Keith Tanner
Keith Tanner MegaDork
2/4/21 10:18 a.m.

I'm looking into what it would take to do a virtual event. We already do Facebook Live shows once a week (Thursdays at 2:00 PM Mountain, tell your friends!) but that's mostly just a live broadcast with some comments that come and go quickly. We'd like to be able to do something a little more...friendly. Like a big Zoom meeting. Or a technical seminar where it's easier for people to actually ask questions.

Anyone have experience with doing this? How do you ride herd on a big Zoom blob? I've only used it for video calls, a dozen people or so at most and those are all people who know each other. Suggestions?

Karacticus
Karacticus Dork
2/4/21 10:22 a.m.

Interested in what develops on this subject.

Will be attempting to do a virtual garage tour for my BMW CCA Chapter in a couple of weeks using one of the online conferencing solutions.  It should be a learning experience.

The plan is to have someone designated to "mind the room" and I'll have my phone on a tripod stand so I don't have to hand hold it and use a bluetooth headset.  I figure I'll also have my laptop up and running in the general area as well.

wae
wae UberDork
2/4/21 10:28 a.m.

I have done a couple for the kids' grade school where we've played bingo with a relatively large number of families and then I've also done some larger-scale webinars for work.  We're a WebEx shop, so I'm more familiar with that, but they have an "Events" version of WebEx where you can create the event and it allows you to have a panel of presenters that everyone can see and then all the individual participants are hidden from each other.  The panel can unmute a participant if they want to ask a question or questions can be typed into the chat window - I think you can configure the visibility of chat as well.  You can record the session and download the video/audio/screenshare as an MP4 file that you can put on Youtube or whatever after the session is over.  If you want a more "social" question-asking, there's a site called Pidgeonhole to which you can link and people can ask new questions and/or upvote existing questions.  That's pretty handy when you have a limited Q&A time so you can have people submit questions starting a week in advance and running through the whole session and then pick the top 5 or 10 or whatever if you want.

Keith Tanner
Keith Tanner MegaDork
2/4/21 10:48 a.m.
Karacticus said:

Interested in what develops on this subject.

Will be attempting to do a virtual garage tour for my BMW CCA Chapter in a couple of weeks using one of the online conferencing solutions.  It should be a learning experience.

The plan is to have someone designated to "mind the room" and I'll have my phone on a tripod stand so I don't have to hand hold it and use a bluetooth headset.  I figure I'll also have my laptop up and running in the general area as well.

We used to do that for the FB live shows - one person to present, one to run the camera and one to watch the comments.

Hmm, I'm wondering if I'm basically looking at a webinar? I will take a look at WebEx to see if there's any real difference between it and Zoom. We're not heavily tied to any one platform at this time.

moxnix
moxnix Dork
2/4/21 11:10 a.m.

Zoom also has a webinar license for additional cost.

FieroReinke
FieroReinke New Reader
2/5/21 6:37 a.m.

Another option is slido.  You can present and it gives options for polls or q&a that people can vote on so you answer the most popular questions.

bmw88rider (Forum Supporter)
bmw88rider (Forum Supporter) UltraDork
2/5/21 7:10 a.m.

Keith, 

You want to really do a webinar. If you leave it as an open line then you will get interruptions all of the time.

I regularly run virtual events with 200+ people on them. With Zoom Webinar, You have a couple of choices. You can either use the Q&A box and answer the questions either live or in Text or do the Raise your hand feature and then unmute that person and talk live. 

The McLaren event I sent you was Zoom Webinar run. 

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