After much planning and organizing, the San Francisco and visiting New York teams pulled off BrightTALK’s first ever in-house live summit webcast on March 17, 2011.  Unlike our previous summit webcasts, where speakers are able to present over the phone facing a computer screen from all over the world, the roundtable panelists sat next to each other in front of a live, in-person audience in our office.

This milestone event came about after our Marketing Programs Manager, Morgan Cantrell, attended a Think Influence Meet-Up group and spoke to the group’s founder, Barbara French, about possible topic ideas. (Read more about their conversation in this post by Morgan, On-site or online events?)  The conversation turned to aligning a future meet-up with a relevant BrightTALK Summit to enable those unable to attend the meet-up in person to still benefit from the content.  And that conversation evolved into what you see here.

Everyone in attendance wore a nametag with a QR code on it that, when scanned by a smart phone, would pre-populate a tweet about the event with our hashtag, “#thinkinf,” in Twitter. Attendees, both in person and online, could use that hashtag to submit questions to the panelists through the emcee, who was following the conversation on an iPad. While online audience members could also submit questions in the webcast player, our in-person audience could raise their hand if they preferred.

After the 60-minute roundtable conversation wrapped, there was ample time (and food and coffee) for our participants to interact directly with the experts and swap a business card or two (or a signed copy of their recent book).

It was also a chance for us to chat more with our upstairs and downstairs neighbors.

Our in-house video team also grabbed some time with the panelists to interview them one-on-one about the challenges they’re facing as marketers. Then they made sure that all that footage they captured of the roundtable and streamed live straight into our Social Media Marketing Summit would also be available on demand for you to enjoy. 

We hope you can make the next one!