Speakers
There’s not a whole amount of information we can expand on when it came to our speakers other than they were amazing. We were thrilled with how the content came together like a jigsaw puzzle and each speakers’ content seemed to cross reference each other. We’ve told our speakers how brilliant they were, but you know, we thought we would again!
Live tweeting
We had our team live tweeting during the event using the hashtag #BrumTechTapas, but the star for us was Laura Creaven of FullToTheBrum, who live tweeted the entire event. The important thing here is that we didn’t ask her to – and it’s this kind of interaction with an audience on social media that is totally priceless. Thanks, Laura!
Questions & Feedback
One of the most difficult things to prepare for the event was Q&A. We have a 20-30 minute slot for each speaker and it’s up to them how long they want the Q&A to absorb that time. Our approach was to write down any questions during the speakers’ talks that we had in case the audience questions were sparse – which thankfully didn’t happen (we had a lot of curious audience members asking questions to our smashing speakers and that was a big win for us considering that getting any interactions in virtual events is hard.
One thing we’re going to change is how we hand over from compere to speaker – I guess it takes a live event to notice these things but we were cutting from me to the speaker. To make it a smooth transition (and to put the speaker at ease) we’ll be adding in the speaker first, then removing the compere once we know that they’re good to go.
Feedback is, of course, the hardest and most vital information you can get. We had great feedback from those interacting both on YouTube chat and on Twitter, but this doesn’t cover everything. Due to time constraints we’d not created a structure of how feedback can be given, so we’re looking to make changes to the website to offer more ways to contact us or tell us what you think/like.
Statistics
Here’s the boring bit – how did we do on stats? Well, we’re open about what we do here, so here they are:
25 subscribers on YouTube signed up after watching.
248 views since the event
91 tickets sold on EventBrite
1 collaboration (hopefully)
This particular interaction between Casey Bailey and Foka Wolf was what we’d imagined, but not necessarily expected. To see it happen was an absolute delight and we hope to see something come of it.
Collaboration
People harp on about collaboration all the time, but I feel that while a lot of the time the intention is there, there’s no substance behind it. Obviously at Brum Tech Tapas we -do- want collaboration, so we put people in the same room who might talk.