Virtual Event Emcee: How one can save your Virtual event!

What is a virtual emcee?

Enter the emcee of the virtual event. What is virtual emcee? They are your bridge between your event and your audience who could be anywhere in the world, anywhere in Singapore, in any place; be at a coffee shop in their home, in the living rooms or even on the bed.

Many event planners don't realise that the emcee for virtual event is crucial – perhaps even more critical than the role of a life event emcee. Why is that so? 

A great emcee will engage an audience and create a positive experience for those attending the event. A virtual event emcee can do the same. The same rules apply. The difference is that the audience is not in the room - and this means that they choose whether to give their attention or not.

In this blog post, I will tell you why the role of the virtual event emcee is crucial and can make or break your event.

Virtual events are a different ballgame compared to In-person events 

That’s because virtual communications are fundamentally different from real-time communications. In-person events are inherently human, physical, and social. They allow for instant feedback and create the shared experience that is so critical to building relationships.

The role of a virtual emcee singapore is not simple. The virtual medium is very different from live in-person events. Live events equate to a captive audience that cannot go anywhere else during the period of the event - in live events; the virtual emcee singapore does not have an attention issue. Virtual events may look simple; however, event organisers must realise that they are competing with everything in the person's vicinity.

If the person is at home, it means that the virtual event emcee is competing with their television, their family members, their mobile phone, their laptop, the snacks in the kitchen, and everything else in their home. If the person is at work, the person is also competing with colleagues, the office environment.

What is virtual emcee role? This means that the virtual event emcee has a crucial role in engaging the audience to such an extent that they would prefer to look at their devices where the event is shown compared to anything in your house.

Engaging The Audience: A Virtual Emcee Perspective

The emcee has to use every trick up their sleeve & every audience engagement tactic they have learnt through their careers to keep their attention; And to keep the audience's attention is not an easy task. With so much going on, it is easy to lose the interest of the audience.

What is virtual emcee singapore's role then? It is to provide encouragement, direction, and guide attention.

"What's In It For Me?" is a question that the emcee should help the audience members answer

The emcee for virtual event needs to constantly remind the audience of the reason(s) why they are attending the event. Both organizational objectives and their personal objectives. Why? This helps them answer the question "What's In It For Me". If they are not reminded frequently on why they are there, they may lose focus, and the event loses meaning for them.

The emcee should be reminding the audience of the core objective throughout the presentation. You can do this with a simple line like, "Let me remind ourselves of our objective here today. We are here today to....."

Virtual "Connection" Tools - Your Emcee Must Use These

Any available tool that the virtual emcee singapore has becomes very important for audience engagement. There could be reaction buttons in the platform, the chat function of the platform. There may be polling buttons where the audience could answer a multiple-choice question & give their view on the subject.

These are the tools that the emcee must use to engage the audience throughout the event constantly, not just at the beginning, especially so for the virtual conference emcee in Singapore, who needs to engage an audience for up to 8 to 11 hours per day. There need to be an excellent team planning the event to achieve this, considering all these functions.

Eye Contact - Your Emcee, Must Connect with the Audience

We all know the annoying thing about webinars online, and that is that eye contact is such a rarity. Everyone looks at the participants on their screens without realising that their camera holds their key to connection.

Your emcee must practice eye contact with the audience via the camera. Looking only at the teleprompter, the emcee must remember to glance at the camera directly from time to time.

If nobody is looking at them, they don’t feel important, and therefore, they won’t connect.

The last thing an emcee should do is read off the teleprompter 100% of the time. They must speak to the audience, even if there is no audience there.

Movement - What can an emcee or virtual conference emcee do with it?

A Live event emcee's body movement used to be one of the best ways to capture attention and connect with an audience in a live event.

However, this could backfire in a virtual event. Too much movement, especially from a virtual conference emcee can be distracting in the online world.

The lower body will likely need to be rooted to reduce camera movement.

The emcee needs to know how to connect through non-verbal gestures, especially with the upper body. Through their eyes, their expression, their hand actions and their gestures.

Repetition Is OK

As a virtual audience can come and go as they please, the emcee for virtual events needs to constantly adjust the presentation to reconnect with the audience more frequently than during an in-person event.

It's ok to recap often by repeating the name of the event, the current speaker's name, the topic on hand, the segment that we are currently on, as we do not want to lose the audience members who joined late or went for a quick break.

Appreciation - Must be shown always and often.

The virtual event emcee role in the online virtual world must encourage the audience constantly for any form of reciprocated engagement. Be it a comment, an emoji in the chat, a verbal sharing from an audience member — especially a virtual conference emcee who spends a much longer time with the audience.

In a world where attention spans are shortening, encouragement from the emcee can prove crucial in keeping your audience's attention as they have many other options just a few metres from them.

Your emcee cannot take interaction and engagement for granted. Once interaction falls, it can be tough to re-engage the audience. It's not the same as a regular presentation.

Likability is crucial for the emcee for virtual event - the audience now has a choice.

The audience can switch off very quickly in the virtual world because they may not like the emcee. For example, if they are not interested in the topic being presented, they will switch off quickly.

Likability is a very mysterious factor. You either have it or not. This is why you must select a virtual emcee singapore with a proven record in a proven history serving the type of audience for your event. This increases the probability that your event will have success.

Picking an emcee or virtual conference emcee and event team without a proven track record of success in a given audience and event environment is like picking an unknown actor to play a role in a blockbuster movie.

Conclusion

In essence, many of the things that the emcee used to have in Live events now come in a different form in the virtual world – hence the emcee that you hire must be very aware of all these intricacies they can make or break your event.

We all know how fast an audience can be lost in the online world. So make sure you hire the right emcee to lead your virtual event to success.

If you ever need an emcee for virtual event, please reach out to me via the form below, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I look forward to serving you and your audience for your virtual event.