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Webex Events (Formerly Socio)
What Is Webex Events (Formerly Socio)?
Webex Events (formerly Socio) is an end-to-end event management platform powering immersive, intuitive, and inclusive virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. Raise the bar with event apps, flexible registration, check-in and badge printing, lead retrieval, and live streaming technology. Webex Events blends flexibility with ease of use so organizers can host engaging events that support their goals, no matter the type of event or organization.
Who Uses Webex Events (Formerly Socio)?
tech, associations, universities, third-party planners, event companies, media companies, and more
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Webex Events (Formerly Socio)
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Reviews of Webex Events (Formerly Socio)
Alternatives Considered:
A great, easy to set-up and manage events platform"
Comments: We used Webex Events to improve participant engagement and reduce staff time for a non-profit's annual 24-hour ski marathon. The app enabled us to put a lot of different participant materials in a single, continually updated location (agenda, rules, announcements, hour-by-hour results, etc.) enabling our staff to spend much less time printing and distributing materials and much more time engaging with participants. The athletes loved the app because they could see their results in real time and track how they and their teammates were doing in real time.
Pros:
We evaluated several different event platforms, and Socios seemed like the easiest to set-up and manage. We first tried to use another platform and that proved too difficult so we pivoted back to Socio (which was more expensive, but worth it in the end.) As a board member of a small, community-based non-profit that produces an annual 24-hour skiing event, we wanted an application to improve participant engagement and reduce work for staff. The results we got in our first year with the Socio / Webex events app were phenomenal.Over half of our 600 athletes used the app over the two days of our 24-hour ski marathon, totaling over 23,000 minutes of usage! The built-in features of the app around Agenda, Announcements, and Participant networking were easy to set up and delivered a lot of value in reducing work on our staff.Even more impressive was how easy it was for us to seamlessly integrate with additional content to deliver a highly-tailored experience to our attendees -- the Web link feature is extremely valuable (especially the ability to pass External ID to a URL), and our athletes were able to continually see their progress in a custom "achievements" web page we built (~2300 clicks from ~280 users), as well as pull up the individual and team rankings in real-time from our race-timing vendor (another 6600 clicks cross 280 users). Additionally, our ability to embed documents and text content made the Event App a one-stop place for rules, instructions and other key details
Cons:
There are some small downsides, especially for folks on a tight budget. These include extra costs for API access, branded apps (in IOS / Android store), etc. Also, once you set up an external ID for a participant it's difficult to change
Alternatives Considered:
Webex Events (formerly Socio) was a valuable tool for our symposium last month!
Comments: Webex Events (formerly Socio) was a life saver for our small business in offering the hybrid symposium last month!
Pros:
Webex Events (formerly Socio) was well received by our attendees, staff, exhibitors, and sponsors. We hosted our Symposium in September, and the event was hybrid. The Webex Events (formerly Socio) app was instrumental in keeping everyone organized. we liked that our sponsors and exhibitors could reach the virtual crowd just as easily as the in-person crowd. Building the app to our specifications was so simple and the help desk was quick to respond with any questions we had. The entire team at Webex Events (formerly Socio) was great to work with! Implementing the app was effortless. Our team was able to customize the app to our color scheme and highlight features of our event. The scheduling function made it straightforward for our attendees to join their session, see the upcoming speakers and overall plan their day based on who they wanted to see speak. The app was used by all involved for two consecutive days. Integrating the Webex Events (formerly Socio) app into our event to keep everyone organized was effortless. We really liked the ticket purchasing feature, this made selling tickets for both in-person and virtual attendees painless. The reporting tool was helpful at the end, we were able to see who and how many people attended each event. The reporting tool and metrics that are available in the end make planning your next event so easy. We also streamed 4 consecutive speakers every and the app records each of those sessions automatically.
Cons:
The least helpful aspect of the Webex Events (formerly Socio) app was the training tool on streaming the sessions. The tool is only set up to train you to stream one session at a time. We spent two days training only to find out the day of our event that streaming 4 consecutive sessions was nothing like streaming just one session. It made the morning of day one of our event stressful. We suggest modifying the training for those that make more than one consecutive session so that you can train on streaming at least 2 sessions at a time.
Alternatives Considered:
Use a better provider than WebEx
Comments: We signed up at the start of the pandemic, when all videoconferencing providers were looking for ways to handle the effects of the pandemic, but my company is currently switching away from WebEx, we all complain about it regularly. The main reason we chose WebEx was the fact that attendees were not required to download software, but based on how the usability is, that's not a big deal for us anymore, plus a lot of people now have Zoom or Teams downloaded. It took a lot of use getting use to WebEx, it wasn't very intuitive. The support has been lackluster when we've encountered issues.
Pros:
The video quality was okay. The fact that downloading a program is not required for attendees.
Cons:
User functionality/ease of use, scheduling and calendar events, the website, support, how hosting the events is handled with user accounts.
Alternatives Considered:
The All-in-One Event Management Software
Comments: Webex has revolutionised our business. Streamlined many processes that were long and unnecessary, saving us time and man power.
Pros:
From start to finish event management on Webex is simple and easy to use. From creating the event and the registration platform all the way to attendee management and the mobile application it is the all-in-one software that literally anyone could use. The customisability on registration and the event app has allowed for us to collect data at events like never before. The support desk are superb and respond to any questions in under 15 minutes allowing you to continue on with what you were working on in no time. We constantly receive compliments on our mobile application when compared to larger competitors mobile apps.
Cons:
The only things missing are some CRM API integrations and event websites. Other than that it is great.
Alternatives Considered:
Socio's Platform is the Ultimate Engagement Tool
Comments: From start to finish, we were well taken care of--from contract phase to event day. Again, we had the Orange Glove service so we had several trainings (staff, speakers, sponsors) and brainstorm sessions to help teach us about ways to maximize features and build an engaging virtual conference agenda. Lots of great trainings and idea shares!
Pros:
This platform is so versatile for streaming options--you can use a variety of streaming options or use the one they offer. It also keeps your audience's attention with incredibly engaging features and a great variety of them--from gamification, a social wall, integration with the virtual lounge of your choice (same for a virtual photobooth) to the chat, polling and q&a offerings, attendees are enthralled and truly participate. Additionally, having the mobile app complementing the web app means if an attendee needs to step away from their desk during a virtual event, they never miss a minute of content.
Cons:
While the initial buildout felt daunting (we bought the Orange Glove service so did not have to do this ourselves)--once the hand off from the Socio team to our team was done and we were trained, it was fairly easy and intuitive. Now that we've done it once, we'd likely be able to do our own event builds in the future if we have the time/bandwidth--but truly, it's a fantastic option to be able to have the Socio team perform the buildouts.
Cisco Response
3 years ago
Hey Julie! Thank you for taking the time to leave such a kind review. We are thrilled to hear that you had a great experience from beginning to end. We appreciate all the work you put into your events and we look forward to continuing to work with you.
