Rohit Bhargava

30 Mar 5 Reasons Virtual Meetings Suck (And 5 Ways To Fix Them)

With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.

I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.

Some of them have sucked.

But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.

Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …

Problem #1 – Increased distractions.

Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.

Problem #2 – Lack of audience.

The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.

Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.

If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.

Problem #4 – No accountability.

When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.

Problem #5 – One-way interaction.

Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.

So, how do we fix these issues?

It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.

Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:

Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.

If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.

Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.

While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.

Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.

Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.

Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.

In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.

Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.

Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.

Is the future about virtual events?

I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.

I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.

We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.

27 Sep Why Trend Predictions Suck (And How To Fix Them)

The first time I wrote about trends, I was inspired by bullshit.

I remember reading an article with a headline that promised “5 Trends That Will Change The Future.” The first trend on the list was “Mobile Usage Will Continue To Rise.” That was the moment when I understood deeply why so many people mistrust trend predictions.

As I dug deeper, I started to discover that there are actually three reasons why most trend predictions are so bad:

1. They are self serving. The only people declaring 2020 to be “the year of [your product here]” are the content marketers from the companies that sell that product.
2. They are obvious. It is undeniably true that mobile usage will indeed continue to rise. So what? Many trend predictions take pains to point out the perfectly obvious.
3. They aren’t actionable. Even trend predictions that seem good lack the next level of insights to make them useful in real life.

Back in 2011 I wrote my first “Non-Obvious Trend Report,” spotlighting 15 trends that year which I thought were changing the world of marketing and social media. Over the following several years, I expanded the report to include trends about culture, technology, media and education. In the process, I discovered the answer to my own question about how to make trend predictions better.

The secret to predicting the future is getting better at paying attention to and understanding the accelerating present.

It’s hard to believe, but that was ten years ago and over the last several months I’ve been working on the research for the tenth annual edition of my trend predictions — called Non-Obvious Megatrends. Unlike previous years, this year’s book will be a bit different. For the first time, I’m taking a look back over the past ten years of research and it all started with a sorting exercise using my signature “Haystack Method” to group similar trends together. Here’s a time lapse video of that:

Over the next several months, I’ll be sharing more about the process leading up to publication of the book in January, 2020. In the meantime, if you want to get an early look at the book and get new non-obvious ideas in your inbox every Thursday, make sure to join my email newsletter list here: www.rohitbhargava.com/subscribe.

PS – If you want to take a deeper look inside my Haystack Method approach and how it works, check out this feature article about my process.

05 Sep 5 Awesome (And Slightly Scary) Technology Stories You Should Now

Most weeks I tend to focus on stories about our culture, but this week my curation led more consistently toward technology with a wide range of articles about innovations, discoveries and new research. In the stories below you’ll find everything from human-animal embryo research to the cure for baldness. They may awaken your imagination or perhaps disturb you with their ambition, but they are all stories you should know about. If there is a theme among them, it is probably the reminder that technology continues to simultaneously be a great and scary thing.

Contact Lenses That Change Focus and Zoom When You Blink
Though its only a prototype, a new soft contact lens from researchers at the University of California San Diego may allow the wearer to use the electrical field found in the tissues around the eye to control features like zooming in simply by blinking. It’s not exactly x-ray vision, but pretty amazing nonetheless.

Japan Approves First Human-Animal Embryo Tests
Hiromitsu Nakauchi has a plan to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. This week Japan became the first government to allow such research and if it works, the door may be open to scientists producing animals with organs made of human cells that can eventually be transplanted into real people.

Pampers Invents Smart Diapers To Track Baby’s Pee
Teaming up with health software platform Verily, Pampers is finally launching the product that countless parents have dreamed about – smart diapers. The diapers detects whether a diaper is wet from pee, as well as how wet it is. It also records how long a baby has been sleeping for.  Now all we need is a diaper that can change itself.

Saudi Prince Announces Plans For City of the Future
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has an ambitious vision to create the city of the future, complete with glow in the dark beaches, AI maids and robot dinosaurs. The project is called Neom, may require close to $500 billion to make and will cover 10,000 squares miles of coastline and desert. More importantly, the effort to build it will awaken human imagination and offer some ideas the rest of the world can use as well.

A Cure For Baldness (As Long As You’re Rich)
Every potential cure for baldness has had at least one fatal flaw. Hair regrowth medications don’t typically regrow much hair. Transplants look unnatural and hair cloning has never been viable. Now researchers believe the secret may lie in using stem cells to create a “hair farm” where new hair could be regrown with stronger hair follicles and then reinserted into the scalp. It’s a promising, expensive, and might actually work.

16 Jul 6 Marketing Lessons From Ed Sheeran

By Rohit Bharvaga

There is a moment during a show at the Austin City Limits where Ed Sheeran finally starts to perform his biggest hit at the time: Shape of You. About 10 seconds into the performance, he breaks a guitar string. Watching what he does next is a master class in stage presence, preparation and perhaps the perfect example of why he is such an engaging stage performer:

For anyone who has watched one of my keynote presentations, you already know I’m a big fan of Ed Sheeran. Usually when I share a story of a video of his performance, I talk about what I learned from it by watching a member of the audience just enjoy the show without distraction. I don’t, however, usually talk about just how good he is at marketing.

Right now, Ed Sheeran is everywhere. He is featured in the new film Yesterday. He’s launched everything from a new line of signature guitars to a Spanish restaurant in London. And today his new album featuring collaborations with a dozen top artists is getting released. It is likely to be one of the biggest hits of the year.

Along the way, he and his team are using some savvy marketing techniques to make the launch as big as possible. Here’s a deeper look at a few of them along with some marketing lessons they offer for the rest of us:

1. Condense the excitement.

Today in 32 cities around the world there will be a popup store for fans to go and buy all kinds of merchandise. He announced it to most fans just a few days ago, in some locations the store will only be open for a short window of time … 3:06pm to 9:06pm in New York, for example. All of which condenses fan excitement into a short window and is likely to create a huge viral sensation on social media and through word of mouth.

2. Find partners you believe in.

Ed Sheeran loves ketchup. In fact, he’s so much of a fan that he has a tattoo of the Heinz ketchup logo on his arm. So now Heinz is launching a limited edition version of their signature product named after him: “Edchup.” It’s a fun campaign, and works far better than many similar influencer marketing campaigns because it’s a sadly rare situation where the influencer in question loved the product long before he was paid to promote it.

3. Keep communications simple.

Emails from Ed are sparse, clear and written at almost an elementary school reading level. But they work because they are to the point and typically spotlight music and videos that his fans want to watch or listen to without getting in the way. It’s a perfect example of understanding what people really want and making sure you’re not overthinking your communications.

4. Create a sequence.

With this launch, as with his previous releases – every song is timed to go out in a drip campaign that allows people to watch and listen to one song, fall in love with it, and then get another one. Today for launch, his collaboration with Travis Scott and the official video is now live. Over the next several weeks, he will likely continue to release new videos for each song – creating another wave of interest and engagement from his fans.

5. Encourage your fans to obsess.

Every new song is also released with a lyric video, which helps fans learn the words to songs more quickly and encourages a short term obsession with the song until they learn it. The lyric video for his collaboration with Justin Bieber for the song I Don’t Care has been watched more than 100 million times – ensuring fans will be humming the song to themselves with perfect knowledge of all the lyrics.

6. Expand your audience.

Some of the most engaging videos Ed Sheeran uses are unscripted backstage collaborations with other artists in casual settings. His performance of 2002 with Anne-Marie and Your Songwith Rita Ora are both posted on their YouTube pages respectively, which allows him to not only create something that his fans will find, but also inspire fans of his collaborators to get to know and fall in love with him as an artist as well.