 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Oh, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to take a break from our traditional spending assessment and share with you our advice on how to deal with this crisis, specifically shifting your physical to digital in the age of coronavirus. So we're not going to be digging into the spending data. I talked to ETR this week, and they are obviously surveying on the impact of COVID-19, but those results won't be ready for a little bit. So the CUBE team has been in discussions with over 20 companies that have events planned in the near term, and the inbound call volume has been increasing very rapidly. Now, we've been doing digital for a decade, and we have a lot of experience, and we're really excited to share our learnings, tools, and best practices with you as you try to plan through this crisis. So look, this is uncharted territory. We haven't ever seen a country quarantine 35 million people before, so of course everyone is panicked by this uncertainty, but our message, like others, is don't panic, but don't be complacent. You have to act and you have to make decisions. This will reduce uncertainty for your stakeholders, your employees, and of course your community. Now as you well know, major physical events are dropping very fast as a risk mitigation measure. Mobile World Congress, HIMS canceled, CUBECon was postponed, IBM Think has gone digital, and so it goes. Look, if you have an event in the next three weeks, you have little choice, but to cancel the physical attendee portion of that event. You really have three choices here. One is to cancel the event completely and wait until next year. Now the problem with that is that type of capitulation doesn't really preserve any of the value related to why you were originally holding the physical event in the first place. Now you can do what CUBECon did and postpone till the summer or kind of indefinitely, okay, that's a near term decision on the event, but now you're in limbo. But if you can sort out a venue down the road, that might work. The third option is to pivot to digital. It requires more thought, but what it does is allow you to create an ongoing content arc that has benefits. The number one complaint brands tell us about physical events is that after the event, they don't create a post event halo effect. A digital strategy that spans time will enable that. This is important because when the market comes down, you're going to be able to better leverage digital for your physical events. The key question you want to ask is what are the most important aspects of that physical event that you want to preserve and that start thinking about building a digital twin of those areas. But it's much more than that and I'll address this opportunity that we think is unfolding for you a little later. Your challenge right now is to act decisively and turn lemons into lemonade with digital. Experiences are built around content, community, and the interaction of people. This is our philosophy. It's a virtuous cycle where data and machine intelligence are going to drive insights. Discovery by users is going to bring navigation which leads to engagement and ultimately outcomes. Now very importantly, this is not about which event software package to use. Do not start there. Start with the outcome that you want to achieve and work backwards. Identify the parts of that outcome that are achievable and then work from there. The technology decision will be easy and fall out of it if you take that path. So out of a high level, you have two paths. One, which is the preferred path is to pivot to digital on the right hand side, especially if your event is in March or early April. Two is hold your physical event but your general counsel is going to be all over you about the risks and precautions that you need to take. There are others better than I do advise you on those precautions. I've listed some here on the left hand side and I'm going to publish this on Wikibon but you know what to do there. But we are suggesting and advising for the near term events that you optimize for digital. That's the right side. Send out a crisp and clear communications Adobe has a good example that asks your loyal community to opt in for updates and start the planning process. You want to identify the key objectives of your event and build a digital program that maximizes the value for your attendees and maps to those objectives. We're going to share some examples that theCUBE participated in this week on what really might look like the digital event and we'll share that with you. Events software should come last. Don't even worry about that until you've envisioned your outcome. I'm going to talk about software tools a little bit later. So new thinking is required, we believe. The old way was a big venue, big bang event. You get thousands of people you're spending tons of money on a band. There's exhibitor halls. You're not going to preserve that, obviously. Rather think about resetting the physical and optimizing for digital which really is about serving a community. Now let's talk about, again, what that might look like in the near term and then we're going to close on how we see this evolving to a new era. The pattern emerging with our sponsors and our clients is they want to preserve five key content areas from physical, not necessarily all of them but in some combination. First is the keynotes. You bring together a captive audience and you have your customers there, they want to hear from executives. Your customers have made a bet on you and they want to feel good about it. So one is keynotes. Two is the breakout sessions, the deeper dives from subject matter experts. Third are technical sessions. A big reason customers attend these events is to get technical training. Four is to actually share news in a press conference-like format. And the fifth area that we've seen is, of course, the cube. Many of our customers have said we not only want you to turn key the digital event, we want the cube or we want to plug the cube into our digital production that we are running. Now these are not in stone, they're just examples of what some of the customers are doing and they're blending keynotes into their press conference and there's a lot of different use cases. I want to stress that initially everyone's mindset is to simply replicate physical to digital. It's fine to start there, but there's more to this story that I'll address later on. So let's have a look at what something like this might look like in the near term. Here's an example of a digital event we did this week with a company called Aviatrix, a small company, but very nice look for their brand, which is a priority for them. You can see the live audience vibe. This was live, but it can be prerecorded. All the speakers were together in one place. You can see that very high production value. Now some of our clients have said, look, assume we want to do this completely remote with 100% of the speakers distributed. And our feeling is that's much more challenging for high value events. Our strong recommendation is plan to get the speakers into a physical venue and ideally get a small VIP slash influencer audience to be there. Make the audience feel important with the vibe of a VIP event. You know, you can wait a few weeks to see how this thing shakes out and if travel loosens up, then you can pull this off. But for your brand value, you really want to look as professional as possible. Same thing for keynotes. You can see how good this looks, nice stage, it's lighting, it blue lights and a live audience. Now this was a higher end production with a venue and food and music for the intros and outros, very professional audio and visual. And this requires budget. You got to think about at least $200 to $300,000 and up for a full blown event as you bring in influencers and the like. But you have options. You can scale it down. You can host the event at your facility, host it at our facility in Palo Alto. I'll talk about that a little later. Use your own people for the studio audience. Use your own production people and dial back the glam, which will lower the cost. Just depends on the brand that you want to convey and of course your budget. Now as well, you can run the event as a live or as a simulive. You can prerecord some or all of the segments. You can have a portion like the press conference and or the keynotes run live and then insert the breakouts into the stream as a simulive or as on-demand assets. You have options. And before I talk about the technical sessions, I want to share another best practice. The Cube this week participated in a digital event at Stanford with the women in data science organization, WIDS. And we plugged into their digital platform. WIDS is amazing. They created a hybrid physical slash digital event and again had a small group of VIPs and speakers on site at Stanford with keynotes and panels and breakouts and then the Cube interviews all were streaming. What was really cool is they connected to dozens and dozens of outposts around the globe. And these outposts hosted intimate meetups and participated in the live event. And of course, all the content is hosted on demand for a post event halo effect. I want to talk a little bit about technical sessions. Whereas with press conferences and keynotes, we're strongly recommending a higher scale and stronger brand production. With technical sessions, we see a different approach working. Technical people are fine with earbuds and laptop speakers. Here's an example of a technical talk that Dan Hushin, who's the senior VP and CTO at DXC has run for years using the CrowdChat platform. He used the free community edition along with Google handouts and has run dozens and dozens of these tech talks designed for learning and collaboration. Look, you can run these weekly as part of the pregame up to your digital event. You can run them day of the event at the Crescendo and you can continue the cadence post event for that halo effect that I've been talking about. Now let's spend a moment talking about software tooling. There are a lot of tools out there. Some super functional. Some are monolithic and bloated. Some are just emerging and you may have some of these either licensed or you might be wed to one-on-one. Webinar software like On24 and Brightcob and there's other platforms, that's great, awesome. From our standpoint, we plug right into any platform and they're really agnostic to that. But the key is not to allow your software to dictate the outcome of your digital event. Technology should serve the outcome, not the reverse. Let me share with you the cubes approach to software. The first thing I want to tell you is our software is free. We have a community additions that are very robust. They're not neutered and we're making these available to our community. We've taken a cloud native horizontally scalable angle bringing to bear the right tools for the right job. We don't think of software just to hold content. Rather, we think about members of the community and our goal is to allow teams to form and be successful. We see digital events creating new or evolving roles in organizations where the event may end, but the social organization and community aspect lives on. Think of the cube as providing a membrane to the conference team and a template for organizing and executing on digital events. Whether it's engaging in crowd chats, curating video, telling stories, post event, hosting content, amplifying content, visualize your community as a whole and serve them. That's really the goal. Presence here is critical in a digital event. Oh, hey, I see you're here. Great, let's talk. There are a number of use cases and I encourage you to call us, contact us and we'll focus on how to keep it simple. We have a really simple MVP use case that we're happy to share with you. All right, I got to wrap. The key point here is we see a permanent change. This is not a prediction about coronavirus. Rather, we see a transformation created with new dynamics. Digital is about groups, which are essentially a proxy for communities. Successful online communities require new thinking and we see new roles emerging. Think about the protocol stack for an event today and how that's going to change. Today is very structured. You got a captive audience, you got a big physical venue. In the future, it may evolve to multiple venues, many runs of shows, remote pods, rules around who is speaking, self-forming schedules. It's not going to be the same as today. We think digital moves to a persistent commitment by the community where the group collectively catalyzes collaboration. Hosting an online event is cool, but a long-term digital strategy doesn't just move physical to digital. Rather, it reimagines events as an organic entity. Not a mechanism or a piece of software. This is not about hosting content. Digital communities have an emotional impact that must be reflected through your brand. Now our mission at theCUBE has always been to serve communities with great content and it's evolving to provide the tools, infrastructure and data for communities to both self-govern and succeed. Even though these times are uncertain and very difficult, we are really excited to serve you. We'll make the time to consult with you and are really thrilled to share what we've learned in the last 10 years and collaborate with you to create great outcomes for audiences. Okay, that's a wrap. As always, we really appreciate the comments that we get on our LinkedIn posts and on Twitter, I'm at D-Valente. So thanks for that and thank you for watching everyone. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR and we'll see you next time.