Percona Live 2021: Fighting Virtual Event Fatigue

Amplify.

Client
Percona

Services
PR

Young Woman at Home Is Using Laptop Computer for Scrolling and Reading News about Technological Breakthroughs. She’s Sitting On a Couch in His Cozy Living Room. Over the Shoulder Shot

The challenge

May 2021 saw the return of Percona’s much anticipated open-source conference, Percona Live. On this occasion, it was to be a virtual conference due to the continuing uncertainty of the global pandemic. Percona tasked onebite with securing media relations and developing content for the highly awaited event.

The thinking

At this time, virtual conferences had become more commonplace and so it was essential to be mindful of virtual conference-related fatigue. The key was to build awareness with press and influencers in an exciting and inspiring way.

The execution

Ahead of the conference’s launch on the 12th May 2021, onebite developed and published a series of targeted press releases highlighting keynotes, principal speakers, and product news to help drive awareness and registrations. Event-specific news was supplemented by Percona’s annual State of Open-Source survey.

By focusing on key news elements from the conference and by developing strong narratives from the annual survey, Percona was able to engage and contribute to important industry dialogue during the event.

In addition, onebite developed additional content opportunities by engaging with key industry influencers and journalists. We collaborated with Eddie Jaoude, an open-source influencer, to create pre-event video content, and esteemed tech journalist, Jennifer Riggins, who tweeted live from the event. We were also able to secure a media partnership with Computer Weekly, which incorporated social media promotion and featured a Percona eBook on their website.

The results

The coverage was remarkable – 11 industry leading titles covered news stories based on the State of Open-Source survey alone, and we also secured a further 24 pieces of coverage from the Percona Live event itself. This amounted to a staggering combined reach of 70 million + readers.