Executive Summary
Hindenburg Systems is a Danish software company that makes specific audio recording and editing software for audio narrative. They cater to podcasting, radio, audiobook, and recording verticals. They serve a broad global audience and nurture these audiences through webinars, workshops and virtual conferences
Chris Mottes, CEO and partner at Hindenburg, has more than 30 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, and business development in London, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. He shares his experience with Airmeet’s ‘Social Webinar’ solution for their multiple virtual events hosted every month.
Chris talked about how he found Airmeet and said, “One of our users was presenting at a podcasting conference in India using Airmeet and invited us to speak. I found Airmeet to be a cool platform. Post that experience, I enquired more about Airmeet and found that it suited our needs and was exactly how we wanted to present our events. I particularly liked the option of free events and browser-based operations.”
He further said, “We come from the radio community, and one of the primary reasons we started this initiative was to support communities around the world. We provide our software for free to many radio stations across the globe, where there is a need for indigenous or local community radios that don’t have the funding support.”
Talking about the effect of the pandemic, Chris said, “The reason for going online wasn’t just the pandemic. We were already heading towards virtual, but the pandemic pushed the impetus. As we are a small company and we wish to serve a global audience, there is no better way to reach our audience than going virtual.
Before the pandemic, attending conferences took a lot of time, with me traveling 10-15 times a year around the world. It wasn’t a sustainable solution environmentally and financially. Therefore, we chose the virtual path and began our journey with Zoom. But Zoom didn’t meet our expectations.”
Challenges (and Solutions)
Challenge 1: Organising an informal and highly interactive webinar experience that’s perfect for the radio community
Chris said, “Airmeet keeps the sessions informal. For firms like us, making the event very formal is counter-productive.”
The standout features of Airmeet’s social webinar included:
Social Lounge – Chris mentioned, “I am a huge fan of the social lounge. I would almost say the social lounge is the reason we use Airmeet for our webinars and workshops. We had great interaction with our customers in the social lounge.
I had a very bad experience with platforms that offer virtual booths because that becomes a very formal and sale-sy environment. Airmeet’s social lounge allowed us to put our partners at tables pre & post event, open for interaction. We had a lot of compliments from people attending our events saying how they finally experienced a virtual environment that really felt like being at a personal conference.”
Chat and Q&A – Chris appreciated these two features stating, “We used these features a lot, as it’s a great way of keeping people connected. I am particularly happy with Q&A being separate from the chat. It’s actually a fantastic functionality because chat soon becomes a long stream. For the Q & A session, attendees are forced to think and formulate their questions, check the other questions posted and upvote them if they so desire.
Invite to Stage – Chris shared how they used this feature to help people that might be uncomfortable being on stage. Inviting others on stage made things more lively. Another thing that helped was having their own moderator so the event could run smoothly.
Challenge 2 : Hosting numerous varied format events within their budget
Chris said, “We wanted to host three primary types of events- webinar series, workshops, and conferences and wanted to streamline them our way.”
Airmeet offered Hindenburg Systems the ability to host multiple event formats and a tailored solution to meet their needs. Chris said, “We conduct three types of events- firstly, one-hour-long webinars, that attract upto 150 people each.
This is a one-session event. The second format is workshops. They run for around three hours and offer a much more interactive experience, where the participants may learn how to do something, and it involves a lot more activity and pre and post event networking with speakers, facilitators, partners and other attendees. Workshops also have upto 150 people.
The third type is the conferences. We prefer to run them as single streamlined sessions, which suits our purpose better. We run the event in a multi-session format with breaks, like a conference.
It has worked well for us, and even the speakers have loved their Airmeet social webinar experience saying that they had a much nicer experience here than any of the other platforms. They have fun going into the social lounge and speaking to people there.”
Challenge 3 : To achieve collaborative working and cross-marketing promotion just like in real-life conferences
Hindenburg Systems wanted to meet the goal of attracting new potential customers, increasing brand awareness while providing higher value to our customers.
Airmeet’s Social Webinar features like the tables resolved their issues while the analytics helped them measure the event’s success. Chris said, “We were trying to use Zoom for meetups, and the whole breakout room administration and functionality was just too clunky. On Airmeet, we created breakout rooms on the tables themselves so that attendees could interact and work together. That was easy for us to administer. In Zoom, we had to take each person and put them into a room in a very stilted interface.
We used Airmeet in ways that you probably couldn’t imagine. We had breakout rooms for collaborative working during workshops and soon, and it was a much more relaxed environment.
Tables – Chris said, “We used tables which worked well to promote our partners. We cross-promote to each other’s audience, as we offer complementary products and services. It was more like a cross-marketing initiative.”
Recordings – Chris mentioned, “We share the recordings in our Facebook group, and that has worked well as it brings additional members to the community.”
Analytics Report – Chris said, “It is a very useful feature, and I am very happy with it. We always download the data and look through it to see our retention, percent of registrations, number of people going to tables and having networking sessions, etc.”
Airmeet’s 24/7 Support Lounge – “We have often used the support lounge to troubleshoot any issues, and it has only improved over time,” Chris added.
Event Outcomes
Higher registrations – Chris mentioned, “While going virtual since the last two years, we are witnessing positive growth, which is higher than expected. The number of our sign-ups for virtual events is much higher than in a real-life conference. Virtual events allow a new audience to get a free trial when they attend a conference without us having to be pushy. Whereas in a real-life conference, you have to coax them to come and join.”
He further said, “Airmeet is my favorite webinar & conferencing platform. It is a great tool for gathering our users and having a good and friendly environment for presentations and social networking.”
Way Forward
Hindenburg Systems hosts around eight to ten events a month on Airmeet in various languages. They plan to continue with Airmeet in the same way. Chris also mentioned that they are looking forward to using the Active Campaign integration”.
If you are looking to host an impactful Webinar, take a demo of Airmeet’s Social Webinar solution!
