Exploring Zoom Events: A Comprehensive Attendee Experience Review (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm David Maldow with Let's Do Video, and today we're going to take our second look at Zoom Events. In the first video, we discussed why there's a need for something like Zoom Events, how it's different from Zoom Webinars, Zoom Meetings, and we took a look at the app itself, we went through the process of registering for our first Zoom Event. Since recording the first video, I've attended a few Zoom Events. So in this video, I want to share the experience of a Zoom Event as an attendee. So let's bring up the Zoom Events app behind me and take a quick look at the experience. Now I know I'm in the way, but before I move out of the way, I just want to point out what's going on right here. These thumbnails are thumbnails of Zoom Sessions, Zoom Meetings, or Zoom Webinars that were live at this moment in time. And by clicking on any one of them, I can bring that one up in the preview window over here. So the experience winds up looking more like this. In this preview window is whatever session you want to look at at any point in time. So in our lobby, we have our preview window showing our session of choice. We have our thumbnails of other live sessions we can preview at any time. Below me is the bar of in progress and starting soon sessions. We can look through, scroll through forward in the day and see what we want to watch. And also we can join live sessions from there. Then all the way on the end of the screen is our chat, which is exactly where we want it to be. We've learned how live streaming works. An event is not like a webinar. It's not a meeting. An event is a live stream and that's the way we do chat and live streaming. One weird quirk I noticed with the lobby is when I clicked on thumbnails to the left, I expected them to just sort of highlight or have a border and then present themselves here. But they would disappear from the list. So the list to my left there would move around. Your right, my left. So it would move around us. I would click on it and it was a little confusing to navigate through the thumbnails. As long as they all just stay there persistently, it should be easy enough to just click on them and see your, see your, your preview of choice. So hopefully zoom will fix that. Now I love the fact that you could just stay in this lobby view all day. You can see every session you want to see from this, from this view and just interact in the lobby chat with other attendees, but you probably, you're going to want to join some sessions. If you join a session, there's a little bit more interactivity. If you're in a zoom meeting, well, you could be seen and viewed if it's set up that way, but usually you could chat in the meeting chat or use the Q and a in a webinar. So you're probably going to want to join your meetings and your webinars. That leads to what I think is one of the big strengths of this platform is it's really easy to find and join the session you want. If you're seeing it here in the preview, you see right there, there's a big blue join button down below. If it's in that list down below, which it will be when it's time to go live, the join button will turn blue. So it's clickable and you have your sessions, a tab and your itinerary tab to the left, which also have ways to join them. It's, it's very difficult to be in this lobby and not be able to find your session. And that was really the biggest problem I've had over the last few years, which with producing events on other platforms, people sign up for the event. Often they pay for the event. And then when the session starts, we get a flood of emails saying, where's the zoom link? We can't find it. I didn't see anything in the chat in the, in the several zoom events that I've attended where people saying, Hey, the event started. I can't find my way in. Sometimes before the event started, they say, what's happening. I'm new. I've never been in one of these, but as soon as the events start, there's no one lost in chat. And that's a, that's a very big deal because again, that was the biggest problem we had with, with alternatives, just people not finding their sessions. The other thing that I really love about this lobby setup is the persistent event chat. It's over on this side of the screen where it's supposed to be. This is how we do chat in live events and in live streaming. And since this is tied to our zoom accounts, there's some benefits. We're less likely to have trolls in our events. People aren't going to want to compromise their zoom account, get in trouble by saying bad things. Also, it's tied to the, our zoom chat app. You can, if you make a friend during the event, if you're having a conversation with them, you can add them to your contacts in zoom chat. One thing that's missing, however, is a chat bot. One of the first things any streamer sets up were on regardless of their streaming platform is their chat bot. You need a chat to help you moderate your chat. It does a number of things. For one thing, it can block unwanted content. There were a lot of people at this event that were published or they were posting links to their website, links to their services. Hey, I offer this zoom related service. Check me out. They didn't want that in there. And what zoom had to do, this was the zoom Topia event. So zoom was running this. They had people who worked at zoom were monitoring chat and going through chat and deleting things manually. Uh, it's a very manual process and it's just not the way to do it. It should be automated throughout with, with a bot, a bot can also help with interactivity in a number of ways. To be clear, a chat bot presents itself as if it was a person in the chat. It has a name, zoom concierge, zoom administrative help bot, whatever we want to call it. And it chats in the chat. So it could do a lot of things. It could do announcements every five minutes for more information about our sponsors. Click here. It could answer questions. If someone types info, it could give a little information. It could even do a raffle. It can collect people's names and pick a winner. There's a lot of really amazing event related things that you could do with a bot while third party bots are available and it might be possible to integrate them somehow or use them and connect them in some way. I think it really makes sense for there to be a bot. That's part of this app. When you set up your event, when you set up your ticketing, when you set up your webinars and your meetings for the event, set up your speakers, you should set up your bot. It should be in this engine. So that covers the lobby. Let's see what happens when we click one of those join buttons and get into a session. It's a zoom webinar. And to be clear, it is literally a zoom webinar. It's not a special version that works with zoom events. There is no difference between this webinar and every zoom webinar you've ever attended. The only difference is the way it's being used. This isn't being used for a webinar, this is being used for a live event. That means there's more interactivity and that leads to a problem, which is the chat problem. The chat is set up for a webinar. It's not set up for a live event with thousands and thousands of people. So it's set to pop up every time someone says something new. That's how we do it in zoom meetings. Hey, I want to share a link with you. It pops up. Everyone can see it. This doesn't work when you have thousands of people talking at once. What happens is it moves too fast to see it and it's distracting. So while Eric was talking and everyone should be paying attention to Eric, we wound up having a conversation here about, Hey, how do you stop this from happening? People were complaining about it in the chat. It made the problem just double on itself. It just kept getting worse and worse. Now there is a workaround to this, but the zoom events experience shouldn't be about workarounds. It should be about very easy, intuitive things like everything else in zoom. The workaround is you click on the chat and it brings up a window and then you just move that window to another screen or you make it smaller, you get it out of the way. But if you, if you minimize it, this, this starts popping up again. So it's not that, it's not that great of a workaround. And again, there shouldn't be a workaround. We need to redesign this so that the chat is appropriate for a zoom event or a live streaming event and not, I'm trying to move it out of the way here, uh, and not for a typical webinar. This isn't a typical webinar. What I think the solution should be is a redesign, which looks like this. What I did here is I made the zoom webinar window a little smaller on my screen. I resized it and I moved the chat over to the left. Now notice how the chat, it kind of looks like how the chat looked in the lobby. And remember before I said, this is how we do chat with live streaming. And now, even though it is scrolling pretty fast, we have a lot of people that are very excited about what Natasha is saying over there. We can read it all. You can follow it, even though it's going fast and you don't want to lose that because look at these comments. This is great. This is what a live event is. This is what live stream meetings to be. Look how excited everyone is and how interactive it could be. So this is what we're looking for. So this is a big fix. This isn't a change just to the zoom events platform. This is a change to zoom webinar itself. But if zoom webinar is going to be the stage as it were for zoom events, it has to be able to handle event size chat because you definitely don't want your zoom events to have that sort of situation where people are complaining about the chat popping up. And another option, which I saw in another zoom event was they turned off the chat. They turned off the chat in a live event. Now any streamer will tell you there's nothing more important than chat and virtual events. It's live streaming. I mean, we want the interactivity. There's nothing better than that. So if there's something that makes us turn off the chat, we have to fix that. Overall, I'm very pleased with the zoom events experience. The lobby is great. The persistent chat in the lobby is amazing. The ability to preview things, the ability to stay in the chat all day and see every session you want without ever joining a zoom meeting is really nice. And of course, the ease in finding and joining the zoom meeting or webinars that you want to join. That is the biggest thing. And while it may not be perfect out of the gate, keep in mind, it's a new product under active development. If you like this video, please let us know in the comments, and maybe we could follow up with another video showing how to set up your own zoom event behind the scenes. Thanks for watching.