On the 63rd episode of Speedify Live we’re joined by event technologist, virtual event superhero, and Shining Star Award winner Tess Vismale from iSocialX to talk about virtual events and conferences.

We discuss what a Certified Meeting Professional is, how to choose the best platform for virtual events and how Speedify can help make your online meetings go a lot smoother.

Here are our 5 takeaways from our chat with Tess Vismale:

1. When it comes to choosing a platform for meetings, Tess says she always approaches her meetings from a strategic perspective, and says it’s best to first look at the goal and objective of what you’re trying to accomplish. You also need to look at the capabilities of the audience that you’re trying to reach, and marry it with their engagement that you’d like to have. 
2. There’s a few ways to do conferences and meetings: you can go fully virtual, face-to-face or hybrid events. With a true hybrid being when you allow your audience to choose whether they experience your content face-to-face or virtually. 
3. The events industry has been one of the most affected ones during the pandemic, which lead to a drastic change in approach within the community, as they had to find a way to band and work together to continue business. One thing that has helped was moving things into the virtual space.
4. According to Tess, there’s a few skills virtual producers need to have in order to be successful: they need to know their tech stack – what platforms are available, and what is best to use for what purpose; they need to have a marketing eye and understand what marketing and communication mean; they should have a good grasp on content development and on basic event planning as well.   
5. Tess says she feels like voice is the future of events, as it’s being used more and more across multiple platforms. With Twitter Spaces, LinkedIn working on things with voice meetings, and Discord gaining popularity, voice meetings can be a good option for everyone, as it doesn’t require people to always be “prepped and ready” for videos all the time.