5:1 Maximising your event content

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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. This is your host, Lee. On today's show, we have the one and only. Hey, it's Bogdan from Visual Hive. Mate, how are you today?

Bogdan Maran:
Getting better. It's not raining anymore, so we're feeling better about it.

Lee:
You see, I quite enjoy the rain, though. I find it extremely relaxing, and I'm one of those people who listens to the rain to go to sleep.

Bogdan Maran:
Oh, God, I did the same thing. I do thunderstorm, specifically. I don't like the quiet rain, but I do have a dog and the kids, so I have to go out of the house quite a lot. I've got a Springer spaniel which is quite white, so it gets dirty every day.

Lee:
Oh, yeah. No, I can imagine that's no fun at all.

Bogdan Maran:
No, that's not the fun part of the rain, definitely.

Lee:
Not at all. Speaking of fun, though, and this is a Great segue. You are the founder of Visual Hive. Could you let us know what inspired Visual Hive and what it is that you guys do?

Bogdan Maran:
Visual Hive has a relatively long history, ironically. I started Visual Hive in 2019 out of an experiment. My background comes from media and photojournalism, specifically, and production. My best friend Nathan gives me this best description. I'm a former photojournalist turned data scientist. I really like the idea of what content is, regardless of the form of content. Content, technically speaking, nowadays is a behavioural trigger. It can be a bad or a good behavioural trigger. I was fascinated by the way Reuters and Red Bull, two of my early trainees and companies I worked for and for me, used content to sell other products. In Red Bull's case was a can, and in Reuters' case was financial services because that's how they make money. But they use content to position their brand. They use content to trigger behaviour. They use content to build communities. They use content in many, many, many, many, many work on a photographer's on demand type of concept called Splento. We did quite well, but the company moved in a different direction. In January, with my friend Nathan, we were sitting down and we were, We need to do an engine for this content because it's nothing that links them together.

Bogdan Maran:
Keep in mind, this is way before the AI was what AI is today and we think AI is today, the magic wand thing. We started building from there. It just started on the idea But look, events and specifically, your target audience, we're talking about trade shows and conferences are one of, if not the biggest content producers in the world, especially around video. Talking about volumes here, and I'm talking about volumes here. I'm not talking about Netflix type of very sexy things and very nice things, but good content, technically speaking, if you know how to make it work. We don't do anything with it. We don't know how to use it. We don't know how to add value to it. That's how Visual Hive started. Very good concept.

Lee:
Of course. What are those common pitfalls then? Let's just think about my own event. I've put on several events myself. We've done the video of all of the talks, etc. We've got some great B-roll footage as well of the event itself to capture the ambiance of the event, etc. It's now taking up terabytes of space on my Google Drive, and I have no idea what to do with it. I am probably a typical event organiser.

Bogdan Maran:
You are somewhere in the middle. Yes, you are definitely somewhere in the middle. You've done the first bit, you've recorded it. I've seen so many companies, and I've talked to companies that wanted to use our services to improve and get more out of their video, and they didn't have any video. We're not a production company. We can help you produce, we can help you tell you how to produce it, not necessarily produce it itself. But if you don't have any content, is that in the water. There is no conversation. The other common pitfall is that you put it on a Google Drive, which is almost the equivalent of it on YouTube. Yeah. And why I say that, and I know it's controversial because YouTube now is one of the biggest search engines in the world. The way I look at YouTube is, you know those prank cameras and all the videos that we watch now on Facebook and Instagram stories with funny bits. There was a show on iTV that curated those bits, like the best of cats and the best of that and the best of that. Youtube is like that. It's like everybody dumping everything with no curation.

Bogdan Maran:
There is almost no chance of you searching and actually finding something relevant. I'm not talking about finding your half an hour, 45 minutes, one hour, eight hour conference. I'm talking about something relevant. I'll put a caveat here because every case is specific because we are in events and events is a very broad thing. But the most important thing that your audience has is time. If you're going to give them a hard drive, let's put it like that, or a Google Drive, I don't know how many hundreds of hours spanning, I don't know how many years of content, nobody's going to watch it. Simply because as far as I know, at least, and I hope I haven't missed this once, but we're not Netflix. We don't have drama, we don't have murder, we don't have sex, we don't have love, We don't have things like this on stage. We have knowledge, which is highly valuable, don't get me wrong, but we have knowledge. Now, your job in my head and where we can help come and help is to curate that content, editorialise that content so we can target your audience, so we can save them time.

Bogdan Maran:
If you save them time, you build trust. That means that the audience comes back. Again, that's probably not a conversation for a 20-minute podcast when it comes to trust in this world, considering the elections are going to come this year and so on and so on. We have fake videos and fake AI and all this stuff. But trust is highly valuable. If you're going to tell me here is a half an hour interesting keynote without giving me those sound bites that you use, for example, for this podcast that take me to the long-form content, so you use short-form content to long-form content, then it's not going to be valuable because I'm busy, everybody's busy, everybody has a tonne of things on their calendars. So curating content for your audiences, and not just, Look, this is my audience. These are my audiences. Sorry, my English is my second language, so I'll use that as an excuse.

Lee:
You're doing amazing.

Bogdan Maran:
The plural bit of it. It's The idea would be that at this point, it's possible to curate content to a specific individual, even if you have 5,000 people in your audience. And that's one of the most common pitfalls, not thinking about it.

Bogdan Maran:
What comes first? Okay, Fair enough. You don't know how to do it. You don't have time. We can help you. There are other companies who can help you, but just think of that first.

Lee:
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, we've got hours of content over the last few events that we can make available, but people don't sit and watch the entire half hour talk on XYZ. Most people might read a blog. Most people might maybe watch a short with a sound bite like you've just said. I'm just thinking of my own consumption of, say, Netflix. I actually just find all of that content too overwhelming. There's too much, and I end up clicking through for ages and then not watching anything, and actually going back to Instagram reels and then showing funny ones to my wife. That's the norm.

Bogdan Maran:
The best show on Netflix is browsing through content. That's the best show of Netflix.

Lee:
That's pretty much it. We were even considering cancelling it. Now, we've started, for example, with the podcast episode. So with this episode, it's video content, and we have started to cut small sections out of value where the guest is maybe giving a little bit of a sound bite, but we have struggled to get an audience to that. And again, we've been using YouTube predominantly. Could you speak into that? Maybe give us some point of some advice.

Bogdan Maran:
I haven't seen your videos on YouTube, although I do use YouTube, and I think this is a great segue. I've seen them on LinkedIn. The idea is to find out your audiences. I use YouTube for NBA basketball, for example. I use YouTube for AI talks. When I'm trying to learn, I use to YouTube for dev demos and things like this. That's where I go to YouTube. I like how to set up my microphone or things like this that are very practical or the highlights from the basketball. I do use LinkedIn for education, on the other hand. I know the algorithms are quite bad when it comes to trying to following the right people and trying to targeting the right people. But you need to look at how... The video is a layer K, so you need to look at keywords and how you use keywords, how you use your transcription, how you use your posts. All of that the sun with big capitals and everything else are bad for For LinkedIn's algorithm or for YouTube's algorithm because everybody does it. You have to have the text assigned to it. It's not just the video, it's more and more and more adding to it.

Bogdan Maran:
It's about the interactions and it's about knowing when to post when your audience is online. But from my perspective, I think more importantly is consistency. You want to post, you know you get more engagement at 8:00 AM on Tuesday. I'm just giving a A random example. 8:00 AM on Tuesday, post 8:00 AM on Tuesday, because I know that at 8:00 AM on Tuesday, I'll see something from you. It creates that response from my brain. I go, At 8:00 AM, I find something valuable from Lee, and I'm going to watch it. If I I have it, I'm going to go for it, I'm going to look for it, I'm going to try to find it. The most complicated thing is when you start understanding your audiences to start bringing them towards your own platforms because we're going to see a move in the next 3-5 years towards Web3, which is, technically speaking, bypassing these big platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on. Having that content on your own platform, with a caveat, is not just putting some content on a website because that's pointless. You're not going to get anywhere. It's about the added value that you bring.

Bogdan Maran:
For example, now because we have AI, and one of the things that we do with your hype is It's creating an interactive on demand, whereas I can go and search on your content and say, Tell me what event tech is trendy, or Have you talked about registration? It's not about just one video, it's about going into all of that database, because it's a database, technically speaking, of knowledge, and allowing me to save time, not to watch three years of content, but saying, Okay, this is the things about registrations. Here are the five clips, the short clips. Do you want to watch more from that perspective? That's the interactive bit. Then is the curated bit where you would understand who I am and you would give me values. You know I'm bold, so you'll give me things about how can I make my head shiner, for example. That means that I can come to you. I don't have to go to YouTube or LinkedIn or anything and wait for something to be served. Because I'm trusting you, and we've mentioned trust before, I'm going to come to you because you give me these interactive things. The third thing is sharing.

Bogdan Maran:
Let me curate your content for my audience because you I have your audience, I have my audience, we are all on LinkedIn, we are all professionals, we all have this audience. There is no marketing team in the world that can beat your audience if you give them the right tools. You asked me about how visual archive came to be. A visual It came to be also from a concept that I've been working on since about 2019 when it started initially with Visual Hive, which is user-curated content, which means it's not user-generated content. We have to be very clear about that. We know what user-generated content is. Other curated content is me going to a show, let's say, and being able to pick good content, so quality content, out of that whole show and share it with my audience. Let's say I take a... We talked about short form video content. Let's say I have a tool, an app, which is something that we are building, for example, in visual high, where I would save my most interesting paragraphs from Lee's keynote. I would have that afterwards in small clips, which is very doable. It's not just us.

Bogdan Maran:
Everybody can do that now in terms of... There are lots of companies that do this and share that with my network. Now, if you have 100 people at your event, I'm not talking about big events. I'm talking about 100 people at your event. If half of them share a clip on social media from your trade show, you've got 50 clips going out on a day. Nobody I know of, and I'm talking about Mobile World Congress and the big shows with big money, don't have the capacity to have that. Now, take Mobile Congress or Money 2020, where you have 20,000 to 100,000 people. Percentage-wise, let's say not 50%, but 20% of those people share content that is on your brand that adds value to their profile because that's the idea of user-created content. You produce the content correctly and I just share those 30 seconds, for example, from a keynote. You can't beat 100,000 people. You cannot beat 5,000 people, technically speaking, to use that in your engine.

Lee:
Yeah. That's a really interesting concept. I've heard of user generated, but user curated. Let me just try, make sure I've understood this because this is a completely new concept to me. I am putting out tonnes of content. Let's go back to my event. I've got my event. Somebody comes, it's two days of them sitting there going, whoa, I've got eight hours a day of information. I'm now overwhelmed. However, what they could do is go to my online portal, let's call it a portal for now. They can go, What are the key takeaways on, I don't know, discovery calls for web agencies? And the system will then go, Okay, these are all the talks that covered that, and here are some of those sound bites. And then that person can go, Yes, and they can do two things with this. Number one, they can go, okay, that's going to go in my head. I'm learning from that and I'm going to action that. That's number one. Therefore, they've had the value and built the trust with my event because they got that out. But also for themselves, they're going to say, right, I want to share this valuable nugget with my audience, too, which will help them and also improve my own brand.

Lee:
I didn't create the content, but I've curated this content for my audience to say, Hey, I've had value from this. You'll probably get value from this, too. Is that a fair you're trying to build?

Bogdan Maran:
That is absolutely

Lee:
It sounds amazing.

Bogdan Maran:
Absolutely. That's the idea. And imagine the behavioural that I from there. Imagine the actual data, not the registration data that everybody takes the buttons, but the actual interest people have an actionable interest that they have coming out of their show, the knowledge, the trust that you give them the tools to look better, to know better, to feel better, and everything else.

Lee:
That's incredible. I think I get the impression then that as long as event organisers have video, this is something that they'd be able to do, regardless of if the event was five years ago. If they still have all of this content sat there and they're doing nothing with it. How can we leverage this? You're saying we would be able to do that?

Bogdan Maran:
Yes, you should be able to do that because you've got... Again, I'm not a salesperson in my company. I don't necessarily have a service person in my company. But that's where we are going in terms of what we are building. That's what we are helping organisers to come in in terms of, I know you don't have the team and I'm going to give you some tools if you want to do it alone, but we can come in and put this strategy in and give you the bespoke or or whatever tools you need for this to happen. It doesn't happen just on video, it can happen on text, it can happen on photos, it can happen on anything from that perspective. That's the conversation we had behind the show. That's the idea behind the AI engine, marketing engine we are trying to build in. We're trying to build this logic, contextual logic with artificial intelligence and machine learning and neural networks and all these things so that we can give the organiser the tools or the service to say, Happy birthday, this is it. Make me very happy when he comes to your event.

Lee:
Could you share with us maybe one or two examples of how you have been able to help event organisers over the last few years with AI?

Bogdan Maran:
Yes. One of the most interesting case studies, which I found was with Informa market, they had a big problem on one of their shows that this came in the pandemic, but it's still quite flagrant in my mind because we've built a lot based on that. You have your guided tours at events. There are no guided tours because there are no live events and happy days. We've built a concept around the idea of creating verticals on their show. It's a life science show. I'm not going to go into details and the names because I probably cannot pronounce half of them. Whereas we used video to engage the buyers and created... The output was fantastic because the idea was that we had innovation verticals. Within each vertical, we had 5-10 companies that were creating something innovating. We created a series of three questions or five questions, I don't remember exactly, for each company, so it was the same question. We recorded everything, of course, with each company saying, Okay, so what's the innovation? What did you do here? What did you do here? We didn't create the questions. We had a university professor on each vertical that created those questions.

Bogdan Maran:
Out of there, we created this pyramid of long-form content, whereas this leader of the vertical, the university professor, would conversation it and would explain why this is an innovation, what each company does, and why it's important, and where it goes. Then you went all down to every single question answered in a certain way, every single free questions, every company, every vertical, all the verticals, you can curate the content. We started targeting this at buyers, understanding who the buyers are, putting this short form content so we can manage their journey from, Oh, this is interesting. I've seen this 90 second. I want to go to see the next one and the next one and the next one and actually go and see the company. We did this, and the show happened by the end of the day, but the output of this content targeting was more sales than they ever had doing just this in person because the buyers came in way more prepared, being curious, knowing what's happening, a lot of value for the exhibitors. This was just a specific example. But the idea of using video content in a targeted, curated manner became way more valuable than just walking people by hand I'm not saying having a group of 15 people going from A, B, C, D, and just listening to something and being bored, which is not saying it's not valuable.

Bogdan Maran:
I'm saying it just adds value. And that was the point of where I were trying to go. We are trying to add value to existing things.

Lee:
Yeah, I think as well, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the difference here is that the buyer has taken themselves on the journey to educate themselves as to the relevance of this and therefore have become invested in it. They've built that trust, which is what you talked about earlier as well. And they therefore want to go in because I've gone to many buyer events. I'm not really sure what to expect. I don't really understand who's going to be there, what the benefits are. I'm just going. It almost feels like a waste of my time. I learn everything at the actual event itself, whereas I think here, again, you are giving the tools to the user. This is, again, user curation they're going through. They've gone through that journey themselves. They've said, Okay, that was interesting. That 90 seconds, I'm going to carry on on this journey. They've brought themselves to the table, as it were.

Bogdan Maran:
Absolutely, because you have to look at when it When it comes to this example, when it comes to using video, we need to stop thinking, and I'm not saying we because we are all in the industry and we need to teach each other and we need to work with each other. We need to look a little bit higher up past the two days, three day, one day event. It's because before behavioural changes, before behavioural changes, during and behavioural changes after. We have to curate the experience regardless of what the experience is based on that. How am I accessing? Am I digital? Am I online? Again, It's where am I? How am I talking to you? It's that ongoing thing. With the caveat, which is one of my pain points in the industry, there is no 365 engagement. You don't want to talk to that individual that is going to be on your website every day because you have competition and there are other people in the market. You have to bring them, like we said, every Tuesday at 8 AM, I'll go to Lee and say, What have you got for me today? Because tomorrow morning, I'm going to go to Event Industry News, I'm going to go to IBTM, I'm going to go to IMAX, I'm going to go to that, I think that you're not the only one in the market.

Bogdan Maran:
From both the event and the podcast, I think we have about 400 podcasts in the event industry at this point. Something to that degree. Sorry, my computer started exploding with somebody's calling. So it's not just, again, your podcast. I have a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. There are 450, so you don't expect me to just come to you, build trust, and know that I'm going to listen to these four or five other podcasts on the road. But if you give me more tools, I'm going to share your name better because I trust you more.

Lee:
No, that's really valuable. I mean, I myself have another podcast. I've got the Event Engine one. I've also got the Trailblazer FM podcast, which has got 450 episodes on. We've been going for like eight, nine years now, et cetera. I'm just thinking several things here. But the main thing I'm thinking is I have an awful lot of highly valuable content with some amazing guests, which has added value to thousands of people around the world. And I know I could... Giving them this opportunity sounds rather exciting. Now, you did mention we're talking on podcasts, your podcast. Could you tell us a little bit about yours and how we can go and check it out?

Bogdan Maran:
So the podcast, I co-host because I'm not alone. I'm not that brave. I co-host it with this amazing individual called Merijn van Buuren. He's the founder of Event Mender. It's live every Tuesday on LinkedIn, so We raise the bar a little bit to put more pressure. That's how we like to do things. You can find it on LinkedIn, and then you can find it on YouTube or on any podcast spreading content thing that exists out there from Google to Apple to whatever it is.

Lee:
And folks, we will make sure that there will be links in the description. So that'll be on the show notes and on our website as well. So you can go ahead and check that out.So, Bogdan, we are coming in to land. I would really love to know the best ways for people connect with you, and then we shall say goodbye.

Bogdan Maran:
Best ways is LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn or on email on bogdan@visualhive.co. Or just call me at some point if you want to.

Lee:
Folks, if you want to have a conversation, get in touch. He's a legend. Thank you so much for your time, buddy. Have a great day, and we'll have you on real soon.

Bogdan Maran:
Thank you.

Lee:
Cheerio.