date. It comes and we go. So that is unbeatable, right? But on the community side, we work with some communities that are growing, that we do global events for, and we get asked, When is the next event in person? And we always say, Well, we don't do in person. They're like, Oh, really? Why? So that conversation, I think, is maybe coming for some communities that they might go up and do their own runs. But we're lucky as the events industry, because the barrier to entry to actually doing an event is quite a big jump if you've never done it before. And there are not too many companies out there that would do a turnkey event for you from scratch. And I think it's a great example of this was David Audrain's ExpoDevCo. In the US, he has done turnkey events, and it's a big business. It's really powerful.

Baris:
But if there were So many of those available to communities who want to do their own shows, their own conferences for a fee. Maybe that would happen. But I don't see that as an existential looming threat to the in-person event organising companies because of two reasons. One, the communities by themselves are generally not very well structured. They are not an entity. They don't have a commercial side. It's a community of people that have come together somehow on some platform. That's the way state we find them, at least. We don't go and say, Okay, you're an existing company with a 10,000 community. Let's run that for you. That doesn't really happen much. So the types of people that find us are different. And the second one is, I think we, as the events industry, putting myself into that lot, we've learned a bit in the pandemic. I want to say that we did learn our lesson in it. Because pre-pandemic, you remember there was no burning platform, and we got the mother of all burning platforms. And so basically, I see most of our peers trying to do a better job at digital, trying to do a better job at transforming themselves, trying to do a better job at serving their communities outside the show as well.

Baris:
So basically, I think we learned less than working actively on it.

Adam:
I think one of the things that just from your explanation there that jumped to my mind was actually the short term opportunity is for existing event organisers with events to find the communities that have something in common, some relationship to them, and actually work with that community to offer them a space or a place, a moment in time to come together in a physical capacity. And then in some way, that's a benefit to them. I mean, the number one goal of every event organiser is to grow their audience, right? And we have venues and infrastructure and things in place. So maybe hat's the short term opportunity for event organisers to say, Hey, there's a community of people over here. Let's bring them in.

Baris:
I think you're absolutely right. This brings me back to one of the first, let's say, events that we've done virtually. And one of the speakers was speaking on communities. And the first thing she said was, If you're thinking about launching a community, start by joining one. I think that that is a great advice for anyone and for us event organisers. Everyone now think about your own event. You can be sure there are people that are gathering online in the topic or an adjacent topic to what you're organising an event annually on. So it's your benefit to reach out to them and give them a platform to meet up because they do want to meet up. I think Adam, you're absolutely right. That is a low-hanging fruit that is maybe not addressed actively by the industry.

Lee:
I think I'd love to share an experience I've had. I Over, say, the last nine years, I've run a podcast called Trailblazer FM, and I grew a huge audience of web developers and web designers all around the world. We even had a Facebook group, which I eventually deleted because it was far too much work, which had over 4,000 people in there, which was amazing. But what you described earlier is very true. You have this globally spread out community, and they are all meeting in one place, i.e, the digital space. So I thought, Well, this is a great opportunity for me to put on a physical event. I did that in 2018, which went really well. It was a conference. A few people from around the world tried to fly in, but obviously, we're all coming to the UK here. Predominantly, we had UK people in there. But I also found that despite the size of my audience, actually getting people to get tickets and get them in the room was way harder than I expected. Thankfully, we hit about 80 people in the room, which was good because we had a good size room and we didn't want too many, but I didn't want five people to show up either.

Lee:
That was a very difficult experience. Sorry, that Was that early 2019? Whenever it was. But anyway, the pandemic hit in 2020, that was it. I'd already done the second, let's all do this in 2020. We'd sold the tickets and everything. We were forced to go online. We managed to mosey on through and didn't do a bad job. Then as soon as everything was lifted, 2022, we did it in person again. But I did find, again, that people from around the globe were unable to get in either through new fears of travel, of new costs as well, because the costs were spiralling, et cetera. Also just a change in mindset for a lot of people as well. Why isn't this just an online event? Why can't you do this digitally? I've been considering for the last few months, maybe doing my event again, but just completely digitally to test, do we get more attendees? Is this something that's more attractive to my community? Because we're not organised around any particular business. We're just a whole lot of folks who have a massive amount in common when it comes to design and development, as opposed to the other example that you chaps were talking about earlier with regards to an event where there's a focused industry and people are looking and merging together.

Lee:
You got anything to read into that?

Baris:
Well, I think really one of my recent, let's say, at one of my recent events, I was chairing a panel. One of the speakers tuned in from Australia. It was 1:00 AM where they are. I was in London, and the other speaker was in Chicago. So it was early morning. And you cannot do that in person. But nonetheless, the value of an in-person interaction is immeasurably higher than any of us. And we know that, and we're not challenging this. But not everything Can't grant a face-to-face meeting anymore. Because face-to-face, I've written extensively about this on LinkedIn, and the value of face-to-face interaction, I have a pyramid, it's at the top. So you don't go to the top for everything. But before the pandemic, it was. Remember, all the client meetings were face-to-face. You would travel, you would look up to a building, get your ID, go to the floor, whatever, meet somebody. That That was okay. That was it. You would have one client meeting per day, maybe two. You would fly to meet clients. And now we just do everything. It's socially acceptable. It's new norm. So therefore, at the beginning of the podcast, when I talked about virtual going from this to that, but shrinking to a much bigger degree, this is why.

Baris:
This is why I think now there is a space for the lower, let's say, of meetings that people are okay to do online, to be done online in mass. So therefore, this is the niche we're playing to with our virtual events. But that doesn't negate, or actually even, I think imitations really glorify the actual thing. So basically, it even amplifies the importance of the actual face-to-face meeting that is unmissable, and it's not something you can Trump by just doing too many digitals, and it doesn't add up to that face-to-face. Therefore, these two forces are, I think, helping each other to a new level.

Adam:
No, it's fine. I think as well, there's a case for doing what you can digitally around thought leadership, education, discussing ideas, discussing day-to-day challenges as a community. And then actually the in-person piece, the value there is, and me and Barish know this as well as anybody else when we go to industry events, is the conversations in the aisles, in the networking drinks, at the after-party, at the breakfast in the morning. I think we spend so much time with the value proposition of come to our event and learn and get educated. But for anybody, whether they're senior leadership or in marketing or any of these other disciplines, to be sat in a conference room for eight hours just looking at a stage, I don't know. Me personally, I question that. Don't get me wrong, there are amazing events out that do that very, very well. But where I get the most value personally of attending any event is spending time with those people that I rarely get to meet and catching up with them and discussing ideas on one-to-one or in groups and things like that. So I would hope that the reason to come together is actually the dwell time and spending time and those things rather than necessarily having the conversation around something that arguably we could do online.

Adam:
I think that's my... If I was to relaunch everything again, maybe that's the way that I would go. Trade Show model is slightly different, don't get me wrong. But from a conferencing event or a community event or things like that. That's maybe lagging in my head from all those conversations we had through the pandemic about formats, but I still feel like that's still true, even today.

Baris:
I'm going to second that. I'm sorry, Yeah, go ahead. By saying another thing that we learned when we launched the business. I fell into the trap of copying something on a one-to-one. We tried to recreate an in-person event online. And what we've done is, okay, there's this session, and then there's networking break, session, networking break. That's the way we did the first event. And we did spend a lot of money to get some virtual round tables and, let's say, randomised one-to-one calls, all that stuff. We built lots of... Not built, but purpose, lots of technology available at Adam's show, anyway. So what we done is because we thought people wanted to speak to each other. That really flopped. Because we realised online, just like you said, Adam, people's reason for attendance is actually the content. They want to listen to the content. Networking is maybe number three, number four, because they are dipping in and out to a virtual event. You don't sit in front of your TV for eight hours watching a virtual event. You come in, watch something, you go. You come in, you go, because you know you're going to get the recording anyway.

Baris:
So that's the way that format works. So we've gradually given up on that virtual networking because people are at least the audience that the audiences we cater to, did not require it. But they do require to know who's in the room. They want to know, okay, this person is maybe I want to reach out on message. Maybe I want to reach out on LinkedIn. That is incredibly valuable. So networking is there, but not like this, not clicking a button and jumping on a video call with someone randomly because it just didn't work. So we learned through the pandemic that that is reserved for face-to-face. People who want to talk, they want to talk face-to-face. They want to talk on this medium with people that they don't know.

Lee:
One funny story for us is we were on one of those virtual events, Tim and I. Tim got stuck with a really random conversation on one of those. It's almost like speed networking environments, which was really, really awkward for him. The chap was in the complete wrong industry and they were stuck together for, I think it was the longest five minutes of Tim's life, trying to make small talk until it all reset and he got to meet someone else. But just on that, though, you mentioned that people dip in and out of virtual events, and I hear that as a common frustration of event organisers where they want to see loads of people online engaging in the content and stuff like that. So these are the metrics they're doing. Is that, again, a mistake of, say, the event organiser who's, especially if they say, sold sponsorship, et cetera, are they measuring a virtual event how you would measure an in-person event? And is that the wrong way to go around that We have come to accept that fact.

Baris:
We thought we would, No, we just do this. If we add more, I don't know, features, people are going to stay. People won't stay. Because I I accepted this fact now. As an organiser of virtual events in the past four years, we don't beat ourselves with people not staying. That's not the stick we beat ourselves with. The thing is, because when you're doing a virtual event, you don't have the full attention of your audience. Your audience is physically not in the room. Your audience is..

Lee:
Including people who listen to this podcast are probably doing emails and half listening to us. I'm calling you out.

Baris:
Maybe they're taking a walk. Maybe they're doing some chores with the headphones in their ears. I don't know. Or there's the next tab on your The grocery is Netflix. Who knows what can happen? It's Game of Thrones. So the thing is, in virtual events, we should not aspire, even, to deliver an attention value on par with face-to-face. It's not going to happen. So what can you aspire to deliver better, even better than in-person is interactions, downloads, digital measurement of what the The audience is doing and actually wanting, polls, this, that. So these are the things that you can do even better than face to face. So let's focus on those things. And most of our sponsors are in it for the data, because we give them access to portions that listen to them, to their session or stuff like that. Or we give them their own registration form and they send it out. So all these things, the data play, the interaction, the deeper knowledge of the people in the room, that is more valuable, I think, rather than people actually listening to you talk about 30 minutes or whatever. Because the attention span, as you just said, are going lower and lower and lower.

Baris:
And if I am watching something, it is very... This can happen, but it's very hard to create a moment where it feels more than watching. And That interaction is really hard to put together. I cannot claim that I can always get it right in that regard.

Adam:
I think, how would you define a community? What are the key ingredients for it to be a community in your eyes? Is that size and scale? Is that interaction? Is that the purpose of the community? I don't know, Baris, we are part of community What is ourselves that we're active participants in. What are the secret ingredients or what do you think are the ingredients? And I guess just bouncing on from that as a further thought, once you've answered that, is what advice would you give anybody looking to start a community maybe in 2025 going forward, whether that could be a platform to work with or that could be a place to start or something like that? I think people are looking for those tangible frameworks of how to get a community going?

Baris:
Sure. On the first one, the difference between an audience and a community is I think the community will come together regardless of you putting an event or not. They don't need you. If the community needs you to be together, it's not a real community. It's an audience. It's a broadcast. If the community comes together on its own, if it's self-organizing, if it's finding its ways of coming together digitally, that is a community. So that's That's why we want to work with people like that, because we know there are real communities. And then we give them the secret source of events and media and all that stuff. So I think that's the biggest, let's say, test that you can do. Would they come together if your event flared away tomorrow morning? If the answer is yes, then you're working in a space that can foster a community or the community is already there. Now, the slight drawback for event organisers, me being one, is that the events we want to put together are much bigger than our communities that we can find. So basically, you should think of your event as a collection of communities, not one big community.

Baris:
Because I'm going to pick on you now, Adam, in your show. There are different audiences, different personas. It's not one big community of event tech live goers. There are definitely registration people. There are marketing people. There are this people, that people. Those But for those communities, you can be sure they exist online. You can be sure there's a WhatsApp group of those communities. I'm not going to give you any advice on your successful show, but if I were you, I would focus on finding who those are and working with them, giving them a platform, giving them a stage, or making them more engaged with the show. And to hold a big trade show like yours together, you need multiple communities in conjunction. So the last question, if you're thinking of Starting a community, start by joining one and see how it goes. Because just like in events, we've all been there. It was like event entrepreneurs. There is an event for everything already out there. So start by going to that event and then see how you can beat it if you want to do a better one. So basically, if you want to start a community, I would wager 99 % that community currently exists today.

Baris:
Start by joining it and see what happens. And Then if you can really find a value proposition that can transcend the original, do it. If not, just don't.

Adam:
Great advice.

Lee:
That is very good advice. I'm just thinking here, an example I guess, of a community, for me, at least, would be the WordPress community. This is for those that don't know, it's a content management system online. It runs about 40% plus of the internet. I'm pretty sure, Adam, you've used it, haven't you, on event industry news? Et cetera. There is a huge WordPress community out there. And yet even looking at that WordPress community, there are many sections of it. There are the developers, there are the designers, there are the users, there are the people that use mid-level tools to create websites who don't even know how to code and don't even know how to design. There's all of these different pockets of communities, and it's very hard to create a catch-all WordPress community. But it is very easy to say, Right, I'm going to focus in on agencies, design agencies that work with WordPress, and that's where I live because that's what I do in my business as well, and I'm going to meet all of those people. And I think the mistake I've made listening to you and only just having this moment is I have very often kind of focused on the big overall or overarching community, and given myself, a terribly difficult job, you know, trying to attract everybody, as opposed to just focusing in on, that particular area. But equally, I think what I'm hearing here is that for potential growth, I should recognise that there are different pockets of communities as well, not just agency owners, but there's also freelances over here who have many of the same needs as agencies, but also have their own unique needs in their own communities, etc. And broaden the net slowly where things are relationary. Is that a word? I made that word up.

Adam:
Relationary is a word, man. I totally get what you mean. I think we often to... Just in general, I think this is the same for every industry, every entrepreneur, everybody, we think bigger is better, right? We always look that scale is a sign of progress. Somebody said to me years and years ago that riches are in the niches, as in the value is often in the really small, really tight elements of our lives. And it's not... Bigger doesn't mean better. It just means there's more of it, which is actually sometimes harder to actually get the value out of. Whereas I'm sure if you come to our show, Baris, if you come, you're not interacting with 100% of it, you're interacting with the 10, 5% that really is a value to you. And I think we often go the wrong way in direction of thinking that in order to provide value, we need to be the biggest, the best, the most, where actually we probably don't. Actually taking away and just focussing right down on the agency element for WordPress organisers and stuff like that is the way to go.

Lee:
I was exhausted. That's why I closed the group down eventually, because I went very, very, very broad. As opposed to now, I have a very a small list of just agencies, and that's the most valuable list I've ever had. I actually get replies to the emails as opposed to the thousands of people that I was messaging in the past. Now, Barish, I'd really love... You've had what, four years now of virtual events? I'd love to hear one or two success stories that you've had with online events, some customer feedback that you've had.

Baris:
Yeah, I'll give you one. In the company, we own one of the communities that we with. And that was a pet project because when we were starting out, now I can tell you all these things, how I think it is. When we started out, we didn't know. So it was really hard to convince anyone to trust us with your community. We started with creating one. We went against the grain of everything we believed in and everything we learned in doing events. Don't do an event for a community that you're not part of, but we did it. Anyway, in the world of agencies, though, it's called the Agency Growth Events. So we've created a brand that caters to digital agency owners. And like Adam said, Riches are in the niches. We really tuned this because there are lots of agency events, and lots of them are for everybody in the agency world. But we wanted to create because of our B2B events experience, we wanted to make sure that we only get the decision makers. So we created a niche that will appeal only to founders of agencies, to no one else. So we created this brand called Agency Growth Events, and we talk only about how to grow your agency faster.

Baris:
Is it through profitability tools or I don't know, anything you can think of. But only about if you're a digital agency and only about accelerating your growth. And there are levels to growth, like starting up, raise to 10, and then scale, super scale, exiting. It's all those things. And Now, three years, something later, that community is 5,200 agencies strong around the world. And we do two flagship events in the year. They're all virtual, but we get hundreds and hundreds of people coming in. We publish ebooks with them, and those are downloaded thousands of times. And we got AA great big sponsors coming our way to be part of our shows and books and things. It has second time, but it has taken It has grown because it was a very small niche. It did not cater to the social media Marketing Manager in the agency. They didn't care. It did not appeal to the graphic designer at the agency, but it appealed only to the founder. When you choose your audience as a niche and you speak to them, then at some point you get heard. That is our biggest success story so far, that brand, Agency Growth Events.

Baris:
The I think that the main thing has been the choice at the inception of going very niche, not broad. Because if you wanted to go abroad, there's the drama and there's the really big, let's say, people out there that do a fantastic job of catering to the world with industries. Like Adam, industry news, awards, trade show, everything. You cannot start and compete with Event Tech Live just because you know a few Event Tech person. But Adam, your competition, when it comes, it will come from a niche, definitely, of people who do X in the region of Y. When you put those parameters and really hone in, that's where you can, in that niche, thrive and build something. So that's, I think, the biggest advice I can give to anyone who wants to build a media brand, who wants to build a community, who wants to build a media community brand, and then eventually move on to events, is to start with a very small niche that you can relate and actually pinpoint. Go on LinkedIn, you can find these people by name, by position, search founder. I don't know, whatever it is. So you want to pinpoint people that you want to invite to the community because when they start joining, they start talking to each other and others join, others join, others join.

Baris:
So that's how it becomes a movement.

Lee:
Yeah, that's really good. I think my biggest takeaway here, I think we've solved which came first, the chicken or the egg, and what comes first is the community and then build on from there, which is phenomenal. Any takeaways yourself, Adam, from this conversation?

Adam:
I think I have to agree with you. I think the most successful events are born out of those who organise the events being right at the start and centre and connected to the people that they're bringing together, right? I know for me, personally, a lot of our exhibitors really value the fact that I've got a very close personal relationship with them even after 10 years. And I think just paying real keen interest into seeing that element of that community grow and that part of the industry grow really does serve you right. The only thing I would probably say, and this is just maybe my own selfish way of thinking of things, because this is the way that we went with the media, we went broad. When a lot of people go niche, niche with media. So we went industry-wide rather than exhibitions or conferences and stuff like that. But the events and the awards, we went niche. So that's the way that we went in terms of our structure. And maybe that's one way that you could roll things out.

Lee:
That's amazing. Well, folks, thank you very much for tuning in with us. First of all, Adam, what's the best way for people to connect with you?

Adam:
You can reach me on linkedin.com/adam.parry, I think it is.

Lee:
Awesome. We'll make sure there are links in the description. And Baris, which is the best way to connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.

Baris:
Just search me on, find me on LinkedIn, and I'll be happy to connect and talk to you.

Lee:
Awesome. You're going to have some new LinkedIn buddies, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great day, folks, and we'll speak to you real soon.Cheerio.

Baris:
Bye now.

Baris:
Cheers