By Chris Lesieutre, Dundee Hills Group CEO

When the organizers of the Knowlton Literary Festival first contacted the LIVE! team, I admit, I had to do a Google search and pull up a map to find out where this Town of Brome Lake was and how the village of Knowlton fit into it.

And once I figured out the geography of it all, I had to ask myself: what was this seemingly sleepy little, out-of-the-way spot in the Eastern Townships (Cantons-de-l’Est) of Quebec doing hosting a literary festival?

Brome Lake Website

Digging further into it, I discovered these Eastern Townships and Brome Lake in particular have quite a lot going on, and not just in terms of absolutely fantastic rural landscapes with an abundance of opportunities for outdoor fun. They also have a long tradition of art and culture, with a rich vein deep in the literary arts. The area claims the oldest free public library in the province for one thing, and of course, Louise Penny, best-selling mystery author, calls it home and acts as Honorary Patron of the Festival. And then there is the singularly charming bookstore just across from the Mill Pond in the heart of town.

Louise Penny, Honorary Patron of the Knowlton Literary Festival

Lucy Hoblyn, the owner of Brome Lake Books, reached out to us in her role as the VP of the Knowlton Literary Festival. She was looking for ideas on how to run the festival in an online environment.

                           The Knowlton Literary Festival takes place each October and celebrates English-language literature with a particular focus on Canadian authors. Started in 2010, the festival has pulled in writers from across Canada to engage the local community in and around the Town of Brome Lake. And then in 2020, it didn’t. We all know why.

After canceling the festival in 2020, the organizers and the town were determined to make it happen in 2021, even if it meant not doing it in person. While not exactly sure how to pull off a virtual event, they had some ideas and they knew what they didn’t want. They didn’t want just a series of Zoom sessions.

I asked Lucy why she had decided to contact us.

“Because,” she said, “some of our people attended an international women’s day event that was on LIVE!, and over the first 12 months of the pandemic, that was the only virtual event, of many, that they said actually felt like a real event.”

No one on the LIVE! team had ever attended a literary festival, so we got a crash course in that first meeting. And we listened to the particulars of how the Knowlton Literary Festival didn’t just bring in noted outside authors, but really involved the whole community. They presented point-by-point the things that happened at the literary festival and asked how each event could be replicated online. Musicians, theater performances, book clubs, dance and yoga classes, tourist and local community information. Not just how it could be replicated, but how it could be replicated in the most true-to-life manner possible, so it would work for people who aren’t necessarily attuned to or up on the latest online technology.

The fun part about working with people who don’t come from the high-tech industries where we do most of our work is that they have no idea of the limits of the technology, so they’re perfectly willing to push beyond.

The team from Knowlton Literary Festival went away from our first meeting and then within a week delivered a thoroughly thought-out structure for the entire event. They built it around the premise of recreating the village atmosphere where the in-person literary festival would normally be held. They focused on the graphical presentation, creating an event map overlaid against a recognizable view of what would have been the physical location if the event were held in person. Room icons on the map included familiar elements like the VIP Main Stage, the Gazebo, Bookworm Café, and of course the Bookstore itself (where attendees could order their books, with proceeds going to the festival). The organizers felt that if the look and feel of the platform was attractive and familiar, users would immediately be comfortable and willing to engage within the platform, and not be intimidated by any preformed technical fears.

Along with these design elements and the familiar layout, the platform gave attendees total freedom to move as they wished between different sessions/stages and the static sessions/kiosks. This was a key element in the success of the event.

The music and theater events were held in the Gazebo, the Bookworm Café hosted the book club events and talks with local authors, and of course, the centerpiece, the highlight was a VIP Main Stage where the featured authors spoke, took questions and, as it turned out, engaged in some in-depth discussion of historical and current events, politics and science. It included authors coming in virtually from across Canada, from Quebec to Victoria Island.

Lucy Hoblyn summed up the experience:

“Let’s just say, a good part of our audience doesn’t sit in front of computers online all day, they aren’t technology savvy. So one of our worries was that no matter what the virtual platform, a good portion of our attendees weren’t going to be able to navigate it. But the LIVE! platform was incredibly intuitive. And yes, there were those few who just didn’t get it, including one of the guest authors, but nothing flustered the LIVE! team and they handled each user issue with patience and respect. Their focus really was on the user experience not on the technology; they treated our attendees like people, you know, like you’d expect to be treated if you were walking up to the information desk looking for help at an in-person event. It wasn’t just logging on anonymously to a technology platform. It was real people working with real people. All to allow authors to actually engage with their readers at an event at a time when no one thought it possible.”

“So the only real issue,” Lucy said, “was that the online map and the graphical representation we created seemed so real to some people that they thought we were having an in-person event. They showed up in the bookstore asking where the Main Stage was!”

If you want to get some great books, check out titles from featured authors from the festival here.

Click here to download pdf version of this article

By Chris Lesieutre, Dundee Hills Group CEO

While I was lying back in the dentist’s chair today, I was thinking about the word “fatigue.”

I don’t know who coined the term “Zoom fatigue,” but it’s been on my mind.

There isn’t a lot you can do, besides thinking, while recumbent in a dentist’s chair — though I am impressed with how, in modern dentistry, they really try to make you comfortable and give you distractions while they work. I was offered headphones and my choice of Pandora playlists. I could even watch Netflix. I thought, “What the hell, I’ll put on an ‘easy listening’ playlist to calm my nerves,” maybe drown out some of the unpleasant sounds that I was expecting.

It’s a great idea, but seriously, is there enough volume in the world to buffer the high-pitched wail of a drill grinding into your teeth? I’ll say it works to a certain degree, but it does nothing to stop the more general unpleasantness of the situation — the spray that’s shooting out of your mouth, the sensation of almost-having-to-gag-but-not-quite, feeling like you need to swallow but can’t really make it happen, or the absolute worst: the odd dry burning smell as the drill screams and grinds your enamel into dust. You can see the dust drifting out of your mouth in a loose cloud.

No “easy listening” playlist of 1970s Elton John, Gordon Lightfoot, and Hall and Oats is going to calm down anyone with that sight, or the terrible screeching that comes with that most awful smell. For just shy of two hours.

So, let’s talk about fatigue.

After a few hours in the dentist’s chair, I feel totally spent, shattered actually, almost catatonic. As much as I told myself to relax and breathe, I was totally on edge the whole time. I would catch myself clenching my fists or grabbing my wrist and squeezing tight. The whole two hours. It was exhausting.

How does that compare to the fatigue of Zoom meetings? Well, I’d suggest there’s no such thing as Zoom fatigue. It’s really just boredom. And it has nothing to do with the technology of video conferencing; it’s just plain bad meetings and bad virtual events.

Too many people are sitting through too many meetings that are dull. Even when a topic is of interest, the attendees have no chance to actively participate and engage. The experience leaves people with feelings of frustration, disappointment, even emptiness.

That leads me to one of the big gripes I have about virtual events as we’ve experienced them in the past year. You go into an online event, and the content being presented may be outstanding … and yet, you feel totally alone in the environment. There is no real opportunity for true human interaction.

I don’t know how many times at in-person events I’ve been sitting in a presentation and then realized, for example, that hey, Michel Proulx is sitting right behind me, and look, it’s MC Patel just across the aisle, and oh, there’s Paulien Ruijssenaars coming in late. I think, “I need to talk to those people as soon as the session is over!” And I do, and they introduce me to new people and vice versa. In live events, I can do that. In virtual events, not so much — mostly not at all. In most virtual events, it’s impossible to tell who else is in the room, let alone have an opportunity to meet with them after the event or between sessions. It’s not Zoom fatigue; it’s boredom and loneliness.

Even when I’m in the dentist’s chair, the dentist and the technician pause once in a while to ask me how I’m doing. True, with a bite guard in your mouth stretching your jaw well beyond where it was naturally meant to go, you can’t really reply with anything more than basic grunts. But still, it’s more attention than I get at most virtual events.

We can do better. (Go ahead, ask me how.)

By Chris Lesieutre, Dundee Hills Group CEO

Yesterday my 14-year-old daughter asked me why I wasn’t posting on Instagram anymore. “I miss your photos,” she said.

It’s true, I haven’t been posting on any social media much, almost not at all for, oh, about the last six months. There’s a simple explanation — which is that I just ran out of time because I latched on to a project that turned into an obsession, to the point of practically consuming me.

Ever been there?

“The real problem was deeper.
We were cut off from our traditional sources
of finding new customers.”

A week ago, I heard a podcast that was a collection of interviews with people talking about what they’d done with themselves during the pandemic — what they’d accomplished, what they’d discovered. These were all positive stories presented as a kind of antidote to most of the negativity we’ve associated with living through this time.

In the next few months, if it hasn’t started already, I predict there will be a plethora of these pandemic stories. It will be kind of like the “what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation” genre of essays, except they’ll be about coping, about personal discovery and personal breakthroughs that happened while, and because of, living through a pandemic.

I don’t mean to make light of this. There will be a lot of stories about addressing tragedy, some of them will be about the enduring human spirit and about the power of love.

My story’s more mundane. Merely about crass business and commerce, at least on the surface. It starts out as adjusting to a complete disruption of the business I’ve been running with my partners for the past 24 years. And it’s not just that we had a huge drop off in clients at the beginning of all this. That was a problem, but the real problem was deeper. We were cut off from our traditional sources of finding new customers. When you’re in the agency business, losing clients is a fact of life you learn to live with, and you develop a deeply felt belief that you’ll always find new ones because you always do. But suddenly losing your tried-and-true methods for getting new clients, that’s just plain terrifying.

“The breakthrough for us came in April when we decided to organize a virtual pub”

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So, if you don’t know already, we run a group of marketing agencies that service high-tech industries, mostly in areas related to media & entertainment technologies. We’ve been virtual almost from the get go, so this working from home is nothing new. But being stuck at home, that’s new. Travel to trade shows and conferences is really big in the industries we work in, and being able to meet people face-to-face at these events was huge, not just for our business specifically but for everyone in those industries.

Clearly we had to do something different.

The breakthrough for us came in April when we decided to organize a virtual pub every Friday as a way to bring our whole team together at the same time. I wrote about it in a blog here (https://www.wallstcom.com/news/we-built-a-virtual-pub/), which basically outlines the big fail of virtual pubs at that time. When all you do is have a videoconference session, it doesn’t really resemble a pub at all, does it? But this offered us the first glimpse of the requirements for a true virtual pub experience, which we were then able to cobble together. And that is an online environment with multiple rooms and simple navigation icons people can use to move themselves between rooms at will.

With that experience, we then sketched out the requirements – what was needed to make a true virtual event for the industry. We concluded you basically need two things: content and connection. The content is the information that you share, and all virtual event platforms focus on this, the ability to deliver your presentation. Connection is about actually connecting with people in a way that would resemble in-person meetings. So you basically need a setting that has multiple meeting rooms that your attendees can move between, with the ability to see who else is in the environment and connect with them, gather in small groups or one-on-one, disperse and regroup with others, and again, and again.

We researched the available virtual event platforms that were on the market, and when we could not find one that could do what we had outlined, could not find one that really connected people, we set out to build a platform that truly put people first. And that’s what I’ve been working on and why I haven’t been on social media.

The development process got a bit crazy because after presenting the concept to a number of clients, we had one that actually bought it. Seriously, we had an idea, and it became a contract … which gave us a deadline to get it built: end of September. Hedging our bets a bit, we organized two development teams to work on it independently, taking slightly different tacks.

“People are going to have to find different ways to connect in meaningful ways.”

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At the same time, we began a collaboration with a third developer who was working on the same problem from yet another angle. With three potential solutions, I figured we’d have a good shot at actually getting the thing built in time. It turned out to be a real nail-biting experience. Four weeks before the event, we still didn’t have a working solution … and then the Oregon fires came, and I was pretty much swallowed in blackness for almost a week. I was already starting at 6 a.m. most mornings and still at the computer at midnight.

We did finish it, and we did pull off the September event; 300 or so people from 29 countries participated over three days. I wrote a blog about it here (https://www.wallstcom.com/…/beyond-the-virtual-pub…/), if you are interested.

Since then we’ve done a half dozen or so other events and hundreds of demos. I don’t know if it’s a lasting solution. What I do know is we are living through an extraordinary time. In certain types of businesses, things may never be the same (some people don’t think they ever should be), and people are going to have to find different ways to connect in meaningful ways.

As a side note, even though we developed this for industry events and conferences, we discovered that it’s also perfect as a virtual office. We’ve started using it for that ourselves, and we are now talking to other companies about that. There may be more applications we haven’t thought of yet.

What I have learned from working and studying this is that people don’t learn much from just sitting in front of their computer screen listening passively to someone passing along information in a PowerPoint on a webinar. They get information, but they rarely get inspiration. It’s the interaction of people face-to-face, the give and take of ideas — that’s where the magic happens. It’s something that is hard to pull off in an online platform. But that’s what we’re trying to do.

And that’s the story of what I’ve been doing during the pandemic so far.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the event platform, you can hit me up by email, or fill out the form here, and I’d be happy to talk about it or show it to you. And you can watch the video intro here https://youtu.be/_52Yd6YxoZ4.