Great post. Here’s something to consider: virtual events give the marketer less control and more risk. I think this ties in well with your second point. With live events, there are few barriers between you and the attendee. You have the personal touch, the well-honed people skills, the skillfully prepared presentations all working for you. With a virtual event, none of these things are guaranteed.

Perhaps the most important areas lacking control are access and experience. You can’t be sure what hardware your attendee is going to be using to enjoy your virtual presentation, nor can you be sure how the experience is going to translate for the customer in his or her remote environment.

This is important because of the risk involved. Anything that clouds or interrupts the view of your virtual event can reflect poorly on your client or product. So imagine, for example, the attendee’s office network is having trouble that day. This is certainly no fault of the marketer, but if it stops someone from having a positive experience with the marketer’s virtual event it will nonetheless have an effect on the presentation’s success. By extending the distance between marketer and customer, virtual events create a chain of possible issues and failures in the pursuit of convenience and accessibility.

This is definitely not to say virtual-event marketing is not an extremely important tool. It is important and will only continue to become better due to our strengthening infrastructure. The “perfect storm” you describe is real, and the iron is definitely striking-temperature right now. But virtual event marketing, even more than most things, is only worth doing if it can be done well.

Also, in response to Richard Feldman’s comment:

The story you relate about the couple that never crossed paths rings true. I completely agree with your take on this advantage to virtual event marketing and I want to offer another related explanation for why this could be so true.

Face-to-face events are often lauded for the personal touch and the human elements that make them so effective. However there are situations where it becomes more difficult in person to connect with the right people and the right ideas. Not enough time, too many people in attendance (as you mentioned), people unable to adequately articulate their needs on the spot, etc. All these problems can be elegantly solved by a well-planned virtual event.

So even if the couple in your story had by chance run into eachother over those ten years, the dating site certainly made a more comfortable atmosphere to strike up that first conversation.

-Jeremy Carpenter, aspiring marketer