John Failla of Tesoro Events and Virtual Events

John Failla is CEO of Tesoro Events, focused on exploring, studying, and evaluating emerging business to business media models. While at the Virtual Edge Summit last week, we had an opportunity to chat about the impact of virtual events and the different stages of development. Also, congratulations to John for his new blog titled "Virtual Event Insights." His first post builds on his thoughts regarding how the retail industry dealt with going digital and looks at how publishers have dealt with this. If you have time, I recommend checking it out and look forward to reading more of John's thoughts on virtual events. Here is a summary of the conversation:

Impact of Virtual Events
- The growth of virtual events is very reminiscent of what was happening when Internet was first impacting retail
- Retailers were trying to figure out how this would impact their retail business
- Retailers learned how to use Internet-based tools to serve their customers
- Like this previous experience, many of the same questions are being asked - will physical events go away, how can these work together, will virtual replace physical

Different Stages of Virtual Events
- People will become aware of the virtual event tools and what they're capable of doing
- Next stage is how they can use and implement a virtual event
- Final stage is how to learn how to implement and use virtual events to expand reach of an event
- In 2-4 years, a physical event will naturally have a virtual component.