“What’s the new trend in Virtual Keynote Speakers? The Pre-recorded message that you simply play back on the day of your Virtual meeting.
With creative usage of Zoom, On24, and more virtual platforms at company meetings, we understand that your interest is in Best Practices for virtual keynote sessions right now. We had an educational expert speaking virtually this past week for one of our financial services customers–and the live feed had some technical hiccups in the first minute. These were quickly settled, but it reminds us of why so many of the virtual speaker events we’ve booked lately have been pre-recorded. If you’ve witnessed the failures of an on-time and on-track virtual event, you’ll agree this is the way to go. But here’s how you best do it:
1. Act as if its LIVE (virtually, of course). We’ve confirmed Good Morning America host Michael Strahan for one of our good customers in the personal care products industry in October. But the moderated Q&A session is being pre-recorded next week. The idea is to have the speaker and the moderator act as if they are broadcasting this program Live–the day-of the event itself. Since the virtual moderated Q&A session typically doesn’t lend itself to questions from the audience after the main question session, a few tweaks in the script make this a slam dunk.
2. Do a playback of the pre-recorded session with your speaker online for a Chat/Q&A session. Our Canon and Dell Technologies customers have recently produced virtual events with hugely popular Leading Through Adversity keynote speaker Alex Honnold. Alex won an Academy Award last year for his starring role in Free Solo–a film which followed Alex’s ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite without the aid of ropes or harnesses. But Alex’s keynote–in which he shares his screen to walk viewers through the slides of his intense story of preparation, risk, teamwork, and body/mind agility–prompts so many audience questions that Alex never could answer them all–until now. The Dell audience of 10,000 viewers didn’t all have questions for Alex, but in this format Alex just scrolled and typed answers during the playback of his talk. Alex had initially questioned the Dell Technologies customer about the pre-record idea, since Alex had only given live virtual keynotes before this one. The response was that their attendees were used to this format and they expected to be able to ask questions during the keynote speech. And it sure does add a valuable angle–and your speaker has the ability to answer every single question–unlike the time running out on an in-person meeting!
We have NFL Legend Joe Theismann pre-recording another keynote speech next month for playback in November. That customer can easily set up the recorded keynote and triple confirm that the playback is working to perfection. IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THIS FORMAT: Having your keynote speaker present virtually on one day and then appear on live the day of the playback is essentially 2 slots of time (on 2 different dates). As we’ve all seen during the pandemic, many speaker fees have been slashed significantly–so it’s important to request of your speaker that she accept the same single fee for both the recording day and the playback day. Most will say yes; some will say no (but don’t expect to pay double the fee!).
The look of a corporate meeting in the future? This will be a hybrid with some keynotes live and some virtual. From a keynote cost standpoint, using a speaker virtually can save a company upwards of $100,000 in many cases (noted motivational keynote speaker and bestselling author Simon Sinek is a perfect example). Since attendees in 2021 will be extremely well versed in the online keynote speaker world, a meeting professional planning a live event next year knows that she can have her Opening Day Keynote Speaker onsite live to present to this audience—while the Day 2 speaker can be virtual and nobody will disagree with the move. And if the worry is no autographed books or personalized NFL Footballs, you simply have these shipped to your speaker for advanced signing.
We’re excited to hear more about your next virtual agenda need soon. Need a politico for Election discussion? Holiday Parties are just around the corner, and we’ve got America’s Got Talent superstars and more for your music, comedy, magic, and mentalism needs. “
