Interactive Live Streaming for In-Person Events

Engaging Virtual Audiences in Hybrid Events

(Transcript will be added after running transcription) Eliza Mulcahy: I'm Eliza. I am the developer I'm on the developer relations team for OutSystems. I my full title is community engagement manager for North America. I keep asking for more words on that title, but they're not letting me. Who here has been to a been in the virtual audience for a hybrid event?

Okay, most of you. And of you virtual hybrid attendees, who had an experience that was, say, less than stellar? I really think there isn't a perfect way to oh, there we go. Hey, there we go. I don't think there's a way to make a hybrid event perfect, right?

I think the experience for those at home is sort of worse of both worlds. Yeah, they're getting the presentations and everything, but they're lacking connection. It's sort of an afterthought versus the in person attendees, and they get limited to no engagement with speakers unless you've put a whole lot of effort into a very fancy hybrid events platform, which are also very expensive, and I'll get to that in a second. Before we get into that though, let me just give you some details on me. I am from Western Massachusetts, where I live with my partner and my dog G.

H, pictured here. He's beautiful. I can give you more pictures of him if you're interested after. I spend most of my time along the Connecticut River Valley hiking, doing some mild birding, and bailing my community out with the Mass Bail Fund. Professionally, I started my career in community management with Microsoft New England.

That was for about seven years, and then I moved into biotech. And I know we think developer relations is one of the most unique careers in the world, but SciRel, which I've just invented here to mean bench scientist relations, is super, super similar. I did get really sick of all of the presentations at my events involving pictures of rare diseases, So I came back to developers at OutSystems for the last three years. I'm so sorry, to build in a little more context. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but OutSystems is an enterprise software development platform.

We have we help developers with their full stack as part of their greater tech stack, and we use low code to generate real code. Originally, we were founded in Lisbon, Portugal, which I'm going to next week, very excited, but we now have headquarters in Boston. We have a community of 864,000 developers and a global conference in Europe every year. Now that is a single global conference for a community spread all over the world. We only have space for about 3,000 attendees usually, and of course, we have our CEO doing a cool keynote announcing product features.

We have the product team developing really cool demos for everyone, and we have some really great community speakers sharing use cases and that kind of thing. The problem is with a conference that large, it gets very, very expensive to hybridize the event. So we had seven stages. It would have cost us $230,000 to make it into a hybrid event. And for a conference with a budget of $1,000,000, 25% just to hybridize wasn't really in the cards.

While we were developing this incredible conference called ONE, My colleague Cecilia and I, you may remember Cecilia from last year, she did a talk on customer success and developer relations. She was supposed to be on the stage with me today, but unfortunately she is. Bigger and better things to do. We were trying to improve our presence on YouTube. There have been plenty of talks about video strategy, YouTube, that kind of thing here, so I won't go into much detail, but we spent two years talking to developers across North America trying to figure out how to capture their attention better, and everyone said, I go to YouTube first to find out about technology that my boss is having me use.

Unfortunately, the OutSystems YouTube had devolved into some sort of boring hellhole for business audiences. You know, the classic business audience that sits on YouTube all day and doesn't book demos or go out for fancy steak dinners. So we jumped in with the tools at our disposal and created a quarterly forty five minute livestream called Decoded Live. So this was a show that was essentially a virtual panel interviewing developers that worked on for the audience of developers working on OutSystems. We did it live partially for a hook and partially to avoid the heady temptation of having the video team edit out our mistakes.

You may have noticed in the start of this video, I did a super, super heinous millennial pause right at the top of the show. Forty five minutes, a good chunk of it, just me staring at the camera. It was really good. So someone several steps above us said, this is really cool. We should do this at one this year.

And we said, yeah, let's do a stage takeover. We have a an in person audience for the show for forty five minutes. It'll be our first time having in person guests too. It'll be really exciting. But somehow, this idea metastasized into doing the show for the entire conference.

Looking back, we don't know how it happened. We can't remember at any point where we could say, hey, I don't know about this. This seems kind of crazy. We were a little bit skeptical but willing to do it because we were, of course, well and truly voluntold. Who's been voluntold to do something in DevRel before?

Yeah, right. So our challenge was to engage tens of thousands of community members with a budget of, at the time, we'll see, and that is a quote from an email. In wanting to execute with excellence to steal from the Microsoft employee handbook, we were trying to figure out how to solve some of our issues with the conference itself with this livestream idea. Who here came to this conference just to see the talks? No other reason, just to see the talks.

Right. Who goes for some sort of social aspect? Yes. So how can we bring that social aspect to a virtual audience, and how can we capture the sort of hallway track of engaging with speakers, even just the vibe of a conference? After a bunch of meetings where Cecelia and I just stared at each other silently on Zoom, grimacing, we finally came around to the idea that maybe we could work to answer these questions if we were able to pull it off.

And I think we did pull it off, just to run through some metrics, which were also in my talk descriptions. We did ten hours of streaming, four hours on day one, and six hours on day two. We had 55 guests, including yes, someone got the joke. Okay. Including our c suite.

We had bunch of our product team members. We had speakers, and we had some of our super users. I'll come back to that soon. We had 42 total segments including panels, interviews, audience segments, and some video buffers, and of course, the viewers are what's important here. We had 18,000 community members tune in across YouTube and LinkedIn.

We were originally only gonna stream to YouTube, but our marketing team said let's put it on LinkedIn too, and so we captured a lot more people that way. So how'd we do it? Our goal through this whole thing was to sort of create connection. It wasn't to just livestream and see what happens. We wanted to connect our hosts to the audience, but also connect the in person and virtual audience.

Next, all the talks were being recorded already to be posted later, much like this conference, so we didn't need to have the speakers on to reiterate their talk, give a five minute version of their thirty minute talk. We kept the interviews conversational, personable. If you watch the livestream, I spend a lot of time asking everyone how they like to be catering at the event, because that's what's important to me, and we focused on delivering energy and excitement, which is what you get from an in person experience at a conference. We also spent a lot of time turning to the audience, asking them their thoughts, asking them to engage with the speakers, prompting them to ask questions, and we had our guests make sure that the audience knew that it was happening ahead of time. So our guests were kind of hard to figure out.

Right? Some of the most obvious ones, we had speakers because they were gonna be there. We had our product team because they could speak to all the announcements. If it wasn't something they were working on, they knew what their colleagues were doing, so that was fine. And then we filled in with our super user program, Champions and MVPs, and very cynically, this meant that we could engage a global audience.

Obviously, means more viewers, but less cynically, this created more paths to connection. We saw folks from APAC in the chat of the YouTube stream congratulating their colleagues and shouting them out. We had folks posting on LinkedIn from The Americas talking about how nice it was to see their colleagues on the stream. So it was really, really nice to see everyone connect that way. Just real quick, I touched on this earlier with our little stats.

We first filled it in with interviews and panels, then we focused on the virtual audience. This seems obvious, but to drill down a little bit, we specifically did games and trivia, and we promised them prizes. And with a promise of prizes, you can collect a little information from them to be able to mail them the prizes later, which meant we got a bunch of email addresses of people engaging with the stream, so we could send out a survey after the fact. We got some really, really great responses, which I'll show later, but then really nice thing about these moments of games and trivia is that the audience was also connecting to each other during it and talking to each other in the chat and that kind of thing. And finally, with ten hours of streaming, we kept having to switch hosts back and forth so that we could catch our breath, get a drink of water, stare at a blank wall for a while.

So we built in some buffers. I don't wanna call it breaks because they weren't breaks. We used videos from our marketing team that we preloaded into our streaming platform. We also had videos from our DevRel team because after we started the Decoded Live videos, they were finally inspired to start putting things on YouTube. And then we had our sponsors make some videos, sponsors of the event make some videos to talk to the audience at home, and we really encourage them to do a really casual, like, straight to Zoom camera, hello, we're from this, we're glad to be sponsoring the conference, not just a plain old video ad.

All of these were under ninety seconds, but they covered panels switching out, hosts getting up, people running in front of the cameras, so yeah. Here is what we went into it asking for, and I think you can do it with a little less, but here's what I recommend. You need two hosts, so one of you can always be drinking water. We need a guest runner because the conference was enormous, and we were very concerned about guests getting lost, we're not showing up. We all three of those positions, we asked for from our team, and we also ask for one person to run the stream and one person to monitor the stream.

That can be the same person unless you're not feeling brave, which have separate people. And then, of course, some AV equipment. A single camera, some mics is really all you need. Maybe augment it with some lights and make a soundboard. What we ended up getting was, no, you can't have half the DevRel team dedicated to just the string.

Right? So we had two hosts and one guest runner from our team. Very thankful for that, because our guest runner knew the developers on the stream and could form a relationship with them. We had our conference vendor staff this. OutSystems decided they would rather spend a little bit more money than sacrifice a bunch of team members.

So we had what we like to call our StreamYard director run the stream. We had a person on audio, a person on cameras, and then a third AV person. I wasn't sure what they were doing, but they seemed very important as well. And then we had these really fancy cameras that recorded in four k, not that we needed it. We had four mics, some studio lighting, and you can kinda see in the back here, a soundboard.

Now, again, we were quoted $230,000 to hybridize the event, which was 25% of our full conference budget. This only ran us 15,000, which was only 1.5% of the conference budget. I did use a calculator for that. Shouldn't have needed to, but I I did. I have to admit.

So what did we use sort of logistically? This is kind of the boring stuff, but it's stuff that I'm willing to share with all of you if you just reach out. We use StreamYard for this because it's what we had been comfortable with in the beginning, and we weren't sure if we were gonna have any professional help at all to make this happen. So StreamYard is nice because you can have multiple people logged in on the same stream. You can also reuse Riverside for this, and I'm sure there's other vendors you can use.

The really nice thing is you can preload all these videos and slides, and it's really clear for a person coming in the day before the stream to know how to control everything. For documentation, we use the Google Suite out systems. So our run of show was on Sheets. We sent out calendar invites on Google Calendar, and we used Google Docs for what we like to call a script, but it was really just collaborative document to figure out questions with the guests of the show. So to zoom in on this a little bit.

Okay. So we have over here some timing for everything. Oh, it's so much cooler out of the light. This is really nice. We have our segment types, and that sort of helped us figure out if we had too many of one segment or another.

We had the host, and this was important because halfway through planning, we realized that Cecilia was on for like ninety minutes straight, and we're like, we gotta rearrange, we gotta rearrange, we can't do it. And then also, you can't really see on this picture, but partway through planning on the final week, I color coded where the lunch break was, because again, that's what was important to me. So we knew that both of us had time off a desk during lunch break. And then we have our guests here, and we have links out to their individual script pages. Those are the ones we worked on collaboratively that they had that lacked some of the detail that the director might need.

And then this end part here, we have the cues for the media in the streaming platform, and the media itself, what it was called in the streaming platform. And then call time is when we set their calendar invites for, and that was also the second that our guest runner was given permission to start to panic. And then to kind of double down on the script here, these are a bunch of our script pages, think 24 out of 36 or so. We, again, it was just the questions, this acted as our sort of cue cards on the desk, but it also acted as something that the streamer director ended up using instead of the run of show sheet, because it was clear on this. At the top and bottom, we have who is on screen and what is about to happen.

Host switch meant that a video was gonna play so we could take our time wandering off the studio. And we also had timing at the top and bottom. We often started segments at the wrong time, but we tried to end segments at the right time to just kinda get back on track for the rest of the show. We also had notes like time check at the last few questions because some of our guests were very long winded. I will say just as a tip to you all, put way more questions than you think you need for the ten minutes because some of your guests will be very short winded.

Not to name names or anything, but our Dutch guests were in and out in two or three minutes, and it was really, really tough to vamp with them. I also just wanna note that for about twenty minutes before the start of every day, we did a step through with our director where we made some notes on the scripts, and partway through the first day of streaming, we realized that the speaker for the Voice of God announcements was directly above our heads because we were in a balcony right above the Expo Hall. So it would go dong dong out of nowhere, and we started noting that down. So little things like that, make sure you have that time before the stream. I touched on a lot of this already, but for guest management, we didn't have pre meetings with many people.

We just used docs. This meant that we sometimes collaborated on Slack or email, but it was very brief interactions with guests that agreed to do it. We just decide on the questions, go from there. We did meet with our c suite to get them on board and to run the questions by the, like, PR team and everything, and a lot of the C suite discussions started with a question like, are you two interesting enough to pull this off? And I would always panic and think to myself, no, we're not at all.

Cecilia would jump in and say, yes, absolutely. I think we were, because this is me with my CEO, and you can see both of us are laughing. So it worked out. The next thing is our final communications came from our guest runner, so that even though she wasn't having to deal with all of these logistics pre stream, she did build up a rapport with everyone, and she also got their phone numbers to send out angry text messages the second their call time started, And I'm very proud to say, with all of this planning, we only had one guest show up late for their actual segment. And while we were recording, we could see her across the conference hall just having a chat.

She did make it eventually, but we had to cover it with a different guest that happened to just be hanging out at the time, which was kind of fun, and you can't tell it all from the stream because it was our second day. We were pros by then. And then just a note on sort of how we dealt with guests before they came on on stage, we had a table about 15 feet away from our studio that had the script so they could go over their questions again, snacks and waters. Snacks included some American candy, which was very exciting for the Europeans, And the only reason most of our guests participated was for custom swag. This pin right here only went out to 55 of the 3,000 attendees, and that meant we had plenty of people jealous so that I could note down their excitement for the next year.

So again, this is what we did. I don't think it's that important, the metrics. What was important was this post stream feedback, and the feedback we got through social. So we had a bunch of really dedicated community members that wish they could have been there posting about the stream on social. We had our guests posting about their experiences, and promoting for us, and then we had our stream feedback survey, which was sent out to the trivia participants.

Here we heard that they were genuinely feeling connected to guests, names that they sort of recognized from the forums or other events that that they spoke at. They felt the excitement we were trying to convey, and they even told us it inspired them to demand the budget to attend next year. So I think our stream succeeded, right, engaged a remote audience, and all of them felt truly included and eager for more. But this all went really well. But I when I worked in biotech, our most interesting talks were from companies that essentially failed, like my novel drug failed in in vitro studies.

Here's what went wrong. We were luckily not trying to cure a rare disease. So it was less of a big deal, but here are just some tips. I think a lot of them may feel obvious, but we didn't think of it ahead of time. The first, most emphatic tip I have for you is to make sure that the computer receiving video has Apple reactions turned off.

We didn't see a single one of these Apple reactions until our CEO, our last guest, was on, and he was saying something incredible about how important developers are to his vision for the future of the company, and he was holding a water cup like this on the table, and so there's just a thumb floating above his head. People on the stream were laughing about it, but the bigger problem was this great quote could not be clipped for later. Right? This is another kind of obvious one. There's a time limit on LinkedIn.

It ran out at four hours if you're live streaming to LinkedIn. It doesn't really warn you about it very obviously. So just know that. My recommendation is to just stick to four hours of streaming a day. Don't go for the full six.

And also, have more hosts. Cecilia and I didn't get a ton of time with our in person audience, which is kind of frustrating. If we had more hosts to cycle through, it would be a little bit more dynamic for our audience at home. They wouldn't be able to see the exhaustion in our eyes, and we'd also have more time with our folks at home. So this is a high effort, inexpensive, depending on how you do it, way to engage tens of thousands of developers at home.

If you have a large audience that may not end up at the conference, this captures the energy of being in person, and a lengthy livestream is exciting to your audience, and constantly cycling out guests and having quick, quick interactions is really engaging. What we did here, and what I'm recommending to you all, is a freakishly long version of Inside the NBA. We did not have Charles Barkley, and no one was using FanDuel to bet on our guests, but it was really, really fun, and our audience loved it. That's about it for me. I am happy to answer questions via LinkedIn, which is about to be shown.

Feel free to just message me here. I'm also happy to send you any and all docs, and I'm happy to meet with you to talk through how we convinced our c suite of this. And finally, one of our guests is in the audience. My colleague, Snei, is here. So if you have any questions about the guest experience, feel free to talk to her.

But, yeah, that's it. Thank you all.