The last six months saw all of us working professionals move our activities online. Work-from-home arrangements enabled us to perform our day-to-day tasks online. At the beginning of this pandemic, most of us would have spent a lot of time setting up our work area and ensuring that the physical requirements of working from home have been addressed.
Indeed, most interactions now happen online in one way or another, with each activity, more or less, becoming an “event.” You may have attended an event or two during this time. Some events involved trainings or sales kickoffs, while others are product or service launches or conferences. In our case, Hungry Workhorse has been conducting and delivering courses on innovative thinking and virtual consultative selling, to name a few.
As a result, these digital events have created new roles for your organization to consider. Holding events online is no longer a function of giving a Zoom link with a meeting ID and taking it from there. Doing so is now a production in itself, so much so that we see the following roles as necessary in ensuring that your digital event becomes a resounding success:
– Digital producer. Pre-lockdown, this would be your main project stakeholder or owner of the particular event to be set up. Traditionally, this is run by the marketing department, but in the new normal the digital producer can come from any business unit in the organization. For example, the head of the business could be the digital producer for a sales kickoff. He or she is responsible for the overall flow of the event, from conceptualization to execution.
– Digital director. The digital director is in charge of the execution of the event, with the program or agenda flow as the main basis.
– Digital floor director. The digital floor director is responsible for the little details happening in the program. If the event has a number of speakers, moderators and other resources, he or she is responsible for ensuring that access is provided seamlessly without glitches and audience engagement is recorded effectively through the use of various capabilities available.
– Digital content writer. A critical part in the execution of any event, the digital content writer is responsible for the creation of the event’s “story.” For example, a sales kickoff should be rich with motivational speeches and even live performances to ensure that salespeople would remain focused and committed in hitting their targets. For this, the digital content writer pens the script that becomes an integral part of the event to ensure that you get the audience you need and that it stays with you until the end.
These roles can be developed internally or outsourced. Once done, the people in these roles would then need tools to get their job done. I mentioned earlier that this is no longer a function of just sending a Zoom invitation, but rather using more complex platforms that combine real-time events, video engagement and collaboration. Imagine a keynote speaker’s speech being livestreamed somewhere and a virtual community watching it on an online platform, asking questions or commenting on what he or she is saying, which the floor director captures nicely for the speaker to answer in real time. This is just an example of what is possible, and there are so many applications available that can be utilized to ensure that the digital experience is, more or less, the same as if it was happening in the physical world.
Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm. Her advocacies include nation-building, sustainability education and financial literacy. The author may be reached at kay.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com