hosted by Brian Clark
Freelancers, solopreneurs, and startup founders are used to operating in virtual environments. Zoom and countless other virtual communication tools are the way we do impactful work without offices or geographic proximity to others.
Now, a big chunk of the business world has gone remote and virtual. Real-life events — both big and small — have been canceled out of necessity, and there’s a good chance that the increasing digitalization of business that was already happening means many events will not go back to the “real world.
That means it’s time to start thinking about how virtual events figure into your business model. Further, how can producing virtual events allow you to provide unique value that results in entirely new business models?
We’re talking to Tara McMullin this week, the founder of What Works — a podcast and community platform for small business owners. Tara and her team have hosted 11 virtual conferences, at least 8 virtual retreats, and countless mastermind or coworking sessions.
You’ll discover what the most important aspects of creating virtual events involve, plus we get into the nuts and bolts of software and related technology. We also explore what the future may hold with emerging technologies that enhance interaction between virtual event organizers and participants, and collaboration between everyone involved.
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Transcript
How to Produce Successful Virtual Events
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving 7-figures in revenue, without investors or employees.
If you want to discover what’s behind the rise in these 7-figure businesses, then you need to get our free Next Level audio course. In this enlightening course from Unemployable founder, Brian Clark, you’ll hear what’s working right now for attracting an audience, discovering what they want to buy, and building your perfect business.
To sign up for free, go to nextlevelseven.com. That’s nextlevelseven.com.
And now, here’s your host for this edition of 7-Figure Small — serial digital entrepreneur, Brian Clark.
Brian Clark: Freelancers, solopreneurs, and startup founders are used to operating in virtual environments. Zoom and countless other virtual communication tools are the way we do impactful work without offices or even geographic proximity to others.
Now, a big chunk of the business world has gone remote and virtual. Real-life events — both big and small — have been canceled out of necessity, and there’s a good chance that the increasing digitalization of business that was already happening means many events will not go back to the “real world.
That means it’s time to start thinking about how virtual events figure into your business model. Further, how can producing virtual events allow you to provide unique value that results in entirely new business models?
I’m Brian Clark and this is 7-Figure Small. Thanks for joining us and I hope all is well with you and yours.
We’re talking to Tara McMullin this week, the founder of What Works — a podcast and community platform for small business owners. Tara and her team have hosted 11 virtual conferences, at least 8 virtual retreats, and countless mastermind or coworking sessions.
You’ll discover what the most important aspects of creating virtual events involve, plus we get into the nuts and bolts of software and related technology. We also explore what the future may hold with emerging technologies that enhance interaction between virtual event organizers and participants, and collaboration between everyone involved.
This episode is brought to you by Freshbooks, cloud accounting software designed specifically for freelancers and solo business owners. They’re offering a 30-day, unrestricted and no credit card required free trial to listeners of the podcast. To claim it, just head over to FreshBooks.com/unemployable and make sure to enter UNEMPLOYABLE in the “How Did You Hear About Us? section.
Tara, how are you? Thank you so much for joining us today.
Tara McMullin: I am pretty good all things considered, and I’m glad to be here.
Brian Clark: Well, I am glad you are here too, because we have a lot of timely things to discuss and I think you might be just a little bit ahead of the curve. Even for people in the virtual and self-employed space as we all are, we’ve now been joined by tons of people who are now working at home and they have taken over our beloved Zoom and we were worried about that.
But when it comes to the topic of producing virtual training, online courses, virtual conferences — all of this stuff is very much a heavy topic of conversation. Now, obviously, because we are seeing very big shifts that may or may not end up going back to normal in the real world.
What Is Your Community and How Does It Work?
Brian Clark: So, first of all, I want to introduce people to what you do because you run a community for small business people and that in itself is a virtual business. So that’s a great starting point.
But you’ve also taken in my mind, I think, a very unique approach to how you structure the educational portions of your community. And that’s really what I want to talk to you about today, because there are so many questions I think people have from, “How do you know what to teach? And how do you produce these digital events? and all of the details that have to do with it.
So let’s start with, tell us about your particular community and how it works.
Tara McMullin: Yeah, so you’re right. The What Works Network is unique in that instead of organizing our community around particular online courses that we’re releasing on a regular basis or even educational resources in some sort of static form like PDFs or videos, we have really taken the strategy of focusing on connection and collaborative learning as the core of how we help people build better businesses.
What that looks like on a regular basis is that we are facilitating conversations about all sorts of different topics. On both the level of “We can talk about anything that people want to talk about. If they want to come bring a marketing problem, a management problem, an operational problem, we can talk about any of those things at any given time. But then, on another level, we are structuring and facilitating conversations on a topical level as well.
So we’re recording this in April. Our theme for this month is The Tools that Run Your Business. And so we’re going to be facilitating conversations about: What software do you choose? How do you know when to switch? What are some of the different pieces of software that people are really excited about right now? How do you get the most out of that software? When do you decide to automate? When do you not? So it’s things like that.
We structure those conversations both on our platform, which is Mighty Networks, which you and I share, and we also structure them in virtual events. So we have monthly kind of very collaborative, very conversation style events where we get people together and talk through these different things.
Then we also have quarterly virtual conferences, where again in a very conversational style, very kind of connection-oriented manner, we talk about the stuff that small business owners want to talk about, the stuff that they don’t necessarily see online courses being built around, or they don’t necessarily see the big marketers talking about them.
So we’re able to talk with people about the stuff that’s top of mind for them, the stuff that right now might be very challenging for them or cause them a lot of concern. And in that way as well, we’re also very nimble. We can roll out events or opportunities to connect with members that reflect exactly what’s going on right now, exactly what they might be thinking about. And just really give them a platform for learning that’s based on the questions that they want to ask and the information that they’re trying to get at any given moment.
How Do You Organize Past and Current Content?
Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s interesting. Let’s drill down a bit, because you made a contrast there with what we think of as the typical membership site. Yes, there’s new content, but when you join, you also access an archive or a library. However, it’s organized. Sometimes it’s not, unfortunately. But we always tried to organize our past content in a way that made sense, so that it actually either supplemented what was current or it laid the foundation to be able to better utilize what we’re talking about currently.
So when you do your monthly and quarterly content, do you then archive that in your Mighty Network community so that other people can access that? Or do you really just emphasize on what’s happening right now?
Tara McMullin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I would say that we emphasize what’s happening right now, but that as much as possible, we’re also archiving it.
So, yes, if someone is very diligent and wants to dig back into a topic that we covered months ago and the conversations that we had around that, they can absolutely go into past events and watch replays. They can go actually and attend virtual conferences that we’ve had in the past. We do have those things archived. It’s just not what we lead with.
We really lead with the value proposition essentially being around participation. So it’s not about passive learning. And it’s not so much about educating yourself as it is actually in participating in the conversations that are going to lead to learning.
I don’t know, for me it feels like a big difference. Maybe it sounds really semantic now that I’m saying it. But I do think that it has made our value proposition and the way we encourage engaging with our community pretty different than what I’ve experienced being a member of other membership sites or other small business communities in the past.
Brian Clark: Yeah, no, I don’t think it’s just semantic, because a lot of times in membership site marketing, you’re marketing the archive — “We’ve got a thousand hours of stuff you’ll never look at.
Tara McMullin: Exactly.
How Do You Balance Current vs. Fundamental Topics?
Brian Clark: I think it’s useful, and again, just from our own past experience, it’s hard work, but you can take what you’ve done before and try to onboard people with it. You know what I’m saying? I think there’s value to that and you probably have a similar thing.
I do like the now-ness, especially in the space of modern small business, specifically digitally based businesses. Some fundamentals don’t change, and I guess that would be where I would see the value of archives. But then, there’s always nuance and difference and contextual differences.
I think a lot of times when people join your community, they are focusing way more on what’s new than what’s fundamental. So you’re satisfying them by keeping things current. But do you often find yourself returning to, “Okay, let’s remember when it comes to marketing, the fundamentals of persuasive human communication and value and all that wrapped up in a more current theme, if you will?
Tara McMullin: Yeah. I think it probably would help to explain that the way we plan content and conversations in our community overlaps with the way we plan content and conversations for our podcast, which is called What Works as well.
We cover the same theme on the podcast and in the community at the same time. We drive conversations in the community with our podcast content. So we actually plan those themes pretty far in advance. And absolutely when I’m planning themes, I’m thinking about what are the foundational fundamental things that we need to be coming back to over and over again.
We actually planned out an entire years’ worth of content back in November of last year. So we planned out all of 2020 — I shouldn’t say we planned out the content. We planned out the themes, the topics that we were going to cover.
And then maybe on a quarter by quarter basis, I go in and I ask myself, “Okay, I still love this theme. I’m glad we’re talking about this this month, but how do I make it really relevant? What are the stories that I want to tell around this theme right now? What are the questions that people are asking right now that I can incorporate into this theme?
So we’re kind of playing between those two levels of the fundamental things that we know we need to be delivering to our people and also asking the questions that are really relevant right now. I’ll give you an example.
Like I mentioned, this month we’re talking about tools, and we’re predominantly looking at that from software systems and workflows. Just the nuts and bolts of how people run their businesses, what goes on behind the scenes. One of the episodes that we had planned was an episode on how my husband and I run the podcast production agency that we also have.
And I said, “All right, this is good, this is relevant. This still works for right now. But what if we also add into that a component of talking about tools for managing stress and anxiety right now? Because we all need more tools for stress and anxiety right now. We actually updated the plan for that episode so that we could incorporate that conversation as well. So that then when that episode airs on Tuesday, I can bring that over to our community and start that conversation with our community too.
So, yes, we are having this very fundamental conversation about great podcasting tools, great agency tools, but we’re also having a conversation that’s super relevant to the moment right now.
How to Identify the Right Topic or Theme
Brian Clark: Okay, we’ve been talking in the context of membership or communities where your members do an incredible job (ours, yours, anyone) of telling you what they want. Sometimes you’re surprised by it.
Let’s zoom out a little bit. Let’s say, given that real world events are currently on hold and may not come back at the same level given various conditions, I would suspect that we’ll see a rise in virtual events. And hopefully they’re higher quality and more meaningful than some of the things we’ve seen done just for marketing purposes in the past.
How would you advise someone who was thinking of doing virtual events to really zoom in on the right topic, the right theme, when they don’t have the benefit of that existing community to draw upon?
Tara McMullin: Yeah, I think even if you don’t have a community, if you’re putting together some sort of event, you have an audience. There are people that you’re thinking about gathering together.
One place that I think online events have missed the mark in the past is we’ve been really focused on what we want to teach, what we think is the right thing to do, and we’re really focused on the content of it. And one place that in-person events I think get really right is they tend to focus more on the people — Who am I bringing together? Who am I gathering here?
And so I think online events need to consider that piece of the puzzle a lot more before they start thinking about content.
If you’re wanting to put together an online event, the first step is to ask yourself, “Who am I gathering here? What do they have in common? What kind of needs do they have right now? What kind of questions are they asking? Who do they want to meet? How do they want to meet those people? What kind of experience do they want to have? What kind of interaction do they want to have?
Start from that really human element of it and really focus on the people that you’re bringing together and the experience that you want to create for them. Once you’ve decided on that, then you can start thinking about content. What kind of content is going to meet their needs? What’s the theme of this event that’s going to help meet their needs?
The other thing I think that I would invite people to really think about there is, again, in the past online events have been super content-oriented. “I’m going to squeeze as much content into this online summit as I possibly can. We’ve got 70 speakers speaking for 70 hours. All you have to do is give me your email address.
Nobody wants that, like nobody has time for that. Nobody wants to sit in front of their computer that long. They want to have more of an interactive experience. They want to feel more like they’re connecting with the guests that you bring in, the other people that are gathered there.
So I think when you’re thinking about content, you also have to be thinking about, “What’s the content or what is the topic that’s going to allow me to create the most interactive, conversational, collaborative (whatever word you want to use) experience possible so that I’m not just ramming content down someone’s throat, so that I’m not just telling you everything I’ve ever learned about — marketing or operations? But, instead, I’m creating an environment where we can have a conversation, where I can get feedback back from you, and I can adjust what we’re talking about on the fly or I can respond to you in the moment.
Not every topic is going to be right for that. And maybe not every question that your audience is asking is going to be appropriate for that kind of context. But I think when you’re really deciding, “What is this event going to be about? What am I going to teach? What am I going to share? we’ve got to be incorporating or we’ve got to be leaving room for that interactive conversational component. Or we really are missing out on the real promise and benefit of the medium that we have here at the expense of just trying desperately to create value by squeezing as much content into something as possible.
How to Create an Interactive Process
Brian Clark: Amen to all of that. Let’s see if we can unpack it a little bit. I mean, definitely, start with the “who. What you want to tell people is of no consequence if that doesn’t solve a problem or desire for them.
So what’s in it for them? It’s not a selfish thing. It’s just why are they going to give you their attention unless you’re solving or satisfying a desire for them first and foremost. So that’s where everyone needs to start. Not what webinar software to use.
But I do want to come in a little bit about the interactivity. Because over the last couple of years, I found that people are paying for the interactivity. I mean, you have to have content in order to guide them, of course. But I’ve really found that focusing on working on a process together, bringing them from point A to point B in a way that solves their problem or satisfies their desire, as opposed to, “Here’s a bunch of information, figure it out, solve your problem.
It’s the interaction that results in the achievement or the success as it is viewed by the audience member. Dead on, absolutely. And I think if you can take away one thing or two things, I would say, from this presentation only, it would be to start with them and figure out an interactive process in which you can help them achieve their desired version of success.
Tara McMullin: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a book called The Art of Community, which I would recommend to everyone. It’s so good. The author’s name is Charles Vogl, and he talks about defining a community as a group of people who care about each other and care about each other’s success or well-being.
And I think that, obviously, that has to do with online communities as well as in-person communities. But I also think it has to do with the strategy and development process that we put behind our online events too.
If the only person that the people attending your event care about is you, I think you’ve failed. In the past that might’ve felt like a success, because if they care about you, well then, they’re going to go and buy your expensive online course, or they’re going to want to coach with you, or buy your service package.
But I think if your goal is really building a community, if your goal is bringing people together for a shared purpose to learn together, they can’t just care about you and the content that you have to offer. They have to care about each other as well.
And so just like you said, Brian, I think building an experience where people are learning together, growing together, sharing together, working towards something together, the more they’re going to care about each other and the better a learning experience they’re going to have. And the better a learning experience they’re going to have, the better results they’re going to get.
And then that just makes everybody feel good about how the experience is evolving, and they’re going to keep showing up. They’re going to keep engaging, and they’re going to keep paying over time as well.
Guru vs. Community Organizer
Brian Clark: Yeah. I won’t use the term or the phrase “death of the guru model, because there will always be people — a subset of the population is attracted to that cult of personality, “I’m just here to listen to every word you say type thing. But I don’t think most people, at least statistically, are looking for that. I think most people are actually looking for the community interaction.
I believe that you focus on that from a philosophical standpoint, because you do not operate that. I mean, you’re more like a community organizer, like a young Barack Obama more than when he became this symbol of hope.
There’s a distinction between the two roles that you can play. Is that a conscious thing for you?
Tara McMullin: It is. It is absolutely a conscious thing. And it was a decision that I made to reorganize my business away from the guru model, away from the cult of personality model, because I didn’t like it. It was not my intention to begin with, but I had found myself kind of falling into it. And so I decided, “I do not want this. I want something where I am a leader. Yes, I’m an organizer, I’m a facilitator, but I’m not the person with all the answers. And instead, really, finding the wisdom and finding the information and the experience and the expertise in the community.
So, yeah, that was absolutely a conscious decision and it’s what we’ve built our whole business model around. And maybe we were about three years too early, which is what it feels like right now. But, yes, I completely agree. I think more and more and more people are looking for that very well-curated, very collaborative, very interactive, conversational environment where they can show up and participate and get what they need out of an experience that really prioritizes connection with other people in a meaningful way.
Tools to Produce Online Events
Brian Clark: Yeah, definitely. So what we’ve been talking about, and you know this as well, is the important stuff. And yet people are going to be, “Okay, I got it. So what webinar software?
But now, let’s talk a little bit about production, because it can be tricky. There are a lot of different tools. I think those of us, like you, who’ve been doing this for a while, there was the Skype days and then the shift to Zoom. Now there are so many choices and we may have to start looking at them, because everyone’s using Zoom. I mean, things like that happen.
But let’s look a little big picture at your production approach from how do you actually get it done? Let’s assume we’ve got the right content for the right who and the right interactive success-oriented process. Those are the things you really have to start with.
Assuming you have that, how do you make it happen?
Tara McMullin: So we take that information and we basically break it down into two different categories based on the experience that we want to create, and then that dictates what software we use. And then what software we use tends to dictate the structure of the event. It’s not that linear, they all kind of influence each other.
But we look at events as sort of on a spectrum between conversation and content, and we always try and be somewhere in the middle. But when it skews to the content side, we use a piece of software called Crowdcast, which I highly recommend. I love them as a company, I love the software. I’ve been using it for five years I think now.
It is something that is more like webinar software than sort of the typical use case for Zoom. But it also borrows a lot just from the live video broadcasting model, so like a Facebook live or a YouTube live kind of thing. And you can stream to Facebook and YouTube and other things straight from Crowdcast.
But we love it, because the user interface is really nice. They’ve got a really cool question and answer feature. The chat room is really nice and I just like it and I like the company. So that’s the software we use on that side.
If we have an event that’s going to skew more to the conversation side where we want to get more of our community involved in the discussion and in sharing and maybe getting multiple people screen-sharing even, then we use Zoom. For whatever reason, Zoom is just not a piece of software that I love even though I spend hours and hours on it every week. So I’m always trying to get out of using Zoom, but we do absolutely use it for our more conversation-style events.
From there, we really think about the structure of the event strategically so that, again, we’re creating an experience for the people that we’re gathering together.
Let me back up for a second. One of the challenges with online events versus in-person events is that you lose all of the physical, social, emotional cues that you have when people are gathered together in the same space. Like the way chairs or tables are set up, the way the coffee bar is set up, the way people are dressed, the physical agenda, the speaker is in front of the room — all of those things give a lot of cues to how you show up and how you participate.
And by and large, those things are missing in online events, so we need to think about ways to build structure back into the event so that people feel really comfortable participating. So that’s going to look like on the Crowdcast kind of content side of things, making sure that there’s a clear agenda, talking about that agenda often throughout the event so that people really understand the schedule and what’s coming up.
Talking about the purpose, talking about how to participate, talking about the kinds of behaviors that we want participants to be engaged in. Do we want you to be chatting along, sharing your own stories? Do we want you to be asking questions? Do you want us to push back? There are all sorts of different things that we might tell people to do.
On the Zoom side of things when we’re having a conversation, we might build a couple of minutes of silent reflection in. So we might ask a question or share a prompt and actually give people time to think about it and jot down some notes. So that then when they come back into the conversation, they can participate more fully and more comfortably.
So we’re always thinking about what are the different things, what are the different pieces of structure that we can build into either style of event so that people can really participate in a way that feels comfortable and natural, instead of just sort of sitting back and hoping to learn something, if that makes sense.
What Role Will Augmented and Virtual Reality Play in Online Events?
Brian Clark: It does, absolutely. And the challenge of trying to compensate in a virtual environment for what you lose in the real world is the topic of unending fascination to me. And I think over the years, we’re going to really start being able to solve some of those problems.
So I want you to put on your foresight hat for a little bit, because no one knows exactly what the world’s going to look like when we get through this. And we will get through this. We don’t know exactly what the damage is going to be, but we will carry on and the world’s going to be at least slightly different. We know that much.
One thing that I think everyone kind of agrees on is that the technology trends that were already happening are now going to accelerate — AI and automation. The companies that were resistant to going through the pain of implementing have just seen their workforce basically either disappear or go remote.
So I’ve been reading how there’s so much more interest in implementing automation now. Now what that means for human workers is of concern. We may have to learn to work better with machines. I know we self-employed people will, and I see that as a benefit.
The other thing I like to watch of course is augmented and virtual reality. And possibly, Apple was going to release their augmented reality glasses this fall. We know that’s not going to happen now, ironically, because of the pandemic. And virtual reality is still incredibly nerdy.
But, assuming we’re going to get past that and that it may actually accelerate now in development, how do you see that? I mean, is that something you look forward to when you go, “Now I don’t have to use Zoom and I can more replicate the physical world and the way people view me and fellow presenters, and the way we mingle with each other as participants. Is that something you’re looking forward to or do you still think nothing’s going to beat the real world?
Tara McMullin: Oh man, that’s a good question, and you are so much more up on virtual reality and augmented reality than I am. But what I will say is I don’t personally have a desire to try to mimic the in-person world online.
I see the potential of virtual reality for education and entertainment and all of that for sure. But I don’t have a personal need, so I’m totally projecting based on my personal needs, but I don’t have a personal need to feel like I am standing up in front of a group of people who are all in one room with me.
However, what I am really interested in is tools that do facilitate connection between attendees more easily, because that, I think, is one of the places where we don’t have great tools yet. And if virtual reality and augmented reality can make that happen, then that’s something I’m really excited about.
So just as a for instance, one of the reasons we do use Zoom is because of the breakout room function. I freaking love the breakout room function. It has made me feel so free as a facilitator, because I can set up a great conversation and then just let people go have it. I don’t have to be there making it happen. All I have to do is push a button, put people in small groups, get them talking to each other, and they have the most incredible experiences without me. It’s wonderful.
And so I would love more tools for doing things like that. I’d love more tools for getting people to mingle and network. I’d love more tools for them having small group round table discussions, for sharing what’s going on in their world, on their computer, in their business, whatever that might look like. Those are the kinds of things that I’m really, really interested in.
And then I’m also just really interested, from a technology standpoint, in how we cannot mimic in-person, but how we can create new structures and new formats for events and community that take advantage of what the online world is all about. I think Mighty Networks is sort of a step in that direction, but I’m really curious what 10 steps in that direction might be. Where we can use things that are a little more familiar to us that feel really native to online like forums and social networks, but do them in more interactive, more conversational ways that drive engagement in new and interesting ways.
So my crystal ball is pretty foggy on this all, but that’s what I’m personally really interested in.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I’m with you actually. I also have no interest in standing in front of a virtual room as an avatar, although some day we will get there.
But it’s really what happens between, say, Zoom today and that that’s fascinating to me. Because there are things we can do today that when I started my first community in 2008 are like science fiction. But it’s going to continue that way and you and me are going to be the type of people who are the early adopters of this, because if it looks like it can enhance the interaction and collaboration between our groups, then, of course, we’re going to implement them and see what works.
So I think it’s the path there that is going to speed up and be very interesting. But yeah, I can tell you whatever I have to put on my face to do our work with our communities and audiences, I will take that off and head out to the mountains as soon as possible.
Tara McMullin: Amen to that.
Brian Clark: Tara, thank you so much. This has been really, I think, an enlightening conversation for questions that are on a lot of people’s minds right now.
I think that regardless of the impact on your current business, we’re seeing an entire new world opening up. And while we have to deal with the downside first and foremost, and take care of ourselves and each other, there are going to be new opportunities for people as the world becomes more digital, as more marketing and events and community take place online.
So it’s smart. Pay attention, keep your eyes open, and it never hurts to listen to smart people like Tara.
Tara McMullin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
Brian Clark: All right, everyone, take care out there. And we will talk again soon. Again, Tara, thank you so much.
Tara McMullin: Thank you.
