For some years, live events have incorporated mobile apps as a value-add, a way to connect with and interact with other guests.

Conference app features were drawn directly from social networking platforms. Conference apps offer, in effect, a social media experience that could be layered atop the live event.

However, these apps are mostly useless if you did not attend the event.

Following the event, almost no one bothers to continue to use conference apps. For most, it is something to delete from your phone and forget about. In fact, most conference planners never really give the app much thought beyond the event itself.

Once the event is over, the app is discarded, a transactional, one-use experience.

In the space that has been graciously provided to me, I would like to discuss the idea of online communities and how they can help extend the app experience both before and after the event.

Online communities and conferences are like two great tastes that taste great together. Similar to the chocolate-peanut butter confection adored by millions, the online conference and online community have evolved along parallel pathways, but they are stronger and better when combined.

A Brief History of Online Communities

You are probably already well aware of what online communities are, but you may not know it. Every time you visit a subreddit, every time you join a Facebook Group or LinkedIn Group, you are participating in an online community.

Online communities have their roots as far back as the beginnings of the Internet. Any time a group of individuals with a strong common interest got together on a regular basis, whether through an email list or a threaded discussion forum, they were forming an online community.

Online communities are formed by a group of people who meet regularly to share a strong common interest or work towards a common goal.

Online communities must meet a few common criteria:

• A dedicated platform to meet online that is relatively private or protected from outsiders

• The ability to exchange ideas via omnidirectional conversation

• The ability to search for past conversations

• A sense of freedom to express oneself

Online communities are more interactive than websites, because they allow conversations, but they are more restrictive than the big social media platforms.

Let me emphasize that.

Online communities are not the same thing as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. Communities may begin to form within some of these sprawling platforms, but for communities to coalesce, they must enable some distinct subset of people to meet in relative safety, anonymity, or obscurity so that they can freely express themselves.

Big Social Media emerged from little online communities that grew larger and larger over time.

Events Management’s Adoption of Social Media

As large conferences embraced the web and social media gained a foothold in the early 2000s, they began to incorporate profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms. 

In addition, as the smartphone revolution caught on, it was no great leap to offer a more private social media experience via the mobile app.

An entire industry of native apps for events has grown up in the intervening years. But despite their adoption of social media, these apps did not have any great reason to incorporate the features of online communities, primarily because the market for virtual events seemed to be far softer than live, in-person ones.

That continued to be the case, by and large, until 2020 when the pandemic arrived.

Suddenly, virtual events were the only option for organizations that had previously depended upon an annual conference held in person. Rather than cancel until the following year, most organizations opted to “go virtual” if there was time to do so.

The experiences were mixed, but the sudden spotlight that fell upon virtual conference platforms like Hopin or BigMarker led to rapid innovations and improvements in the ways online events were handled.

Unfortunately, most of those experiences were little more than a series of Zoom webinars strung together by a website with conference sessions and a single live chat. 

When the event was over, just like the native events apps of old, the conference attendee was left alone. What was lost?

• Connections

• Conversations

• Moments of Insight

• Resources

There has to be a better way to preserve the wisdom and discoveries that happen at conferences.

The Best Online Communities Love Virtual Events

Meanwhile, the world of online communities was evolving, too.

Since the early 2010s or slightly before, the business world began to see and embrace the promise of online communities to better connect with customers, get more ideas for their products, deflect support calls, and increase customer loyalty.

When 2020 came around, a confluence of events worked to launch online communities from a slow-burning adoption rate to something that most of the Fortune 500 now accepts as a must-have part of their digital strategy. These events included:

• The pandemic

• Remote and hybrid work

• The Great Resignation

• The rise of cryptocurrencies and NFTs

To be sure, the first three items above are related. Covid created the need for work-from-home options for workers at the same time as companies needed online communities to better connect with their customers, especially those B2C customers who were no longer visiting physical storefronts.

The Great Resignation resulted at least in part from professionals who were asked to return to the workplace after a year or more of the relative freedom and greater productivity of being a remote worker.

Finally, the cryptocurrency movement, independent of the pandemic, had come into the public consciousness. 

As people warmed to the idea of buying non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of cute jpegs of crypto kitties, penguins, and bored apes, they shared these manias in online communities hosted on Discord. Soon, the crypto world was jammed with demand for experienced community managers who knew how to organize events and engage members in online spaces.

A Comparison of Evolutionary Branches: Virtual Events and Online Communities

If we were to think about the relationship between virtual event technologies and online communities, we would need to look at online communities as the trunk of the tree. As I mentioned earlier, online interactions began among small groups of individuals interested in exchanging information or ideas amongst themselves in relative anonymity.

From this trunk, grew the notion of social media platforms. Listservs and discussion forums evolved and grew into things like Twitter and Facebook.

And from this branch grew the conference apps used at events across the world today.

Finally, a tenuous, growing branch emerged from conference apps whose special purpose was to support virtual conferences. These were the Hopin, Airmeet, and BigMarker apps.

Evolution favors doubling down on advantage. 

For online communities, the advantage was the ability to help people with strong common interests to come together despite the hindrances of geographic distance. Whilst online community experiences today certainly support scheduling and running events, there was no evolutionary advantage, no challenge to providing anything more robust than individual event sign-ups and the ability to embed the playback of a video meeting in the platform.

For virtual events platforms, the emphasis was on the conference itself, on making it easy to sign up and sign into a platform resembling a conference hall, review a program, watch videos of presenters (either pre-recorded or live) and maybe chat a bit with others in a “main stage” area or within each of the various sessions. There was no perceived evolutionary advantage to extending the relationships from the event beyond that handful of days and times when the event was held.

The Opportunity to Evolve is Convergence with Online Communities

So virtual events have remained mired in a transactional, episodic mindset while online communities have only limited event capabilities.

What if we could splice their DNA into a more robust organism? What if we could build the ubiquitous, event-driven community experience? What would that mean?

Permit me the vanity of stepping you through a brief design fiction of what this experience might look like.

Jasmine is a retail sales associate with a major B2C enterprise. She hears about the Aeternium 2022 virtual conference from her social media feed. 

After looking into what the conference is about, she decides that it’s exactly what she needs in order to take her sales results to the next level. The intensive two day program promises to showcase industry thought leaders, creative exercise, and plenty of chances to interact with other professionals during the course of the event.

Jasmine visits the Aeternium website to sign up for the event. In doing so, she creates a personal profile and password for the platform. Because she’s a little unsure of herself about how to get signed up, there’s someone from the conference staff there to ensure that she has a smooth onboarding. This signup is her immediate and direct entry into the online community where she is greeted with a video welcome to the event and an explanation about the purpose of the online community. 

“We’re thrilled that you are interested in attending Aeternium, but we think you will get even more value in the resources and opportunities we will be sharing with you before the event even starts,” the enthusiastic greeter says. 

Jasmine is led around the community via a step by step screen tour that helps her to fill out her profile to optimize networking opportunities. She’s also led to the planned agenda for the event, but here she is able not only to sign up for the sessions of interest but also to vote on certain topics and add her comments, which the event speakers, who are also part of the community, can see and respond to.

The advance interactions with the speakers helps them to hone their talks to better fit the needs of the attendees and leads to some valuable interactions between the attendees themselves.

As the event approaches, the community management team shares several valuable resources, including an advance copy of a white paper, a few short podcasts she listens to that highlight special offers that will become available at the conference, and a contest that results in her getting a free copy of a thought leader’s book.

All of this happens before the conference.

As the conference begins, many of the interactions occur here that would have happened previously on a dedicated events app, but now Jasmine has made at least ten connections with attendees as well as one of the speakers that makes her even more excited about attending. Up until now, she has logged in intermittently to participate in discussions. In the days leading up to the event, she starts participating even more because she’s excited to get started.

As the event launches, Jasmine downloads a mobile app for the community so that she doesn’t have to miss a minute of the day, especially when she has to pick up her children from school.

Two days later the event wraps up, but Jasmine learns that the connections she has made here don’t have to end. In fact, the staff encourages attendees to continue to connect and collaborate with new colleagues in a dedicated private group within the community, rather than trying to find and connect with them via LinkedIn or, worse, never seeing them again.

After the conference has concluded, Jasmine keeps logging back in to watch recordings or highlights from the other sessions she didn’t get the chance to attend. She further extends her network and stays involved with the topics she originally joined the conference to learn about. 

In the meantime, the community management team makes sure that Jasmine and the other attendees get value from the platform by offering follow-up Q&A sessions, more contests, discounts for next year’s conference, and special interest groups.

Jasmine starts interacting in discussions almost right away to start providing inputs to what the next year’s sessions will look like. When there’s a call for speakers, she decides that she has some ideas to share and, with some coaching from peers in the community, decides to go for it.

As you can see, the combination of community-building activities begins well before the conference with an intensity and usefulness that exceeds what might be possible on one of the big, distracting social media platforms. Not only does our fictional friend Jasmine get engaged almost right away and gets to shape what the conference offers, but she also stays engaged with the brand during and well beyond its conclusion.

The opportunity for meeting others and learning more is considerably strengthened.

How to get started building conferences into communities

At present, the technology already exists to support conferences fully within online communities. The main elements that are missing have been the organizational will to make the leap from single, epiodic events to 24x7x365 communities. 

The leap can be a daunting one for organizations not familiar with what’s involved with starting an online community.

A good starting point is to articulate your reasons for convening this community. Good news: as a conference builder, you’ve probably already defined a value proposition and the success metrics involved.

Next up, it’s time to articulate what’s in it for your members to join, not just the event, but to join the community itself. What do they receive by interacting with the people, agenda, and related materials ahead of time? Why should they connect with others before and after the event? 

Again, the nascent reasons to connect are probably already there in the core value proposition for your event in the first place.

From here, it is a good idea to engage someone who has built online communities before. They will very likely introduce you to some version of the Minimally Viable Community Canvas. 

Going through the canvas will help you to capture more detail about your audience, the values espoused by the community, and what people will do when they join, including the conversations, connections, collaborations, celebrations, rituals, and content that will keep them coming back.

Selecting and setting up a community platform comes later after these bigger questions are answered. The biggest adjustment for you will involve expanding your thinking beyond the event itself to what will fill the rest of the year for your members. Newsletters and content marketing campaigns may keep your past attendees aware of what’s coming in terms of your next event, but getting them into your community will get them involved.

The ‘Stall Out’ Is Where We Are

Over two years into the pandemic and live events have become more commonplace again, although many virtual and hybrid events also continue to live in this new reality. As a result of this attempted return to live events, the convergence that had been happening between events and online communities has stalled out or at least slowed down considerably.

Despite the understandable desire to return to the familiarity of live events, and despite any belief we might cling to that we might return to normal, the landscape will never return to what it had previously been. If there ever was such a thing as normal, it is certainly not returning.

The Great Reset is upon us.

What we have instead is an events landscape that includes live, hybrid, and virtual events, each existing for entirely worthwhile reasons. And in all three instances, online communities can help.

Live events have always benefitted from augmentation by online communities. In the years that I’ve worked on starting up new communities, one of the very best ways to launch is to time that launch to coincide with an in-person conference event. An influx of 500-1,000 new members attending an event through on-site registration and login bodes well for a community’s sustainability and growth.

Although I haven’t any proof to cite about this, I feel strongly that professional working relationships tend to blossom quickly from a live, face-to-face meeting in advance of any association within an online community. 

Hybrid and entirely virtual events are already ripe for incorporation in online community experiences and I will suggest that organizations will soon realize that it is more economical to build these events through an online community with a strong mobile experience rather than investing year-over-year in a dedicated mobile app for an event that is used and discarded again and again. 

The benefits of keeping an interested group of people connected and involved throughout the year are many, from the economic savings of easier, or even automatic, signups for future events to deeper, more satisfying brand engagement. 

What’s Beyond Convergence: The Next Evolutionary Leap for Events and Online Communities

Neither online communities nor the big events management platforms are particularly good at enabling serendipitous interactions. At least they haven’t been so far.

One of the most powerful, wonderful things about live conferences is the potential to bump into someone you weren’t expecting to meet in the hallway, then finding that person is incredibly insightful, is your next client, or is your new best friend.

It is hard to network in this way with others online. A few new technologies like Meetsy will match you with others with similar interests at random, but these are still by and large standalone platforms with limited integrations to other systems. In a matter of a few months to a year, however, I expect that we will close this gap, too, and will simulate those happy, accidental meetings as a regular part of conferencing or being part of an online community experience. 

One way that this may happen that would not require automation is if the technology for virtual avatars becomes simpler and easier to use. There are platforms in development now, putting aside Meta and their outsized ambitions to own such a marketplace, that simulate venues like a conference center. Kickback Space is one of these companies and their 3D virtual meeting spaces are nothing short of gorgeous and realistic.

What’s Blocking Evolutionary Change?

That being said, these technologies have far to go. They are the next horizon—or one of them at least. At present, virtual worlds have a tendency to lag once a few dozen people get into a virtual room. Even worse, visitors with a poor internet connection are doomed to having an almost unusable experience. Finally, those users who are not comfortable with game-like “first person shooter” style 3D environments may find it confusing and difficult to orient themselves. Some users may even dismiss the idea of a meta verse complete with avatars as downright silly or unprofessional.

The technologies will get better and attitudes will change, but these are the holdbacks that currently block the path forward.

Conclusion: The community mindset

Moving from events management into more of a community mindset means embracing the idea of extending interaction and commitment from attendees well before and well after the actual days of your event.
The new mindset also challenges us to think about how virtual, hybrid, and live events will exist more co-equally than ever before thanks to the pandemic and subsequent changes to our world.

By working to combine the power of events with the ubiquity of online communities, we have the opportunity to change transactional interactions into transformational, long-term relationships and professional growth. I hope to meet you in one of those online event spaces in the near future.

This article was originally published in issue 94 of Revista Eventos magazine.