How We Created an Always on Event
Brandon Wernli + Josh Shepherd | BW Events Tech & Atlassian
Brandon Wernli and Josh Shepherd at BW Events and Atlassian, show how they use Swoogo tools to make better use of their content to create an always-on event. They discuss the role of AI, and how big a challenge it can be to engage your audience.
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Alright. I will not be able to introduce these two better than that song possibly could. But I'm very excited to welcome two close friends and partners to this stage. Brandon Wernli at BW events and Josh Shephard, who is Head of Event Technology and Innovation with Atlassian.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you.
They're right about the lights. So I actually I have five kids, if you can believe that, and I'm still alive.
And my my nine-year-old listens to Rocky every single day. So if I bring him to soccer practice, we're listening to Rocky. So they asked me a second ago, you've got to come up with a song, and I pay tribute to my nine-year-old on that one. So hopefully, part of that was on video.
Yeah. It's hard to live up to that song. But thank you, Swoogo, for this. It's an incredible event. It's like a homecoming to me. I see so many people I know. I bet I know a third of the people in the audience, and I've met so many more. So it's wonderful to see so many people here.
So we were asked to talk ... we were supposed to do an Ask Me Anything session, but it's about how we created an always-on event. And I think what we're gonna do is kind of build a bit of the framework around that, and what we're doing to put these events together. Now, I know a lot of the people, everybody here, has put together, that's why you're here. You've already built events and event stacks and everything else. But to put everybody on the same framework, so that we're all talking about the same thing, we tried to talk about how the pieces fit together, you know, in a bit of a pyramid. And what we've done at Atlassian is we've created, like a bespoke system, so everything is like a collage of different things put together.
But everything is sort of fundamentally placed on that base platform. And the base platform is ... that's your stable, customizable experience that is the rock that everything's built upon. And that's Swoogo, for sure.
On top of Swoogo, we build all our integration and development layers. So the integrations would be into Salesforce and Marketo, and your analytics, and into your other business systems. And that's where we involve other trade partners and/or development partners, like BW Events, and they fill in the gaps and help us connect all the pieces together. So that's kind of our dev and integration layer that sits on top. And then we have sort of the experiential, which does-- that's the wow. That's the stuff that's always in constant flux and evolution.
You can't sit idle on those things, and even ... I'm sure you've all gone through that cycle many times, where you you find the perfect thing, only to find out six months later, a year later, it's a completely new thing that you have to, we gotta swap that out and find something new. Get that wow moment and bring that new experiential in. So, that's kind of the evolving piece.
I'd like to talk a little bit about the attendee journey, and this sits on top. And I think this is one of the most fundamental things that you need to make sure you include in your events, is thinking about that attendee journey. It's how once you've put all the pieces together, how does the attendee experience your event? And from all sets of eyes, regardless of how they're attending, whether they're in-person or digital or post event. But however they're entering that event, you need to think about what their experience is going to be.
Rather than just create one system and say, we're focusing on in-person and then, yes, there's digital, because you can log into it. Well, that's not really enough. You need to make every person feel special in all that.
Yeah, Josh, one of the things I'll say about that as well, which you do really well, is you've got to start your event understanding what your KPI is, what are your strategic goals.
And because occasionally, you'll get into a situation where you try to create this attendee journey, and you didn't plan in advance, and that foundation wasn't prepped with the right metadata, the right tagging, who are your various attendee types or personas that you're trying to address. And so all of the sudden, you get into a planning phase and say, okay, time to talk attendee journey, but you actually didn't plan ahead for that. And then you're doing a lot of make-up work. Too much dev work is happening and you're redoing it.
And so it's really critical, at the onset, to have that strategic conversation of, what are we trying to get out of our event? And then let's make sure that the technology is integrated in a way, architected in a way, that's working for us rather than, you know, you swearing at it and all that stuff happens. So yeah.
And that's where we get into human error.
Right? Like we start making patches upon patches to quickly backpedal during the live event, and say we forgot this little piece. So without that due attention to attendee journey, then that's when we get into those added complications, added complications lead to potential errors, whether that be, you know, just a data-entry mistake or some change, you know, that's always a challenge when you make changes to a live anything.
Right?
So one of the ways that you keep the events fresh, and I think in order to think about these attendee journeys, is to continually evolve your mindset. So I just wanted to give three examples of this concept of evolving your mindset, because honestly, this can apply to anything across your event, but you should be able to think about that aspect and reimagine it and come up with something totally different. And come in with fresh eyes and say, why are we doing it this way? And what is the attendee getting out of it? So here's three examples from this. The "where next?" mobile assistant. We, at Atlassian, we've we've just started going away, and we've stopped using mobile apps that are native, that are installed, and we're using a PWA like a progressive web app. And it's just another way to think about it. So what we're doing, and you can see on the slide, there's a couple of screenshots of ones we've done for past events this year.
We went to, we're building these completely within Swoogo. They're Swoogo pages, but instead of being responsive width-wise, their responsive width and height. So now we've got ... We're building a mobile app inside a platform, that already knows everything about our event, all our speakers, all our sessions, all the data, it's already hooked into all our analytics. It's already hooked into all our business systems.
So everything's already there, all the pieces. We just need to make it look like a mobile app. So now, we don't have to go through the process of educating all the people, install this, you know, go to the store. We were talking earlier about looking up your Apple ID to try and find, how do I log into my account? That goes away.
You get some countries that have bans on what you're allowed to install. Some corporate cell phones, you're not allowed to install apps. That all goes away. So we can use the Swoogo features to make it accessible across multi-languages.
So there's a lot of really cool things we can do with that. But in addition, we also thought about, why do we have a mobile app? Is it because, you know, we don't want to get left behind, because well every big event has a mobile app, so we have to do it. Right?
Think about why you have it, and when you start looking at the analytics, they always tell the story. So, when ninety-five percent of all your usage data in a mobile app is, where do I go next, then why don't you listen to that? So we've retooled the whole thing. So the top half, like, the top half of these screens above the icons, as you progress through the event, it's always changing to say, here's your countdown timer, here's where you need to be next, here's the room.
And then once the session starts, by the way, here's your button to enter your feedback. So it's the right information, at the right time, and we have many people never leave the homepage for it. And in case anybody here didn't know or read the Before You Go email that came to everybody, you can install it with a QR code. So if you guys take your phone out, take a picture of that QR code, the page it takes you, is a responsive mobile app, or a PWA, for this event.
And so if you haven't been following that along, that QR code will take you right to it. So we can put those QR codes onto our signage onto, like they walk in the door, they scan it, log in with their Swoogo cached credentials that are in Chrome, and then scan the QR code to print their badge. So there's a lot of efficiencies you can get, where you can install it like that, or from a link. So that's an example of reimagining, like, evolving your mindset.
Attendee journeys. So, attendee journeys. This is what I wanna just expand on this. We talked about attendee journey in the previous slide. But really thinking about splitting your event. This is something we're doing for an, sorry, we're doing for an example.
And it doesn't apply to everyone. But what we found is that when we've tried to create hybrid and unified events, or create parity between digital and in-person, we found it wasn't targeted to some people. Like everything it did, it wasn't a one-size-fits-all. So what we've started doing is pulling those journeys apart.
And even creating multiple Swoogo events and saying, this event is for the in-person, this event is for the digital, and creating those. And then also for post-event, instead of going to post-event, and it's just, here's a here's a list of all our videos. You go browse through, find help yourself. Right?
We're make trying to make each one of those pathways a journey. So when you come into the digital, it's like, welcome to the digital event. We'd love to introduce you to our topic. You know, we're glad you're here.
And here are three short versions, like abridged versions of the keynote, because people experience the keynotes differently. Right here, you're a captive audience. Right? Thank you.
You're a captive audience. That is, here, listening to the event. But if you're at home in your office and you're connecting through webinar, you're competing with email and telephones and food that's in the fridge and going for a walk and the dog needs out. So all these things, you don't have like a five-hour time block to present content to people.
So you really need to tailor it to them. So it's saying abridge versions of keynotes is part of that journey for digital. And then call-to-actions. Don't leave people to say, you know, welcome attendee to the digital event. Here's all the stuff.
Guide them, you know, show them along that journey. Just like here, there's announcements that say, please take your seat, it's about to happen. Guide them and say, your first step should be to watch these abridged versions of the keynotes. If anything touches you, watch the full version.
Your next step is, here's how we can help you find what you want in your digital content. Your on-demand video is on-demand. And then here's what you do next.
The next follow-up would be talk to the-- here's how you get in touch with the sponsors. Here's how you get in touch with the communities or plug into the forums, so that people know what to do. So it's like a mindset change on attendee journey.
And Josh, one of the things I'll pick up on, one of the things you were saying is, I think, a shift. Now, he just said that you guys are very attentive. I cannot see your faces, so you could be sleeping right now. Or not even here.
It's blind face on this end.
It sounds ridiculous, because when someone said that earlier and I was back there, I'm like, you're making that up. They're not making that up. I can't see your face.
But Ashesh mentioned that, you know, regarding the comment of Zoom fatigue, that we should take a page out of the YouTube book. I mean, we're already getting lessons on how the digital experience works, where you're consuming a piece of content, and then it's updating the content to personalize, to say, this is what you should do next. And that is part of an attendee journey, is let the attendee figure out what they want to consume, and then make it easy and digestible for them to just conveniently go to the next piece of content.
And that's a little bit of AI that we'll talk about here in a moment too.
Great point.
And then, just from that, let me lead into the last point, which was inside the content. And it's always been a tradition that we've, my experience anyway, has always been to, let's take the content, let's record it, and let's put it up on-demand because, you know, millions of people are gonna wanna watch us and watch our content because we put a lot of hours into it. In reality, it's all those things I just said, of fighting for time and fighting for attention and mindshare.
So what can we do to sort of take that content, instead of being a place to go to die? What can we do with it? So we're changing our mindset around content, saying, we can't just put it up there and assume people are gonna watch, even if we point people to it. So we've started looking inside the content where, let's take all our videos and all our PDFs and all our supporting PowerPoints, and let's index it all. Just like Google does or YouTube does. So then, allowing people to do searches inside the content to sort of hyper target what they're trying to find. And that's a big shift in our mindset for how we move forward with this stuff.
Always-on environment.
On this subject, just for context, what is this talking about? This is your 365 environment. It's your one-stop place to create an account. And then you have an opportunity to register for multiple events. As some context, we had done a case study with Cisco. Cisco Live, for the longest time, actually had an always-on environment, pre-COVID.
The nature of it was that they would have their in-person event for Cisco Live US, roughly thirty-thousand people would attend. And then during the keynote, they would have their attendees, or the virtual attendees, watch the keynote, live-streamed, onto their Cisco Live always-on. Sometimes they called it Cisco 365.
During the keynote, while they had thirty-thousand people on-site, they had two hundred and fifty-thousand people watching the keynote. And so, the director of global events came to us and said, I'm a little bit concerned that what we're doing is cannibalizing our audience, if we're going to have a free, always-on environment. Because our paying audience is on-site, and we're getting millions of dollars for that. And it's helping to fund the whole conference.
So we did some analysis and what we ended up finding is that the year-over-year, at least, when we conducted this, the year-over-year trends were showing that we weren't getting drop-off on who was attending. We didn't see any major changes. What we are seeing, on the other hand, is that two hundred fifty-thousand people became a huge marketing opportunity to drive them to the in-person event, and you are getting a certain percentage that were coming, net new users, from the virtual over to the in-person, to the tune of, for her, it was 1.9 million dollars.
And so she started thinking about that opportunity of, yes, this is free, but I'm getting content out there, and there's a little bit of FOMO going on, because they know that Aerosmith is there, or they know that they're getting these demos and other things. And so as a result, they continue to invest in their always-on environment.
So some components of what is effective about this, and I think Tricia Williamson has left, DocuSign has an always-on environment, as an example, and so we can, at a later time, do a demo of it. Just kind of imagine for a moment. This is what the opportunity is. You have a single location where your attendees can go to register.
Then, through the use of all the data that you're combining between your CRM, your registration data, what are they doing at a particular virtual event? What are they doing at an in-person event? You've got a ton of data And then you can serve up personalized recommendations, not only towards a particular piece of content, as Josh was alluding to, but also, hey, this is in your region. Why don't you attend this event? They don't have to reinsert all their information; they can just click if it's something as easy as that, and maybe just the information that's pertinent to that event. And then they're in that event just like that.
And so you may have an SSO. This can be done with an SSO. DocuSign has one. Or you can leverage Swoogo to be able to do this in a seamless way. That's one of the advantages of having, on that lower level, that the tech stack is flexible, is that you can create an environment where you've got an always-on.
One other thing that I would say about this is, I don't know about you guys, but a lot of our clients, they're coming out of COVID, where they had a robust virtual event, and they had a budget that was commensurate for it. But they get through COVID, and they're expecting a much more significant budget that would account for a very robust in-person event and a very robust digital event, and it's just not happening. And so they've got to make some prioritization calls on, which direction should we go. The always-on environment allows you to prevent yourself from spinning up another virtual event again and again, and you already have the interface for it.
So just bring them back to the interface. You've got a catalog of content that you can take advantage of.
But you just put in the live streams that are pertinent to that event at the given time, and it optimizes the spend in that way. And then you get your, hopefully, your two hundred and fifty-thousand push to your in-person event as a result.
Another thing that we'll call out is your sponsors. This creates an opportunity for your sponsors, rather than having, like, an exhibitor resource center that you keep spinning up for event after event. You just have a central repository for your sponsors to upload their logo once, upload all of their collateral, and then all they need to do is have a single login to say, I've got to update my logo because it's out of date, but they do it once and you've got a centralized booth, virtual booth, to obtain leads throughout the entire year rather than saying, I'm just picking a name out of the air, Intel has to redo their booth over and over again. And where the heck are these leads coming from? You can have a better lead strategy in this type of environment.
And then, going back to the AI, because we talked about, Okay, so let's recommend some content. Josh goes to an event that's a virtual event and then he finds himself on-site. As a result of the content that he consumed at the virtual event, we're going to serve up in person recommendations to say, let's go to this demo and let's go to this session. Right?
Then, as they're doing that, you're getting a taste of more of their interests. So we're gonna start recommending personalized sponsor content that's in line with their interests. And we say, let's go to booth 124, because there's a product that goes along ... very much like YouTube, you know, 'if you like you'll probably like this' or or Amazon and so forth.
What we're finding is that, you get an increase in leads as a result for those various sponsors. And you can also turn around to the sponsor and say, hey, you know, for this individual that's getting this recommendation, there's like twenty of you sponsors that equally could be recommended to this individual.
You pay twenty-thousand dollars and we'll put you on the top of the list. And so all of the sudden the sponsors are loving this, and they're getting more hot leads rather than just generic leads. And so that becomes a helpful benefit as a result.
Networking opportunity, single dashboard. And then I'll just say one thing about the sales team. Can you imagine, in this environment, your sales team can go in and see what the engage score is for their top ten accounts, filtered in Swoogo for those top ten accounts, and they can see, what this attendee or this account journey has been for both the virtual, the in-person, and so forth. Swoogo has all the fundamentals to be able to do that. It's just architecting in the right way.
And then the sales team might have a particular push to say, hey, I know we can promote certain types of content. But there are actually types of content that will give you a higher propensity to buy. So I want them, instead of going to this session, I want them to go to this demo, because when they go to that demo, I see they buy product afterwards. Let's push that up the algorithm and let's push those type of demos instead.
And so we can get really smart about it. But for the attendee, all they know is, I'm walking through the venue and I see on my mobile app that I'm getting a recommendation to attend a particular activity and it's convenient for me. They don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
So there is a lot of optimization with cost efficiencies, driving certain types of behaviors, or let the attendee themselves curate their own experience, the way that they want it in the end.
That's great.
And actually, one thing I'd add to that, Brandon, we talked about this, and we loved the sessions where we saw so many examples from people here were doing things within Swoogo. All the stuff we're talking about here can be built in and around Swoogo. So that's that's one of the amazing things. And as we saw, people through the day today coming up with examples and saying, look what we did.Look what we did.
And when we were talking, we were just kind of laughing that Swoogo didn't intend this. Maybe he did, but I don't think he did. There's like, you just provided a platform that had the facility for people to dream and imagine these new things and build elements like this.
And I think the technology has finally caught up with what we're trying to do here, by creating ... people have tried to create event hubs, which is kind of what we're talking about. Like, content hubs. People have tried to do that for many, many years, and it involved copying and moving videos and keeping content up to date. That kind of stuff, we don't have to move anything. We've got, you know, on-demand events that we've run.
They can just be indexed and added to this. You don't need to move all your videos into one place. Let them live where they live. And so all your content remains distributed in the home that it existed in, but the content is all pulled in from an index into here.
You know?
So that's a really cool addition. But also some of the maintenance things, like sometimes, can you imagine somebody's ... a team's full-time job, poring through content, saying this video was made four years ago, and it's a demo something? Is there another, this other video overrides that one? So that one's gonna be deprecated, so we take it off that.
Like, that's an impossible job. Until AI comes along. And now it looks inside our content and does that deprecation of older content, or it doesn't actually get rid of it, it just deprioritizes it on the search results. So it can, if you search enough, you can still come up with it if you want to, but it's not showing up on the top, because you get these other elements in there.
And one thing I'll say, Josh, coming back to the initial pyramid that we were looking at.
You may hear AI and you think, oh, boy, that's complex. We can't do that. It really isn't complex if you're planning ahead and you're doing the necessary mapping. What are your goals that you're trying to get out of this?
And then it gets actually easier the more you go down the journey here. Genuinely, it does.
But this is one of those areas that a good strategy in advance is very helpful. This one's fun.
Yeah. In terms of AI, I mean, you're gonna have, in this always-on environment, a ton of content, whether it's sponsors, demos, or session content.
It could even be people to network with, too.
And so, as a result, how do you get this whole bunch of content to be relevant for the individual that's trying to find something very specific?
There's this cognitive search that can be done, that we're piloting at Atlassian. We're doing it at Google as well.
Where you plug in a word. It could be analytics. It's literally analytics on that thing. That's clever. Okay.
The AI knew I was gonna say that.
So, what's gonna happen is, you put in analytics; not only will it search for analytics across all pieces of content, including videos, and I'm gonna dig a thing deeper there. Even in the video content that you've got, it'll take a thirty-second snippet of the place, in which it said analytics, pull it out for you, out of all of the video content, and place it up for you, but not only place it for you. If, Christina, you have interests in analytics, but you also have interests in a particular product. It says, oh, Christina, I know what you're actually after, in the realm of analytics.
Let me bubble up to the surface, the type of analytics information that you're actually looking for, not just random junk. And so it bubbles it up to the surface, but not only that, it's got a translation capability to say, oh, but if analytics in English is actually such and such in French. Let me give you the French version of it too, and it'll automatically translate it in French.
This is just a clever way in which AI is just working smarter in the context of a global search, putting a single word, and let's get not just search results, but specific search results just for the individual themselves. That is easy to consume. And then, game changer, to me is that you can then take that content, package it up, and then send it out as a thought leader and say, I gotta share with you what's going on at Google Next or at Atlassian Teams. We've learned about this in analytics, and I think you need to either consume this content, or you need to buy this product, or you need to attend Teams next year, because this was fantastic.
And there's that way to go and share this content after the fact.
And I think we've been doing the, like, cognitive search on all our tier 1, tier 2 events for the last year. And each one has been independent. But we're actually working on creating, like, a corporate homepage version, which amalgamates all the stuff, which is kind of the previous slide we were talking about that.
But what's ... the interesting thing is, is just like Swoogo went into developing this platform, and people started using it in unique and unusual ways that they've dreamed up. The same thing happened with us, and we thought we were developing a tool that was exclusively for attendees. And attendees, were gonna find this so much better to hyper-target content, share content between each other, create links to videos that they can share with somebody, or their team, that is right to the sentence in the video that pertains to them. We actually found out there was a massive group of people inside the company that was like, can we reuse that?
Can that be a sales tool? Can we take that? We've got marketing teams that are spending hundreds of hours a month going through videos, and poring through them to find highlights, to find videos. This search just took those hundreds of hours and made it ten. Like, it was literally crazy.
And then, so now they're the ones that are pushing this technology from an internal point. And then we start using it in different ways that, it's not just the attendee. And again, this is back to how many attendee journeys, because now we have an internal attendee journey, that people are using to create these.
We have people who are communicating with our communities, and our forums, and our help desks, and our help support teams, that now can draw on the content that was in our videos that had, you know, so many people poured so much sweat and tears into creating presentations, and sessions, and webinars. Now they can access those and include it. So somebody's replying to a help support chat. I know Swoogo has, like, one of the best support teams ever. They're the best; that's why we use them. And, but they can now reply and do a quick search and say, here is a talk. Or here is a webinar, or here is a demo, and here is the line. Like you're linked right to the line in a demo that answers the person's question.
And putting it into the forums as well, on how to do that. When you're in the forum, you can start posting. And in the help. And the other tool was, all the market leads, like the MQLs, that are coming out of events. They're starting to hyper-target content towards the interests of the people who are there.
So we can see, what did you watch, like the AI? What did you watch? What did you take part in in the event? We can provide a bit of a trip report in their email, but then also have very targeted, this is what you should watch next, and instead of starting at the beginning, you're starting at eight minutes and twelve seconds in, because that sentence is gonna appeal to that person. So we found a whole new market when we started diving into this.
Can you bring that to the first slide? I'm gonna bring it all to the beginning really quick.
This one?
Yeah. There was another case study that we did at Cisco. They were kinda curious to see if, because you guys have probably have done this across the room, or you've got your persona and then you create a journey for that persona, and it looks just like this. And the question became, does a persona ever jump from one to the next, and are we honing them in too tightly?
And you know what's interesting is when we started developing some AI components where the attendee can start choosing their own journey, simply based on the content that they're consuming. Just like YouTube, we began to see that they did have somewhat of a hybrid experience. A hybrid, I should be careful with that word. Right? Hybrid in the context of, I'm gonna be this persona in this moment, and a little bit of a flavor of that persona in the next. Because I have some unique needs that are personal to me in my role. And maybe my role has shifted over a year.
The AI component allows you to do that, and the always-on environment gives you more data to work with, so that you're homed-in on what your attendees are actually looking for.
So again, just more of a point towards getting the platform and the architecture right, getting all the mappings down right, all the integrations in their appropriate way, and then build all of the foundation on top of that, let the attendee potentially create their own journey as a result. So I just ...
Great.
Let me jump back to the right point. So Chris, did you wanna ...
Perfect. So this was the last slide, and we were just, we were gonna feed some of the AMA.
And these were seed topics in case there was no AMA.
So Josh, are we gonna tell them we just made all that up?
What up?
Everything.
Yeah.
Anyway, is there so do we wanna start with questions? Do we wanna start with any of these topic? A question could be, can you expand on one of these topics? How's that?
Can you give me a little taste of how the sauce is made to surface these Amazon-like recommendations within Swoogo's existing feature set?
So, yeah. You know, you do want to make sure that you've got the necessary tagging across your sessions, demos, exhibitors, and so forth.
Some of it may be a conversation around, are there certain pieces of content that are of higher value than others? And you may weight them.
To be clear, there's a lot that is in, if I were to take a step back, there's a lot that's in Swoogo that you can do in order to provide all the tagging. You've got all the custom fields and various things that you can do across all of these various exhibitors and sessions and so forth.
It does necessitate an AI algorithm. To go on top of that. Candidly, BW Events provide's that here, but it doesn't have to be that. You can use another AI algorithm.
What we do within our AI algorithm is that we will put certain weights upon specific behaviors, specific types of content. We'd like to visit with the content team to understand that, what's the pecking order, what does that look like? And then we'll also create other rules within the algorithm that says, this type of attendees should not see certain types of content, because you don't want to recommend something they shouldn't see. But that's a little part of it. And so what we generally do is, we'll guide the event team through that journey.
Sometimes we have templates of questions-- let's just go through a series of questions. What are your attendee types? What are your taggings? What are your products? Let's define what those are. What's the pecking order? What's the weight?
In order to go through it, for us, it's about a week-long process of a couple of meetings, going through and hashing that out, but it's also helpful to do in advance, so that as the content team is seeing what the possibilities are, they're starting to think about how to refine their tagging approach. To make it more user-friendly for the attendee down the road.
I don't know if that made you happier or frustrated you.
We may be thinking on a lower level, like that you could spin up an instance of an AI on a machine or on a server that's on the cloud, and then through API, collect the data from Swoogo, feed it into the API, and it have the outputs pushed back into Swoogo for your controls. Essentially, that's the meat of how that system works.
And, you know, the other thing that we do is usually the taggings only provide initial recommendation. What's more powerful is when attendees actually react to the recommendation, and then the the system self-learns. And so that could come in the form of five stars or thumbs up/thumbs down. Let them react to the recommendation, and let it get smarter and then teach your attendees that that's what's going on, so that they can work with the system and for their benefit.
So really what I was describing is that foundational initial output.
Since we're on that topic, let me throw one other word in there. It says "and cautions," on our IT thing. There's some ,there's some cautions. There's, like, people are thinking, well, SkyNet. Right?
What's gonna happen with AI? But seriously, what it is is the the potential for PII that you, we're so careful under GDPR and everything else, of maintaining control and and access to personal information. And then we take an AI and train it on information that potentially is secure. So now we need to really take precautions to make sure that the AI that you're using is in its own silo and contained.
And that that engine that has learned from personal information needs to also be secure and can't be utilized by anybody else, can't be transferred to other clients from the same company, that kind of stuff. So there's a whole another discussion to this kind of stuff to make sure you have a control.
And, you know, from a high level, so every company's data privacy experience is often unique. And so you're gonna have to work with that team to understand what their standards are.
Within that context, what I've seen universally, generally speaking, is if you've at least disclosed and offer the opt-in for the attendees, but also educate the attendee that if you opt in, you're gonna have all these experiences. And then what happens is for those attendees who didn't opt in, give them easy access opportunities to change their mind on the mobile app and otherwise, because they're gonna start seeing other people benefit and say, why am I not experiencing this? Well, you didn't opt in. Go ahead and opt in. And so, it's all manipulation is what it is, guys.
I'm just kidding.
I think we've got time for one or two more questions.
Anyone else who wants to?
They said we could get you back on track for time, so we can eat all the ...
Josh, I have a question for you. And you just came off running Teams, which is Atlassian's user conference.
Four days, four thousand people.
I hope I'm getting the stats right. And your attrition for that event is like industry-leading.
And so I don't know if you can speak to some of the things that you and Atlassian do to drive engagement at that event.
It's a great question. I don't know there's a secret sauce. I think we talked, somebody talked about that earlier today, a little about drop offs and and rates. Digually, we have we like, over the next thirty days, like, we're adding up thirty days, right, with the, these are still attendees even though they came later. So digital attendees, absolutely, we collect them, but we still have a high drop-off rate, for sure, with digital, big drop off, because there isn't really ... Digital's generally free for us. We just sign people up, and if they have interest, but then, so the drop off rate's quite high.
The in-person rate, I mean, it's a paid event, and everybody in the industry knows that a paid event tends to have much lower drop off than not. But we really spend a lot of time, like, six months ahead, starting that process to start collecting our attendees, in attendee acquisition.
InGo was mentioned earlier. We use InGo as well. It's a great tool that creates, like, that viral social media. Like, hey, all my network, I'm going to this event, you're gonna see me there. I'd love to see you there. And then, and you know, you get with tools like that, you can reduce your drop off because I'm gonna get an email later that says, Brandon and Chris and Chris and John and Sally are all coming to this event from your network. Make sure you're there. Right? So it works kind of both ways to remind people to come.
I think it's also all of the above in being ... It's that experiential layer that you're always changing up. And making that sort of ... people learn to rely on you. That you are gonna change it up, that you're gonna always have these experiences of wow there, and delight and something totally new. And our attendees are very loyal, fiercely loyal, and they come back, you know, year after year.
We always do a thing in the room where we say, everybody stand up and then say, okay, who's been to one of these events? And then people sit down. And who's two and three and four? We usually get up to about thirteen, fourteen, before the last few people.
And then we go around the room. It's kind of a fun exercise, and every person who's still standing gets a microphone. And say, give us some advice from your point of view. So it's kind of a fun thing, but it shows the loyalty of people.
So I think in trying to continually improve and do things the right way, you start building that following, and building the people who want to come to your events.
I don't know if I got off topic or no.
That's great. Josh and Brandon wanna thank you both. This was an awesome session, and we're gonna break for five minutes, and then come back to our final session on the future of Swoogo.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.