Level-Up Your Virtual Events with BlueJeans Events
When we launched BlueJeans Studio for BlueJeans Events last year, we couldn’t have been more excited to bring the power of production-grade, TV-quality live-streaming to users everywhere. Our simple and intuitive Producer’s Dashboard delivers single-click layout switching, interactive graphic overlays, and a world of endless possibilities for your virtual events. The industry has recognized this innovation with numerous awards and accolades and our customers have been blown away at how Studio has unleashed their creativity.
So obviously, we had to keep moving forward and give our users an even more powerful set of features to level-up their virtual events. Today, we are excited to announce a host of exciting new capabilities for BlueJeans Events that will improve the presenter experience, give attendees fun new ways to participate in the event, and make production more intelligent.
Presenter Upgrades
In its initial rollout, BlueJeans Studio layouts and graphics were only available to be seen by event producers and the audience. We are thrilled to bring Presenters into the fold, with our new Presenter Dashboard view. The Presenter Dashboard has been given an upgraded look and feel to deliver a clear line-of-sight into what the audience sees and ensure a cohesive experience for all parties. Additionally, the Presenter Dashboard highlights when a presenter has their microphone and camera enabled, to eliminate potential confusion when a speaker is live and on stage. Having a confidence monitor is critical to event success and ensures everyone is on the same page as an event progresses.
Additionally, the Presenter Dashboard provides a dedicated toolbar to easily respond to audience chat, Q&A, and polling questions. The side panel also provides a backstage chat option for all presenters to share in a green room-style experience, as well as a direct presenter-to-producer chat option for more personal questions. This new option also features a visible clock to keep presentations on track, as well as a stream timer to keep things moving forward.
Another key challenge that presenters encounter during their virtual events is simultaneously being able to focus on their presentation, while also being responsible for managing their slideware and progressing their content. Oftentimes, this results in an awkward, “Next slide please,” back and forth between presenter and producer. With our new Presentation Upload feature, presenters will be able to provide access to presentations via Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive to enable other members of the production team to help transition content in a seamless and secure way, without having to actually share potentially sensitive files.
Attendee Enhancements
BlueJeans Events has always sought to create an interactive live-streaming experience that brings attendees and presenters together, regardless of the size of an event. While attendees have always had the ability to add emojis alongside their comments in the event chat, we are so excited to introduce a whole new slate of attendee reactions to the BlueJeans Events experience. These new animated emojis can easily be selected from the new Reactions Widget that is placed front and center of the revamped attendee experience. Attendees will have three options to customize how their emojis are displayed (single, burst, confetti) and their widget bar will retain their most recently used options for quick access. The reactions will populate up the right side of the screen en masse and give presenters more tangible feedback for when certain topics and content are resonating with the audience. Perfect for blockbuster product launches and celebratory town halls
Additionally, the overall attendee view has been improved for accessibility purposes, with better color contrast, clearer iconography, and improved usability. Furthermore, the event join screen can be more customized to better articulate attendee expectations and deliver clearer guidance on the event that they are joining.
Producer Improvements
Now that producers have a wide variety of tools at their disposal to transform the virtual event experience, we recognize that it’s possible that some producers can potentially get overwhelmed with their new toolkit. To ease the burden, we are excited to introduce Smart Producer, a dynamic, AI-fueled experience that automatically recognizes the active speaker and shifts layout options to accommodate the best possible view for attendees. This relaxes the burden on producers, so they can focus on driving attendee engagement via different modes of attendee interaction. Ultimately, Smart Producer features a variety of automated recommendations to enhance event quality, while removing a lot of the administrative burden to help producers create the best virtual experiences for their attendees.
Finally, we are also excited to launch Engagement Analytics, providing producers with real-time and post-event insights into audience engagement. Producers can quickly visualize the number of reactions triggered during an event and receive an aggregated engagement summary after each event. Summary data will include chat, Q&A, and poll engagement insights as well. Ultimately, Engagement Analytics will be measured across events to arrive at attendee-level insights that can be ported back into marketing automation systems for further demand generation initiatives. With better insight into what fosters audience participation, event hosts and producers will be armed with better intelligence for developing the agenda for future events.
Overall, we couldn’t be more excited about the initial reception that BlueJeans Studio has received from the market and we can’t wait for this next set of enhancements to bring our Studio-style experience to new parts of the BlueJeans Events product. All of the features outlined above will be available to preview in Q2 2023 and generally available in Q3 2023. By making it easier for presenters, attendees, and producers to get maximum value from their virtual events, we hope to continue blazing a virtual trail that powers amazing creativity and brings everyone in attendance along for the ride.
About the Author
Mahabaleshwar Bhat (MB) is a Senior Product Manager at BlueJeans Network. He oversees strategy, roadmap planning, product/feature requirements, prioritization, and release planning for BlueJeans Meetings and BlueJeans Events. Prior to joining BlueJeans, MB ran his own start-up in the SaaS domain.
