A presentation on Cisco’s bold experiment to hold its annual global sales meeting virtually was one of the highlights at this week’s Event Marketing Summit in Chicago. This event had been held face-to-face (f2f) for the past 20 years and drew 16,000 people, give or take a few thousand. Typically over 4 days, Cisco’s finest gathered to communicate, motivate, and recognize their sales peers in the manner they’d become accustomed to. But this year things were different.

The Global Sales Experience (GSX) was planned in partnership with George P. Johnson (www.gpjco.com). InXpo (www.inxpo.com) was the virtual platform provider. Cisco’s event planning team anticipated there would be enormous challenges in shifting from one extreme to the other but the order had come down from on high and they didn’t really have a choice. The weak economy was the primary driver for going completely virtual. Another big driver was the fact that the company’s reputation is built around leveraging bandwidth for fun and profit, so if not Cisco, who?

Having made the commitment, Cisco pulled out all the stops. In addition to leaning heavily on their event partners, they leveraged internal resources like Cisco TV for both live and pre-recorded sessions and broadcasting. They ultimately broadcast to over 600 locations around the world.

Because this was no ordinary event, Cisco realized they’d need something special to generate interest and enthusiasm for the attendees. What they came up with was an Augmented Reality Game (ARG) called Threshold, which allowed Cisco employees to strategize and play against each other. I saw a brief clip. It looked like a Hollywood action blockbuster, with jungle scenes out of ‘Platoon’, helicopters, the works. If this represents the future of virtual meetings, sign me up for a bucket of popcorn.

But seriously folks, it seemed to do the trick. They registered almost 13,500 players across their sales organization (70% engaged), some of who invested some serious playtime on the way to winning some serious prizes, not to mention street cred.

Other impressive stats:

•88 hours of content developed and delivered over the course of the event

•73,000 unique content views

•337,000 hours of productivity gained by not having to travel

oSignificant reduction in their carbon footprint

•Virtual hosting cost of $386 per person vs. $4500 for a live event

•90% cost savings

By certain measures, GSX exceeded management’s expectations. But not everyone was happy. Evaluation results showed that only 28% of the attendees found the virtual experience effective (vs. 96% for a f2f event). And almost 40% of attendees rated the experience poorly (vs. 2% for a f2f event). Despite the resources a company like Cisco can mobilize, the medium still leaves lots to be desired.

So what’s next for Cisco? What did they learn?

For starters, they pulled this off in an extremely tight timeframe. They started to promote the event about 20 weeks out, which they strongly advised against. Active engagement of attendees began 3 weeks out and they conducted reinforcement communications 30 days post-event.

Based on feedback, they’re also aiming to do more live broadcasts next year and use less pre-recorded content and broadcast in two time zones instead of all 24 of them. To keep such a wide audience engaged, they’re going to break regularly for a variety of ‘surprises’ from musical acts to guest speakers, etc. And they’re going to cut the event agenda down to 1.5 days in order to keep things moving at a good clip for the virtual audience.

But perhaps the biggest change for next year…the event will have a f2f component. It’ll be a true hybrid event. It seems that regardless of Cisco’s determination and technological capabilities, people want to meet with people. So what they’re proposing is delivering the majority of their programming virtually while allowing local management to sponsor about 175 events globally with material support from HQ.

This little case study reminds me of another lifetime when I was running a software training business. It was the age of CD-ROM’s and the early days of web-based training. There were those companies who claimed to have seen the future and dumped their classroom training businesses and put everything online. It wasn’t long before those same companies swung the pendulum back, but the landscape had been changed forever. At the time (1980’s), the American Society for Training & Development (www.astd.org) began collecting data on the percentage of classroom vs. online training key companies provided. The ratio: 70% classroom / 30% online. Today, some 30 years later, the ratio: 70% classroom / 30% online. That’s no typo.