As event professionals we are usually on the side of managing events, not speaking at them. That being said, we understand that a little perspective can go a LONG way when it comes to problem solving and improving our events.
Today we’re sitting down with Summer Robinson, a technical project manager on our team who is based in Sydney, Australia. She was recently asked to participate on a panel hosted by EventHub, at their annual Event Seminar Marketing Fes in Tokyo, Japan.
Transcript:
Molly Welch [MW]: Let’s start with some background – Could you tell me about the event and how you got involved with an event in Tokyo?
Summer Robinson [SR]: Sure thing! We work with an awesome agency in Japan called Yururito. They are the go-to event consultants in the Japanese market. They’re huge fans of our ShowUp On-Site check-in solution, and use it for the majority of their on-site events. This year they sponsored a session at Event Seminar Marketing Fes. The name of the session was “Japan’s Event Marketing is 10 Years Behind Compared to the US Market.”
MW: Wow, sounds like a great opportunity! What kind of role did you play at this event?
SR: I was asked to participate on a panel with Yururito who wanted to showcase US event technology from an event marketing perspective, because the attendees of the event were all event organizers.
They say that the event technology landscape and the event marketing teams in Japan don’t really work like the US because event marketing in the US is a huge drive for a lot of businesses to grow. They wanted to know how companies in the US are doing it, how they are collecting all of this data at events through event technology and what they are doing with the data.
MW: How do you deal with going to an event like that where you don’t speak the language? How does that work?
SR: We’ve worked with this client for a long time. We have worked with them on a variety of events over the past two years, so we’re quite familiar speaking with them with a translator. We’ll be on Zoom, and they will speak and then the translator will translate them into English. [An event is a bit different.]
At the event we had simultaneous translation… which was phenomenal, because it’s gonna sound silly, but when you’re having a conversation and you’re stopping to pause and translate, [it can really affect the flow of the conversation.] I wore an earpiece and as they were talking, the translator was translating in my ear. That was incredible, because I’ve never [experienced] that before. [Normally] when our client speaks, I have to wait to understand what the translator says, but because I had it on-the-go in my ear, to be able to listen to our client in a different language straight away, that was fantastic.
MW: What was a memorable talking point from your panel?
SR: [One thing I discussed was how] you need to work backwards from your goal. Our client said no one’s doing that in Japan, and they’re “getting all this data [from their events], and still sharing it through Excel, but there has to be better ways.” During the panel I was trying to present all the tools that you can use to gather data, like a mobile app, registration site, lead retrieval, check-in and badge printing.
MW: What was your overall takeaway? How would you want technology to help you with an event like that in the future?
SR: [This was] my first experience [at an event like this]. When I arrived, I did check-in, and I was given a speaker badge, which, for me, was very exciting, because I’m used to being on the other side to print the badges. To be the one receiving a badge, it was great. It was a very seamless, quick experience. And they also gave me a gift upon arrival, which was a very nice added touch!
Because we used Slides, a Google workspace, to do our content, we [could have used] a speaker resource center, if I was more involved in that kind of planning. I think that would improve our content. It was great, but we did work on it quite quickly, so leveraging more planning time and maybe a resource center would be helpful. My arrival with badge printing was great. I wouldn’t improve [anything on] that. I think they did a great job. They were using ShowUp, and they actually integrated EventHub with ShowUp.
Because they did the Q&A with EventHub, we’ve actually now got a log of the questions that were asked, but we didn’t get time to answer them all. So I think being able to have that content now will help us and Yururito and EventHub to market future events with questions that are being asked because we only got the answer to a few questions in the allotted time. I think integrating technology to be able to allow attendees to ask questions is helpful. Now the question is, how do we better answer those questions for the attendees?
MW: Is there anything else that you want to mention about this event, or just thoughts you had on it?
SR: They say with Japan, they can take something like event technology and make it better. [The Japanese] can take any product and then elevate it. Give them a product and they’ll make it 10-times better. So, it’s not like they’re 10 years behind; they’ve [simply] followed a manual process that has worked for them over the years.
We shared how US event companies are using this data and making data-driven decisions based on collecting it all through this event tech. It’s all good having event tech, but what are you doing with your lead scans, your session scans, all your registration info? How are they analyzing it? What tools are being used, and then what decisions are they making for their next event? [What we want to help with is] what they do with all the data that they have collected.
What a lot of event marketers forget is you don’t have one product that fits all companies or events. You have multiple products that you can combine, and use APIs and webhooks to make them all talk to each other and that’s something we explained on stage. I think EventHub is the first event technology platform, in Japan, to start using APIs and webhooks to integrate with other platforms, which has not really been done before in Japan. The future is quite promising for the advancement of events in the Japanese market.
END
Looking for more information about integrating event tech to help your speakers have seamless experiences? The BW Events Tech team can help!
We are committed to being platform agnostic, and helping find the best solution for your event based on your needs and budget. Reach out here or at [email protected] to get started.
