Steve has another chat with Alysa Taylor Steve reads his Blog

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft, to get the latest from the Queen of Marketing for Microsoft Business Applications Group. We chat about the success of Virtual Events, Customer Insights, Power Apps vs Power Apps, and touched on SMB.  Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript below: Alysa Taylor: Hello? Steve Mordue: Alysa. Steve Mordue. How are you? Alysa Taylor: I'm doing well, Steve, how are you? Steve Mordue: Well, you know why I'm calling, right? Alysa Taylor: I have a hunch. Steve Mordue: Yes, yes. I've got the record button on and I just wanted to see if you had a few minutes to talk about just things. It's been a while since we caught up. Alysa Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Would love to spend some time and just chat. It has been a little while. Steve Mordue: So we just came off Business Applications Summit the first pivot over to a virtual conference. And at least from the rumors I hear the attendance was off the charts compared to an in person conference. Alysa Taylor: It was off the charts. It was actually our first Microsoft virtual, we classify events and this is a tier one event, so it was our first one that we executed as a first party tier one event in a virtual capacity. So we were both nervous and excited. We had over 50,000 people registered. So it really was... And it's a very different format. We condensed two and a half days into a half day. But I would agree, we were very pleased with both the online turnout. And then I think, from what I heard from the community, the format worked well. It was a nice mix, we did a prerecorded keynote, then we had live sessions that were moderated with subject matter experts. And then we were able to do some networking and fun interstitial type activities in between the programming. Steve Mordue: You know, I would have to think that if I were Microsoft, having done in person events for so long and the expense of doing those and the coordination of putting those together, because it's a production when you guys do those. And then looking at the number of attendees there were able to make it because of schedule or cost because of getting approval by their employers and versus now suddenly a virtual event at no cost. I mean, there was no limits to anybody being able to get into that. And while we might lose some of that in person networking amongst one another, from Microsoft's standpoint getting the information out to as broad an audience as possible seems like this is a better way to do it. Alysa Taylor: You know, my team and I have talked a lot about that and I think in the post COVID-19 world, because we're learning so much about virtual events, I think we'll end up, and no timeline on this, but we'll end up probably in the future in some kind of a hybrid type scenario. Because I do think there is always that benefit of face to face, being able to network, shake people's hands, see old friends. So I think that in person will never completely go away, but I think we're learning how to do virtual events that will compliment the in person. And so I think, and again, this isn't an official statement, but I think there'll be a world of probably smaller, more intimate events. And then the big scale events will be virtual because at the end of the day we've had over 150,000 views of our content from Microsoft Business Application Summit, compared to we do 7,000 to 10,000 in person. So it's a very different scale. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It really is. When you think about the ability to touch just so many people that way and the expense. I think that, obviously, we all got thrown into this virtual event motion when we weren't quite ready for it and our tools weren't quite built for it but ready or not, here we come. And I was, I can't remember the earlier virtual event t