I never actually attended M365 NYC. That is probably a strange way to start a recap about my contribution to the event, but it is also the reason I wanted to write this. Most conference recaps are written from the perspective of somebody who was there. They talk about the sessions, the hallway conversations, the people they ran into, the food, the venue and whatever chaos happened after hours. My experience with M365 NYC happened almost entirely before anyone walked through the door.
As many of you have come to know about me by now, I never really settle. I am always doing something that makes me uncomfortable, usually because that is where I end up learning the most. My community work has been no different. I do not even know exactly how it began, but after helping with the first M365 Miami, at a point when my head was still not fully together after a major personal loss, I knew I wanted to do more for this community. Then came the first AICONYC. Quite honestly, nobody really asked me to help. I just put myself out there and started doing whatever needed doing. That is still some of the best advice I can give anyone who wants to get involved with community events. Pick up a chair. Move a box. Help with registration. Organize the pizza. Do something useful. You do not need an official title before you contribute.
After that event, I ended up listed as one of the organizers, which was very much a “Oh my gosh, me?” moment. Somewhere along the way I also became close friends with the NYC crew, and that is really where this story begins. Then M365 NYC 2026 landed on the calendar at exactly the wrong time. I had already committed to a friend’s birthday trip during the event itself, so physically being there was not going to happen. I was disappointed, but I also had to make a very deliberate choice to prioritize my friends over the community for once. That did not mean stepping away from the event. It meant finding a different way to contribute.
Instead of helping in the room, I ended up focusing on everything that could happen around the event before anyone ever walked through the door. What started as a workaround became my biggest lesson of the whole experience: the event does not start when registration opens that morning. If you plan the content properly, it can start weeks earlier.
Stop treating event promotion like advertising
Most event promotion follows a very familiar pattern. Announce the event. Post a speaker graphic. Post another speaker graphic. Share a registration link. Remind everyone that seats are limited. Repeat until either the event happens or the algorithm stops showing the posts to anybody. There is nothing wrong with any of that. People need to know who is speaking, what the sessions are and where to register. But it is still advertising.
What I wanted to explore with M365 NYC was what happens when promotion becomes content in its own right. Instead of only telling people that a speaker was coming, I wanted to let people meet that speaker before the event. Instead of thanking a sponsor with another logo graphic, I wanted to start an actual conversation with them. The goal was to make something useful or entertaining enough that people might watch it even if they had already registered. That became the idea behind a lot of what I worked on for M365 NYC.
Even the sponsor agreement included Social Media Promotion as part of the sponsorship value. The sponsors loved that idea because it gave them a chance to start participating before the event instead of waiting for somebody to walk past their booth. So for M365 NYC, we figured sponsorship did not have to begin when the expo area opened. The conversation could already be happening weeks earlier.
That seems obvious once you say it out loud, but community events still tend to treat social media as the place where we advertise the event rather than another place where the event can actually happen. Social media needs thought and planning just like the event itself. If it is part of the attendee and sponsor experience, it cannot be the thing somebody remembers to deal with after the schedule, signage and lunch order are finished. And right now there is another reason this matters. We are drowning in AI-generated filler. Every feed is full of polished, generic content that technically says something while somehow saying absolutely nothing. Original conversations, real people, unscripted answers and the occasional weird tangent stand out more because of it.
Let people meet the speakers before they meet the speakers
One of the biggest pieces of this effort was video from the speakers themselves. Some speakers submitted short videos introducing their sessions, which I edited into finished clips that could be shared by the event. I used CapCut for most of that work because it made the job quick and practical, but you do not need a giant production stack to do this. Microsoft’s own Clipchamp can handle a surprising amount of simple trimming, reframing, captions and social video work too. The tool is not really the important part. The important part is having a repeatable way to take what the speaker gives you and turn it into something ready to publish.
Looking back, I would make this part of the speaker process from the beginning. I do not mean turning the call for speakers into a hostage negotiation where submitting a session means agreeing to become a full-time content creator. I mean setting the expectation early that, if your session is accepted, the event team may ask you to participate in a short promotional recording before the event. Trying to organize video after the speaker roster is finalized adds another round of emails, calendar juggling and reminders. If everybody already understands that a short video or interview is part of the process, it becomes much easier to plan.
It also helps attendees because there is a big difference between seeing a headshot next to a session title and hearing the person explain why they care about the topic. By the time attendees arrive, some of those speakers are already familiar faces instead of names they first encounter on the schedule.
Not everyone wants to perform for a camera
There was another lesson hiding in that process. Asking somebody to record themselves talking into a camera sounds simple until you remember that not everybody enjoys doing that. A conference speaker may be completely comfortable presenting to a room full of people and still hate sitting alone in front of a webcam trying to manufacture a polished 45-second promotional monologue. Those are two very different things, and that is one of the reasons the interview format started making more sense to me.
Riverside was the essential tool that made that part work. It gave me a straightforward way to bring somebody into a remote conversation, record good-quality audio and video, and leave with material I could actually use afterward. More importantly, the guest did not have to think about producing a video. They just had to show up and talk to another person.
I am also very much not a professional at any of this. I had to learn how to position lights, figure out framing, and hang a roughly $20 curtain from Amazon in the middle of my living room because I needed something that could pass as a backdrop. The hosting and interviewing part has been the same kind of learning curve. I am figuring it out as I go, and it is still very much a work in progress. That is part of why I wanted to write this. None of this started with a studio or a production crew. It started with a setup that worked well enough, then got better every time I used it.
The interview format changes the entire experience. You ask a question, they answer, you react, and the conversation goes somewhere you did not plan. Suddenly the speaker is not “making promotional content.” They are talking about the thing they are excited to present, how they got into it, or what they hope people take away from the event. Social platforms favor video, so community events have to adapt to that reality, but that does not mean every MVP, speaker, sponsor and volunteer suddenly needs to become a YouTuber. If video is part of the plan, organizers need to make participating in it easier. For me, interviews were one of the best ways to do that.
Two of my favorite examples from M365 NYC show why. I sat down with Danielle Moon to talk about the Women in Tech panel, and that conversation worked perfectly well even if you removed the conference entirely. The same was true when I spoke with keynote speaker Heather Cook. We talked about the event, of course, but we also somehow ended up talking about Madonna. That is exactly the kind of thing I mean. Once the conversation becomes interesting on its own, the event promotion stops feeling like promotion.
One interview should become more than one piece of content
Recording the interview was only the beginning. One of the things I started doing was chopping each conversation into smaller, bite-sized clips that could stand on their own on social media. Instead of asking somebody to watch an entire interview, you could take one interesting answer, one funny moment or one useful point and turn that into its own piece of content.
For sponsors, I used that approach to create what I called a Sponsor Takeover. Rather than publishing one sponsor interview and moving on, I could take multiple moments from the conversation and spread them throughout the day. The sponsor effectively took over the event’s social feed for a period of time, but with actual conversations instead of a sequence of logos and sales copy.
One interview can become the full conversation, several short clips, sponsor promotion, speaker promotion, event promotion and content that still has value after the event is over. This is where event organizers need to stop thinking in terms of “we need a video” and start thinking about source material. You are not recording one asset. You are recording something that can become many useful pieces afterward.
Video takes longer than the video
A 60-second finished clip does not take 60 seconds to make. Someone has to schedule the recording. Then you need to record it. Then somebody has to watch the conversation, find the good parts, cut those moments out, clean up the starts and endings, reframe them for the format where they will be published, add captions, export them, name the files, write the social copy and schedule everything. If you record a 20-minute interview and decide there are six useful clips inside it, congratulations, you did not create one piece of work. You created seven.
That is not a complaint. It is just production reality. Now that I have done it once at this scale, I would move the entire production calendar earlier. I would start speaker and sponsor recordings much sooner, batch them where possible, and intentionally leave more space between recording and publishing. That is not because the approach did not work. It is because it worked well enough that I now understand how much material a good conversation can produce. The earlier you start, the more intentional you can be about when those pieces land instead of simply trying to get everything out before the event starts.
Sponsors should be part of the conversation too
I think this is one of the areas where community events have a lot of room to experiment. Sponsors are essential to making these events possible, but sponsor promotion often looks exactly the same everywhere. Logo on the site. Logo on the slide. Thank-you post. Booth. Maybe a sponsored session. There is nothing wrong with those benefits, but social content gives sponsors another way to participate without turning the community feed into an advertisement.
Bring somebody from the sponsor into a conversation. Ask what they are working on. Ask what they are seeing from customers. Ask why they wanted to participate in this particular community. Ask what people should come talk to them about at the event. Then pull out the interesting parts and use those. The sponsor gets exposure, the event gets useful content, and attendees get to know who will be there before they arrive. That feels much more valuable to me than posting “Thank you to our Gold Sponsor” for the fifteenth time.
Build hype, don’t just fill a content calendar
Once the speaker videos, interviews, sponsor conversations and short clips start overlapping, the promotion begins to feel less like a campaign and more like the event already started. A speaker shares their clip and introduces M365 NYC to their own network. A sponsor shares part of their interview. Somebody watches one conversation and discovers another speaker. An attendee sees the same faces a few times before arriving and already knows who they want to meet.
That is the kind of hype I am interested in creating. Not manufactured excitement. Not “THIS IS GOING TO BE EPIC” written in all caps because somebody found the Canva template with lightning bolts. The people, the sessions and the community are already interesting. The job is to show more of that before the event instead of waiting until everyone is standing in the same building.
And when you do that well, the social content adds value for people who cannot attend too. They still get some of the conversations, ideas and personalities surrounding the event. The physical conference becomes the center of the activity, but it does not have to be the boundary of it.
The event does not have to end when the event ends
The same thinking applies afterward. A speaker interview does not suddenly become useless because the conference is over. A good answer is still a good answer. A useful clip can still send somebody toward a speaker, a session topic or a resource. Sponsor conversations can still be relevant. Photos, recordings and follow-up conversations can become recap material instead of disappearing into a folder until somebody needs storage space six months later.
That means the post-event content calendar should probably be planned at the same time as the pre-event calendar. A conference session should not have to die after the conference, and neither should the content surrounding it. For community organizers, there is another benefit too. Every one of those assets gives the next event a head start. You now have examples of the people who participate, the conversations that happen and what the community actually feels like. That is much more persuasive than starting from zero and telling everyone next year’s event is going to be great because the registration page says so.
What I would carry into the next event
If I were building this approach into another community event from the beginning, I would make a few things part of the plan immediately:
- Set the expectation for promotional participation during speaker onboarding, not weeks later.
- Use conversational interviews for people who are more comfortable talking with someone than performing alone for a camera.
- Start speaker and sponsor recordings much earlier than you think you need to.
- Batch recordings whenever calendars allow it.
- Treat every interview as source material for multiple pieces of content.
- Budget editing time based on the number of finished clips, not just the number of recordings.
- Include meaningful social promotion in sponsor packages and define what that can actually look like.
- Give sponsors something better than logo exposure.
- Design for short-form video from the beginning instead of trying to crop everything after the fact.
- Plan content for before, during and after the event.
- Give speakers and sponsors finished assets they can easily share through their own networks.
- Treat the content as community content first and event advertising second.
None of this requires a television studio. Riverside made remote interviews dramatically easier for me. CapCut worked well for editing the speaker submissions I received. Clipchamp or any number of simpler editors can handle a lot of the basic work. The production stack can grow later if the need grows. What matters first is deciding that the content is actually part of the event.
And then the conversations started wandering
There was one more thing I did not expect from all of this. Some of my favorite parts of the interviews were not necessarily the parts where we talked about the session. They were the moments when the conversation wandered and you got to know the person behind the Microsoft 365 bio: what else they were into, what they did when they were not talking about SharePoint, Teams or Copilot, what made them laugh, and whatever side project they had somehow managed to squeeze into an already ridiculous schedule.
That stayed with me. It made me wonder what would happen if we removed the session promotion entirely and just kept talking to the person. Joy Apple and I eventually took that idea much further with M365 After 5, which is deliberately about the people behind the Microsoft 365 community and what happens when the workday is over. Building the show has already taught me plenty more about interviewing, recording, editing, branding, clips and distribution, and I will absolutely have more to say about all of that later.
But this story is about M365 NYC, and then the event actually happened without me in the room. I spent that day watching it from a distance, seeing the photos and posts go by, and getting more than a few “I miss you” messages from people who were there. That part hit me more than I expected. I had spent weeks helping build the conversation around M365 NYC, so even though I was somewhere else entirely, I never really felt disconnected from it.
In the end, that was the best proof of the whole experiment. M365 NYC had started for me weeks before anybody checked in at registration, and by the time the doors finally opened, the community around it was already very much alive. I may not have been in the room, but I was still part of the event.
This article was originally published on UnsuckM365.