...it may be time to reevaluate how your firm or company is using online events

Since the pandemic, virtual meetings, webinars, and other online events are now commonplace, and most law firms and companies subscribe to and pay for at least one online platform to host and deliver online events.

To keep up with the times and save time and money, it may be time to reevaluate how your firm or company is using online events to enhance your reputation, build your brand, and nurture and develop relationships and business.

Some companies are now using LIVE STREAMING to communicate in real time. For example, J.P. Morgan, MIT, Pfizer, Best Buy, PwC, Mercer, Boston Consulting Group, Salesforce, Mitel, and others are using live streaming and LinkedIn® Live (LI Live) to educate, inform, reach, and build awareness with four key audiences:

• Their current workforce
• Potential new employees
• Existing customers/clients
• Prospective new customers/clients

But most law firms and other companies are not using live streaming or LI Live at all, even though the benefits of doing so over traditional webinars are significant.

• Live streams on LI (and on other strategic social media platforms) can do a lot more than a Zoom (or other) webinar.
• Since there are approximately 1 billion users of LI (around 145 million of whom are active), doing LI Live events can increase your reach, audience, connections, and followers. No internal mailing list can match this potential reach.
• Any LI Live event is accessible to and can be viewed and shared by ALL the host’s LI connections plus ALL the LI connections of the guest speaker(s). So, LI Lives reach a larger audience than does any in-house email list because the event is PUBLIC and is shown to the networks of both the host and the guest(s).
• LI Lives showcase presenters in real time and provide an opportunity to build new relationships immediately while authentically displaying their credibility and expertise.
• Live streaming (on LI or on other social media platforms that support live streaming) offers the advantage of being able to show the attendees’ questions/comments on the screen. On most online event platforms, you can’t display the comments on the screen.
• Using live streaming, experts can present while simultaneously answering/showing attendees’ questions/comments (with or without back-end assistance), which demonstrates their knowledge and capability plus enhances their reputation.
• After the LI Live is over, the replay is instantly available for people to watch as evergreen content. Replays of LI Lives get an average of 500 views.
• Anyone who signs up to “attend” a LI Live event but misses it is automatically sent a link to the recording/replay (so you don’t have to). Whereas with a Zoom webinar, it’s necessary to send the recording to those who missed it and usually only to the people who registered beforehand.
• Depending on the streaming platform you use, the branding and presentation tools and communication options can be much more robust and tailored than what Zoom offers.
• The recording of the LI Live (the replay) is automatically posted and lives on your LI profile under “Events,” so it augments your LI profile, anyone can see it, plus it’s searchable, which can increase your reputation and reach.
• Once a LI Live event ends, you can easily download the audio and video files from StreamYard or Restream (or using other AI tools) and create more evergreen content, such as a blog post or an article, or you can chop it up into video snippets. The possibilities to leverage and reuse the content from live streams are endless.
• Live streams are live in real time, so mistakes can be made during live streams, and there is no ability to redo or edit out any faux pas during the live stream. Unless a Zoom webinar is prerecorded and then edited first, there’s no way to edit it during the actual presentation.

Remember: Even for “private” or “unlisted” live streams, ALL live streams are hosted on/streamed from the internet, so depending on the event, privacy or confidentiality factors may need to be considered.

Some people stop using Zoom or similar platforms once they get a live stream up and running.

To assess whether livestreaming and LI Live could benefit your firm or company, consider the factors below:

• How much does our current webinar platform cost per year?
• What is the monetary value of the time it takes for staff members to operate it and optimize the content produced during the event for use after it ends?
• Have we optimized our webinar production process to reach ALL our LI connections?
• How much new business has our firm generated from our webinar platform?
• Does the webinar platform allow the audience to submit questions and comments during the presentation?
• Does it allow the audience to interact with one another?
• Does it allow presenters to do polls and giveaways?
• Does it immediately provide a transcript of the presentation to leverage for reuse of the content?
• Could our firm benefit from hiring an experienced live stream host or growth expert?

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Connect with Julie Savarino on LinkedIn.