Author: Hannah Wehrly

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Ike Singh - Social27

In this podcast episode, we interview Ike Singh, Co-founder and CEO at Social27, a virtual and hybrid events platform.

Ike shares how event platforms can accelerate revenue, how Social27 uses an AI recommendation engine to recommend content to the right people, and why he thinks there needs to be a change in the way we deliver content due to COVID-19.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Ike Singh - Social27

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ike Singh

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Ike Singh, who's the co-founder and CEO of social 27. Welcome to the podcast Ike.

Ike: Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. It's a pleasure.

Mike: So you're into virtual and hybrid events in social 27. So if you want to give me just a quick overview of what social 27 does, and where your market is.

Ike: Certainly, Mike. So yeah, social 27. We focus on all sorts of events these days is primarily virtual events. But certainly a lot of our customers are planning for hybrid events in the very near future. Are we all provide a platform focused on providing the content, matchmaking and networking, which is powered by AI, and also a pretty robust Expo solution so that people can actually find amazing solutions and services in the ecosystem? So it's all about really connecting people, building communities and the big factor around accelerating revenue, the revenue cycle? So I mean, we'll talk more about that in just a bit. Yeah.

Mike: Fascinating. I mean, I'm intrigued to know, you know, a little bit about yourself, how you got here, what your career was like, and why you decided that events was the place to be?

Ike: Okay, certainly, Mike. So I'll go back a little bit. So I did about eight years at Microsoft, that was starting around 2000. You know, and when I was at Microsoft, I actually did a bunch of events, I used to work in the global partner marketing teams, so I would be on aeroplane every two weeks, somewhere in the world, it was a great time to see the world, but also meet lots of people. But what I found was that events certainly did not have the best ROI, you're spending a lot of money going everywhere. Sometimes you'd find like 500 people at an event and sometimes 50 people, you know, so just, you know, it was just all over the place. So I think for me, it was more around being able to build something which would bring people together, irrespective of where they were located. But also kind of be able to extend the in person events, you know, the so that if even if there's an in person event, the people who can't come there can still somehow participate. So that was what I left with it with Microsoft, you know, and then around 2012 was the first version of our virtual events platform. I'll be honest, it worked for about a year or two years or so but did not go where I wanted it to go. Just because I think the technology wasn't there yet. Streaming was really expensive. At that time, it was only the very, very big companies who could afford it. So we didn't get as much traction as I wanted. So then I kind of did a few different things. You might check them out on my LinkedIn, I've been all over the place. And then in 2019, is when we kind of came back to the board on our side and said, Look, there is a lot of advancements that have happened in from a technology perspective, streaming, as well as AI is becoming more real, we can actually use some of this stuff, you know, which is provided by the big cloud vendors. So we re architected and created a new version of our platform. And that is what is in market right now, since the last year and a half, two years. That's kind of the backstory.

Mike: And I'm really interested when you decided to go back to that business. And you know, I guess trade again, with the new technology, was there something specific that that drove you to do that? Was it something you were seeing in the market? Or was it a particular aspect of technology?

Ike: Certainly. So whenever it comes to b2b, I always think about how do we use technology and or just do stuff in our daily lives as just regular human beings, you know, so what I refer to is, as the consumerization of IT is what is kind of happening in the world right now. So a lot of the experiences that we have in our daily lives, we also want some of those same experiences at work. So what I was seeing, as a paradigm shift in the last few years was how people consume content and how people collaborate. You know, so what are events? Right? I mean, events are all about consuming content and collaboration. That's what they're all about networking. So consuming content is equal to Spotify is equal to Netflix, Amazon, you know, movies were prime. So the whole point behind some of these content consumption patterns that we see in the world right now, as in our personal lives, there's one thing which is very clear among all of these, that is that they provide us with tonnes and tonnes of content, but then they also provide us with recommendations and help us personalise our experience. So give me a lot but pay system, please understand what I want and give me exactly what I want. You know, so I don't have to waste my time, you know, just finding things right. So that was the kind of the North Star that we were going for, which was like how can I create an event perience where the event isn't in the middle, and the people are kind of like circling around it like, you know, shift from one room to the other. I think it's more about the, the human being being in the middle, and the events circling around the human being in terms of what they want, just like it happens in our daily lives with Spotify, and with everything else. And then plus the collaboration piece was more around LinkedIn for that matter, right. So think about if you could put LinkedIn from a collaboration online collaboration, perspective and networking perspective, and add some of that content consumption, aka Spotify style. That's exactly what we set out to create. And we've done that and our customers love it.

Mike: That's fascinating. It sounds like there's, I mean, there's lots of elements there in terms of the delivery of content, it says terms, one is delivery, which pretty streaming has become much easier. But you also talk about the AI in terms of being a recommendation engine, I'm, I'm really interested because historically, with physical events, we've not really had the AI recommending it. So I mean, do you see that as being your big, unique selling point for hybrid events, as well as online events?

Ike: Absolutely, Mike. So again, what the experiences that I believe in again, irrespective of our platform, right, so the whole goal is to give people the opportunity, especially in a business environment to get to what they want as fast as possible. You know, you hear things like Netflix binge, but believe me, nobody wants to binge on event, you know, b2b event videos. So the point is, you know, you have to get them to what they need to go to really, really fast. So the goal is to really understand who they are, you know, and there's lots of information available for that particular purpose. There's third party data, but in many cases in our environment, we actually create, give the opportunity to people to also self select some of those things, just like on Spotify, I'll give that example one more time. So as you go on Spotify, you choose your genres of music, that you're interested in soft rock, but I also like hip hop, okay, well, you come in there, and you choose certain categories of that you're really interested in, and then we kind of based upon that information, their actions, plus, based upon some of the information from their second party and third party data, we were able to pull together some pretty amazing recommendations. So that just really kind of helps, you know, reduce the friction, in terms of getting them to exactly what they're looking for. And as they like, start liking things in there, our algorithm starts sharpening its recommendations accordingly.

Mike: And I mean, this is kind of hard. But do you see your recommendations as like, showcasing interesting content that people might not have necessarily looked at before? Or is it more about removing the irrelevant content?

Ike: I think it is, the first one is more around giving them recommendations around what we think they might like, because it's also again, be put them into a cohort in the backend with other people who have similar profiles, you know, and it's just like, hey, this, there's 1000 other people who really liked these sessions, I think there are similar to you. So you might like this as well. So yes, and then again, the the recommendations become better as we see their actions inside. Right. So that's a starting point. But then it's also a lot to do with their own actions. So yeah, that's how that works.

Mike: Fascinating. So one of the things I've seen is that, you know, with COVID, particularly, obviously, a lot of stuffs moved online, but in general, companies have tended to go towards easier content webinars. And a lot of the event organisers have actually, you know, to some extent shut down during COVID. I mean, how do you see things coming back? Do you see events being run by large enterprises? Or do you see it going back to trade show organisers?

Ike: So I think, irrespective of who runs these events, I think what needs to happen is that there needs to be a change in how we think about delivering content. Events are just again, one more way to deliver content, right? So again, I'm just going to go a little bit broader, because I know your audience is not just events, right? They're more than that. So but delivering content. So now right now, in most cases, you're delivering content, mostly online, you know, and it will continue because people do want access to you know, content easier faster whenever they are variant of the or any device, all that fun stuff, right. So the point is, when it comes to in person events, and or virtual events I from based upon every everybody I've talked to, in my industry, as well as among the bunch of CMOS that we have from our customer side, these are companies all over the world, right? What they are telling us very clearly is that going in the into the future in the near future and onwards, every event is going to have a virtual component, you know, and yes, some of them very few of them might be in person only, but mostly everything is going to have some virtual component because people are used to it now. They want it and also the value that most corporations as well as exhibitor, exhibitor companies have found like the scale that they can achieve with, you know, some of this having a virtual component attached to it. So how we think about the world in the near future is that every event will have pre, during and after phase, in the pre phase, everyone is virtual.

And I think most organisations who are doing events, irrespective of their company or their a big event company, whatever be, they should put a bunch of that 100 level intro content online before the actual event happens. Why would you want to rent out a bunch of rooms and pay so much money for just delivering intro level PowerPoint doesn't make any sense. And nobody enjoys the nine to five on those uncomfortable chairs, looking at PowerPoint, right? So the goal is to achieve Do it fast, get it done online before the actual event happens, Spot the minds of the people, get them interested in, you know, the value of what's going to get delivered, and then also get them networking. So once you are delivering that content, people are already going to be there they meet others who are similar to them. So that once they go to the actual event, that is the question is not Oh, what do you guys do? Because that's the one question that's asked a billion times at every event, there's that's just such a waste. If they should know that intro stuff should happen pre event, during the event, rolling up your sleeves or getting deeper into the content, attending some exclusive workshops and things of that kind. You're having your side meetings with people you've already met before you go into the booths where you've already seen the demos before, right?

So it just completely changes the game. And you find a lot more value in person. And so for us, the way we think about events is let's take the events away from being email list generators, because that's what they are today. That's all you get from an event is an email list from that email list generation two more like revenue acceleration, where you actually getting business done not asking what do you do? Right? So that's all that what do you do sure happened in the in the pre event phase, and then post event is all about, you know, seeing some of the content you might have missed out on and or reconnecting some of those people and having a connection always on community until the next event happens, you know, so it's kind of like, that's our approach and strategy towards hybrid. And a lot of our customers are very aligned to that.

Mike: I love that idea of thinking a lot about before and after the event. I think that's, you know, that's something that online can give us that we really couldn't do before events were becoming hybrid. So that's great. In terms of, you know, one of the challenges of virtual events, I mean, one of the biggest complaints I hear is about networking, you mentioned there working, where, quite often it's very easy to network with people who want to sell you something very hard to network with anyone who's, you know, from your point of view, an interesting contact? I mean, have you seen this? And what do you see event organisers doing to overcome that problem?

Ike: Now, certainly a very, very valid question I, you know, I do say this many times, I'll repeat it one more time. It's not like that buyers don't want to buy, it's the process, the process of buying, especially in the upper mid market, and the enterprise is pretty tedious. I think it's tedious even feel buying, like, anything for your personal life. I mean, you go to a bunch of reviews and check out a bunch of videos. I mean, that's what people do. So it's that process that has the friction in it. Buyers want to buy it, that's what they've been given by a charter by their boss go buy me XYZ, you know, solution. It's the they have to kiss those 100 frogs to find the prince. That's where the problem is, right. So now, as the event owner, slash, you know, the platform, there is tonnes and tonnes of information that I have on both the parties, the buyers and the sellers. So I think the what I could do best for the buyer is first of all Q rate, what the kind of people I can connect them with. So we are many solutions and ways to do that. Yes, the recommendation engine certainly helps.

But then we do a further curation, where we do something called Online speed networking, in which you know, there's a, for example, you might be in the market for, you know, I'm looking for a CRM solution for healthcare. So you know, the, the event owner will find you eight or 10, so called solutions and partners who want to talk to you, and they'll be given three minutes on a quick video call. And you talk to them. And if you like someone, you continue the conversation beyond that, right. So that that's the kind of like do your pitch and then see how it goes? So curated? I think experiences for networking will certainly help. The next thing I think, from my perspective of the sellers is, well, maybe there isn't any curated stuff happening at all, networking, speed networking, what else do I do? Well, it's all about giving them an access to the information. So let's say out of those 5000 people at this event, here's the 50 people that have the highest propensity on what you're trying to sell. So basically, that is an interested party, because all they've been doing is looking at content and meeting people around that topic area. It's they love working for home solutions that are compliant with the healthcare system. Great. So that's what they're looking for. Don't send them a cybersecurity ebook, send them exactly the one pager on that solution, and it will strike. So that is the kind of information we're able to provide to both the parties where it becomes relevant in terms of having that connection. It's not a spray and pray kind of style stuff that happens mostly in events right now.

Mike: That's awesome. And I love the idea of that speed dating because I think that reflects very much an in person event where you could have two minutes talking to someone you You know whether you're a fit or not, and you either continue or you move on. I love that idea. So I'm moving on. I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is companies running their own events and how much work is involved? Because obviously, if you're looking to create the event and the pre and post event experience, do you think that the bar has been raised for what people are expecting from events in b2b now?

Ike: Yes, the bar has been raised, I will not say it's been raised, essentially, I think that the bar is a little different, you know, so it's, there's been some additions to it. So the whole point out here is that still I've seen over the last year and a half, since people have really gone in with virtual events, because of COVID. They're still doing what used to happen in E commerce back in the day, where, you know, people would take their, their catalogue book thing, and you know, just take pictures of that and put it on a website and say, Here's the phone number, call me if you want to buy something. Now, that was the beginning of E commerce, right, but then became Amazon, the recommendation engines, and you know, everything else in between. So that is where the event work needs to go as well. You cannot just take your offline content format, we're gonna do three days, I'm gonna do 50 sessions at the same time. And that's what we're going to do. Like, why would you do that? It seemed I mean, there's no, you know, there's no limit on how long you can have this thing. There's no limit on rooms that you can have, why would you bother, like, just change the thing? And next thing is around the time, it's like, oh, we'd normally do 45 minute sessions. That's what we should always do online as well. Well, nobody listens to anything 45 minutes online. I mean, yeah, if they're sitting on a chair, in your convention centre, and they are your so called captive audience, because they flew in there, and they stuck there for three days, they might do it, but they'll be on their phone for the most part. So the point is, let's understand that we have to start looking at the best practices from the digital world. We're living in the world of tick tock and Instagram right now. You know, and so the goal is, Listen, give them content, which is, which is very much in tune with the digital world.

Best example could be TED Talks. The TED talks are the best, you know, most watched content online, there's a format to it, but 15 ish minutes, not super salesy. Hardly any PowerPoints, and yes, let's do that 15 minutes session. Plus, you can also do your deep dive a one hour session, as a as a link, you know, so they, if they want to go super deep, they can go there. So those are some of the things that we just talked to our lot of our customers about. So the bar has not been raised, it's just that we have to start thinking differently, the medium is different. The ways that people are interacting and looking at all this stuff is different. And I mean, always listen to people saying using the word zoom, fatigue, and so forth. And people always say, well, people are kind of like zoom fatigue already. I don't think anybody wants to stuff anymore. And I always say to them, Have you ever heard the term tick tock fatigue, or Netflix fatigue or Instagram fatigue? No, people watch, look at their screens all day, they have no problem looking at screens, they just don't want to look at bad content. They look at they're used to looking at good content. So guys, I mean, come on, everyone, please, let's rethink this thing. And let's not be so lazy.

Okay, so the goal is, and then one more thing I want to bring up is the best thing about online is participation from the audience. Okay, so now a traditional event, or any of those kinds of events that happened as we choose, like, few people, which are roughly about two to 5% of the entire audience, and they're given the podium and 95% plus of the people just sitting there, like kindergarten kids looking at them. Right. So the point is, that's wrong? Why are we wasting the collective intelligence of this massive community. So with online and the way online works, it's all about participation. So let those chosen few speakers ignite that fire. They're just the spark, they're not the fire, the fire is the community, and so have a bunch of avenues and give the opportunity for the rest of the audience to actually chime in. And they can do their own, like small sessions in there. Right. So we have the ability, for example, in our platform for anybody to start a six person or a 30 person, mini session on any topic that they want, again, so aligned with the you know, the bigger topics or the event, you know, but the goal is that, you know, they can start their own mini sessions inside there. So now you've got, you know, hopefully more than 5% of the people contributing content, and it's coming from the community. And that is certainly more interesting. So there's two good parts about it. Number one, the you don't have to work as harder. So it's not like oh, it's online, I have to produce this whole new kind of content. No, you don't, you have to just do what you do. Do it in an online format, but give the mic back also to the audience so they can add as well. Right. And that will create an amazing event. And yes, it's not going to be a bunch of work from your side. If Instagram and or Tik Tok were supposed to create all the content themselves, they would have, I don't know a team of a billion people working there. They don't The point is, that's the new word. Let's look at that. Let's not just, you know, put our heads in the sand and pretend it's you know, 1984 it's not you know, so let's let's move on. You know, that's a That's brilliant.

Mike: I love the idea of that kind of unconference approach where, where the the delegates can actually form their own events. I mean, leading on from, you mentioned bad content. I think a lot of b2b companies over the last year and a half have really struggled with exhibitions. So where exhibitions have gone virtual. Typically the the format's are not very inspiring, and there's not very much interaction and generally speaking, the, the quality of leads is pretty poor. I mean, what do you think's going wrong? And how do you think we can fix it?

Ike: Okay, again, very good question, Mike. So quality of laser start with that, in the past, you know, both nauseous in the past, and generally traditional style events, you go there, you collect a bunch of business cards, you call them leads, and you come back home, and you put that into a Marketo, and you start dripping them. So the question is that the number of leads, so call him at a collector, maybe 100 cards with everybody you met at a coffee shop, you know, everybody met at the drinks, you know, Stan, and whoever came to your booth. Now, I've got 100 leads from there. And look at the all of them are directors and CVPs. Well, we all know how many of those people actually do a deal with you, maybe 1%, maybe five, you're really lucky, right? I mean, I've been to so many events, I know that rice representing Microsoft. So I mean, it was not too bad.

The point is, it's the way the virtual, you see those leads in front of you then in there, and you're able to measure more. So that's the reason why people are feeling this, like, oh, the Vert the leads are not great, well, just depends. I mean, brilliant. Blimey, in most cases, they were the same before. But then the best thing about works alone and or hybrid on that other side also is that, as I said earlier, the ability to create those experiences where you can curate on both sides of the audience and give them the right connections to each other. I think that is something which a lot of the event owners have to really take onus off. Again, I don't want to put people on the, you know, bid on the on point for this. But mostly in traditionally, the event owners have all been about, hey, I've got all these people coming, this 5000 People coming there, the booth is, you know, $50,000 come in, and you figure it out after that, it has no responsibility whatsoever for anything, and you just take the money, right. So the goal, I think now, because everything is so much more transparent, but digital, you can measure things better. So the point is that it's all going to come out.

So you have to have, you know, an experience that you have to work for you. Because he as the event owner, you're the only person who actually knows both the parties, you got to connect them in the best possible way using technology, right. So I think the old event owners have to step up their game just a bit, you cannot just say I have an event. So give me money, I think it's all about all MLOK more to do with giving them real value. The other thing, I think also is, from a digital perspective, I really believe in micro transactions. So for example, in the traditional event world, you would say, Okay, you got to pay me $2,500 to come in here, otherwise, you can't come and what's gonna happen there? Well, here's 10 pictures of amazing speakers, that's what's gonna happen. And the rest is up to you. You know what, now in the digital world, it's not like that, if you go somewhere, you you know, you engage a little bit you like it, you pay a little bit more, you like it more, you pay a little bit more. So I think that whole micro transaction has to come to the virtual world and hybrid events world as well, where you get access to, you know, keynotes and the basic stuff. But then if you want to indulge in some of that matchmaking, some of that, you know, speed network, and you just pay elaborate extra, you find value a little bit more extra, you know, and that way everyone feels the value. So yes, everyone, from event owner perspective will have to really be more responsible for what they're doing. And from the event, you know, attendee perspective, I mean, I think we will get a better value going forward.

Mike: That's fascinating. So it sounds like you know, one of your messages is flexibility. And the other one is around, really trying to curate things and using AI to make sure that people get the right content. So tell me, how does social 27 achieve this in practice?

Ike: Yeah, so again, we are still the platform, I don't have all the control or the content that comes in. But again, I'm very lucky to have some very amazing customers. I mean, the kinds of customers I have Microsoft, Salesforce Capgemini, you know, the UN and, and so forth. We have lots of really, really amazing customers, and most of the customers that we are dealing with are digitally advanced, because they've been doing digital for a while, you know, and so the point is, these companies already have people in their teams who understand digital. And so it is easier when we talk to them or some of these best practices, that they actually believe in them and want to do something about it. I then yes. And so I think as a as a platform, our main responsibility is to first of all Yes, provide the best possible service from a platform perspective, but then also share a lot of best practices from across our entire audience and also connect our customers to each other. You know, where they can share best practices, right?

So we do our best try to do our show at least in that particular regard, I will still say that, um, there is still a lot more work to do, you know, the tools are there. But I think people, you know, are slowly, slowly getting warmed up, you know, to this whole idea of doing things a bit differently. And not just using events as number of registrations, but after using events as how much influence did we create for revenue perspective, right. So I think events have are traditionally the highest, or the biggest line item on the marketing budget for the expense part of it, the ROI certainly isn't very clear. And the point is, in this world, where we hardly get any response on emails, so using events just for email list generation is probably not a good idea. So use the events, because that is the only place where the customer is out in the open, you know, otherwise, they're going to go back and hide behind their desk and never answer email. So the point is, they're out in the open, give them what they want, understand their needs really, really clearly give them the option of finding the right people making the right connections and do a lot more off your revenue. You know, cycle can happen in the event itself, it does not need to be just an email list, right? There's a lot more conversations demos, you know, giving them the ability to just kind of do their own thing in there, you know that I think all lot of those things will help. But yes, going back to your question, yes. Even though I have amazing customers, I think all of us are trying slowly, slowly to kind of unfold this new world.

Mike: And so I mean, you mentioned some really impressive customers there. But do you think Virsh events are just going to be the domain of these huge enterprises? Or are smaller, midsize b2b companies able to organise their own events successfully?

Ike: I think it is everyone. I mean, just I mean, again, look at the spectrum of things, right. So in reality, if you really think about it, online events, or online experience of this kind is the domain of individuals right now. It's the people on Youtubers, it's the Instagramers. And everybody else, I mean, there's a bunch of kids doing pet dog videos all day. So the thing is, it's actually the domain of the individual person, the tools are available, they're pretty cheap. I mean, they're very, they reach very far. So that I think it really comes down to is all of us embracing this new medium. I think very found some of the hesitation has been around the control that you know, a lot of the teams, a league, legal teams, and so forth, they have on every word that goes out, right, actually. So in reality, I think there's more hurdles in the upper mid market in the enterprise space, because the control on what content has to go out, versus, you know, the SMB space, I think the the small and medium businesses, well, they don't have a crazy team of lawyers sitting there, you know. So the point is, you know, I mean, learn from, you know, from what people are doing individually every day on the social media platforms, I'm even seeing so much of that happen on LinkedIn right now. There's a lot more people a lot more waster. So I think it's just all about, you know, getting out there, like the what we're doing right now, Mike, the point is, you know, just get get to get your word out there talk to people, I think there'll be, there'll be some interest, hopefully, especially from the if you make, you know, a sense to the relevant audience.

Mike: Fascinating. So, I mean, if somebody is excited by this, they want to, to launch their own event. I mean, what's the best approach? I mean, is it just sign up for the platform and build your event? Or are there better, more effective ways to make use of social 27?

Ike: As far as Social27 is concerned? I mean, yes, you know, I think the best way to be is, you know, just come to our website and just, you know, fill out a contact us form, maybe we'll do a demo, understand your needs, and then give you the right solution that works best for you. Again, we work with events that are 100 people and events that are nearly 100,000 people, you know, so it just depends upon what you're trying to do. For us, again, the goal is to have a long term relationship. So you know, all of our agreements are more or less than the you know, and we'll arrange and we find the best possible package that works for your organisation now.

Mike: Amazing. So get in contact on the website. If people have specific questions about what you've said today. I mean, is there a way for them to contact you on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, perhaps?

Ike: Absolutely. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn every day, you know. So the point is, please send me a quick message on LinkedIn more than happy to answer any questions and or discuss anything that might be of interest.

Mike: This has been great. I mean, I've really enjoyed it. I love I love the focus around improving the quality of the content and the fact that actually, it doesn't have to be more work because the expectations in terms of the length of time is probably shorter for for each presentation. So I think there's a lot there that that's really positive.

Ike: No, absolutely. Mike. I think it's the new world. And again, it was already coming. We just were dragging our feet, you know, so I think it's just a Yeah, it's here now. So let's, let's get started all of us. Yeah.

Mike: Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I've really enjoyed it.

Ike: Thank you so much, Mike. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Hannah Wehrly