Breakout sessions give meeting attendees time to engage with their peers and decompress. Learn how to plan one for your next meeting, discover a list of engaging ideas, and draw inspiration from real-life examples from businesses.

Breakout sessions can happen during both in-person and virtual meetings. The former typically send attendees to different areas of a conference venue, and the latter use breakout room functions native to virtual conferencing tools. These sessions are especially important during virtual meetings, where there is already an element of built-in disconnection as attendees are in their own respective locations.

This article from Hubspot goes over some ideas that you can use to incorporate engaging breakout sessions into your upcoming meetings.

Breakout Session Ideas

There are various breakout sessions you can plan for, like those directly related to meeting content and others that are entertainment-focused and involve attendees playing games with each other.

Read the full article at: blog.hubspot.com

Virtual events still sound a little futuristic, but they’ve been happening since 1993 when the world’s first livestream brought us nail-biting webcam footage of a coffee maker in mid drip. The streaming pot brewed up millions of views.

In some ways little has changed in 2020. On TikTok, teenagers have gone viral with sleep feeds, raking in crypto coin as they catch some zzz’s. But tech and social media upgrades have opened the door to new ways to connect online, from virtual museum tours to live Q&As with astronauts in space.

Even some of the largest conferences have gone partially or completely digital. Moving events like this online can reduce costs and carbon footprints, and make attendance accessible to a wider audience. In 2018, Coachella’s YouTube livestream brought Beyoncé’s Homecoming to more than 41 million people in more than 232 countries, rather than just the hundreds of thousands in attendance in person.

From live-tweeting to livestreaming, businesses and organizations are staging virtual events across the web. So, is your company ready to get digital?

Whether you have an event already in mind or you’re looking for ideas, this article is your all-access pass.

Read the full article at: blog.hootsuite.com

Virtual events are growing in popularity, and it doesn’t appear as if that’s going to change very soon. But as planners, venues, on-site teams, and everyone else involved in an event’s life cycle plan for a future full of virtual and hybrid events, there’s still a lot of unknown. That’s where these virtual event examples come in.

The following examples of virtual events span across multiple industries and vary in size, length, and technology. But they all have one thing in common: They took place in 2020, as the need for organizations to pivot to virtual events skyrocketed.

So whether you’re a planner in charge of putting together your first virtual event, a venue manager getting set to host one, or anyone in between, we hope these virtual event examples provide you with some inspiration and maybe even spark some new and innovative ideas.

Read the full article at: www.socialtables.com

In 2020, you might have heard your favorite influencers talking about a mysterious new social media app called Clubhouse.

But, unless you had a huge online following of your own, you might just be getting access to the app now.

Until a few months ago, Clubhouse was a platform where big-name celebrities, company leaders, Silicon Valley investors, and some of the web’s top global influencers could have uncensored audio group chats about their lives, hobbies, work, or industries.

Now, as the invite-only Clubhouse continues to gain media coverage and a growing pool of non-celebrity users, you might be wondering, “What the heck is it? And, how do I get in on the action?”

Below, we’ll explain where Clubhouse came from, what it actually is, and the pros and cons of using it in your marketing strategy.

Read the full article at: blog.hubspot.com

Wow how quickly this event tech company list in growing, more are being added weekly. 

The above graphic organizes 268 different tools for online event experiences, in 9-14 different subcategories, such as streaming, ticketing, networking, event marketing, and “all-in-one” platforms, including those with 3D virtual environments.

Read the full article at: chiefmartec.com

Microsoft Teams has got a new AI-powered feature that makes it easier to zone out during endless online meetings.

The app has launched a live transcription tool that creates a written record of what was said during a meeting.

It identities each speaker, captures audio in “near real-time,” and generates a live transcript on the right-hand side of the window. After the meeting, the saved transcript will be available to download.

Read the full article at: thenextweb.com

The so-called virtual event revolution over the past year has taken place in a time during which we have never been more digitally connected and engaged as a society. Netflix has to ask its viewers if they’re still watching, and online dating platforms have become mainstream.

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The pandemic has only heightened the success of the everyday online platforms we spend our time on, with video games and streaming services both experiencing massive surges.

However, virtual events as a whole have not yet been able to tap into this existing potential. While tech providers colloquially cite increased engagement on their platforms, over half of planners still cite engagement as their main frustration with virtual event tech. Virtual is undeniably unfamiliar to many in the event industry, but it’s not new, and it’s been succeeding in other areas.

What is being missed, and what can virtual events learn from existing formats that have been captivating online audiences for years? EventMB sat down with several visionaries from leading event tech firms to find out.

Read the full article at: www.eventmanagerblog.com

Brands, artists, businesses, entertainers have all traded in physical events with virtual ones to accommodate our new reality with the pandemic, with more or less success. It remains a place of potential (and necessity) for marketers to experiment and learn. 

That being said, events are now quintessential to the social marketing era where the places communities and individuals meet become more precious and their connections and sharing behaviour more powerful, branded or not. A good event is, more than ever, a social experience that puts its people first.

Here are our picks of virtual events that may be laying the groundwork for bigger and better socially-led events to come. 

Read the full article at: wearesocial.com