Wait, two What's New articles in a single week?! What can we say? We ❤️ improving, and we're not afraid to show it. We're pumped to share two amazing enhancements to your streaming and attendee engagement experiences - Socio Streaming Brands, and Custom Tab. We've also added an Analytics Tracking Alert and Dark Mode for the Web App, plus a couple bonus updates. Have a look.

Socio Streaming Brands

Live streams are a fantastic way to engage remote attendees and enrich their experience while adding value for your sponsors, speakers, and organization by weaving in custom branding assets like Overlays, Logos, and Video Clips.

What if you have a lot of custom content, and not all of it is useful for every stream though? You shouldn't have to spend precious seconds during a live stream feverishly hunting through your own content to find what's useful for a given sponsor or session. That's why we've partnered with Restream to bring you Brand folders!

When you visit the Socio Streaming studio, you'll see the new Brand button. Click the button to add a new Brand or switch between up to 5 existing ones. Captions and everything on the Graphics tab — Theme, Primary Color, Logos, etc. — are unique to each brand. Just like before, all assets in one studio are shared with every other studio in your event.

There are tons of applications for switching between sets of branding assets, so let your imagination run wild!

For a complete look at using the Socio Streaming studio and Brands, check this out.

Custom Tab

Socio's own Chat, Q&A, and Polling features have been a mainstay for attendee engagement in Agenda sessions and Live Stream features for a while now. That family just got bigger with an awesome new sibling - the Custom Tab!

Now, when you edit an Agenda session or Live Stream feature, you'll see a new toggle under the Attendee Engagement section. Toggle Custom Tab on, name it, and enter a URL for an embeddable, mobile responsive site that appears as another engagement tab for your live stream!

Websites like Sli.do work well, but there are many more possibilities. Simply remember that the custom tab content has to be responsive - able to resize itself automatically - to fit inside the engagement panel on the Web App and to be usable on mobile devices. Websites' privacy settings may also prevent embedding. Simply remember to test any site you use before showing it to attendees. 👍 

We're excited to see all the ways you'll dream up to engage your attendees with this new feature, so if you think of an awesome use case, let us know! 

Analytics Tracking Alert

Informing your attendees about data privacy and honoring their preferences are more important than ever. Show your security-conscious attendees you value their privacy choices, and equip them with knowledge about your security and data practices. 

When attendees join your Socio Event or Community, we track their actions so you have the insight you need to improve your events, show sponsorship ROI, award Continuing Education credits, and understand how people interacted with your content. Some attendees can't be tracked for metrics because they're using an ad blocker or private browser session.

We've added a new option to the Web App Settings page. When someone logs into your Web App, and the Socio Platform detects that they can't be tracked, they'll see a pop-up.

If the pop-up is set to "Warning", they can close the message and go about using the event. If it's set to "Prevent Access", the message will keep appearing until the Socio Platform detects that they can be tracked. The Show Me How button leads to this article that helps them allow Socio through their ad blocker.

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This new setting is set to No Warning by default for all active and upcoming events and communities, but you can customize the message to suit your situation.

For details on controlling this new feature in your event, check this out!

Metrics

Along with this release, there's a new Tracked Users sheet in the Metrics export. Check out our Metrics article for more information on interpreting and exporting data.

Web App Dark Mode

When you visit the Web App page of your Event App, you'll notice a new toggle for Dark Mode. When the toggle is turned on, all attendees who join your event via a web browser will see the event in Dark Mode. 

⭐ Keep in mind, attendees can't turn dark mode on or off themselves — only you can do that. Dark Mode isn't available for Branded Apps or the Socio App.

Make sure to hop into your Web App as an attendee and test things out for yourself to make sure your branding and color choices all jive well.

And more...

• We've added support for 3 new languages - Danish, Slovak, and Romanian.
• All live streams through Socio Streaming by Restream and the Socio RTMP player now stream at 1080p by default on web and mobile. 
• Socio now passes attendee language selections to Slido when a Slido link is opened externally and the Pass data to URL box is checked! In a Custom Tab, Slido will update with the selected language.

That was a lot of reading. Have some pie. 🥧 

As always, keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep working to make Socio the best in the biz.

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

We're absolutely pleased as punch to bring you two amazing quality of life upgrades for Registration and the Socio Platform at large! 🍷 There's also a small update to Attendance Management.

Registration Form Questions

No one likes entering the same information over and over, so we've improved how we handle custom Questions in Socio Registration! 

Previously, when creating a Checkout Form, any Question you wanted to add to multiple different forms had to be created from scratch in each form. You could copy Questions by cloning the entire form and then removing any unneeded Questions, but that's a lot of work. 😓 

Now, the Checkout Forms tab has two different sub-tabs: Forms and Questions. This should seem familiar since it's similar to how you configure Categories and Tracks in the Event App.

Click the Questions tab to create all the Questions you'll need in your entire registration and assign each one to Forms you've already made. 

Need to make a new Form after you've made all your Questions? When you create new Checkout Forms, you can easily search for and select the Questions you need for that form! 🙌

For a complete look at creating Checkout Forms and Questions, check this out.

Notification Center

Ever been pinned down by a file upload? 📌 It's the 21st century, and no one should have to twiddle their thumbs while they wait for an import or export to finish. 

Previously, when you imported or exported a file in Socio Registration, Event Apps, or Lead Retrieval, a progress window would appear until the process was complete. For larger files, this could take a while, and closing the window would stop the file from processing. 

The new Socio Platform Notification Center is here to set you free and get you back to work! Now, when you import or export a file, the process takes place in the background, and the Notification Center keeps you up to date on progress even if you switch to working on another event or Socio Product. 

When a file is done processing, a notification appears in the top right corner of the screen, letting you know it's done. If you were exporting a file, the link to the download is included in the notification. If you were importing, click the Click here to view link in the notification to go to the feature or product the file was imported to.

If you missed a notification, don't worry! The new bell icon in the top right corner of any screen in the Socio Platform shows a red dot if there are any notifications you haven't acknowledged yet. Click the bell icon to see all notifications for the past 30 days. Each notification shows the file name, date of the import/export, and the name of the event where the file was processed. 

Attendance Management change

When you create an Agenda session, one of the options available to you is Attendance Management which lets you control who can add a session to their personal agenda. We've made a small update that moves the Session Participants panel into a separate modal outside the Edit Session modal. 

Now, when you're editing a session, you'll still select the Status, enter the Maximum Attendance limit, and edit the Denial message. To add attendees to the Session Participants list or view which attendees have added a session to their personal agenda, simply click the Settings (⚙️) icon next to the session, and click Session Participants. 

For complete instructions on using Attendance Management, check this out. 

That was a lot of reading. Have a cookie. 🍪 Stay tuned for more updates in the near future, and keep the feedback coming!

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

Go Live again

Aaaand we're back. That's right. With this new update, you can click Go Live in the Socio Streaming studio, run your awesome session, click End Stream, and then Go Live again later! 

Previously, you could only click Go Live once per studio. That meant that if you had two different sessions separated by an hour or more, your only options were to have two separate streams or leave the stream running with a "we'll be back" message.

Here are a few important things to consider with this update:

• There's no limit to the number of times a studio can Go Live again! 🎉
• Only Live Stream features and Agenda sessions created on or after September 9, 2021 have the ability to Go Live again. If you want the option to Go Live multiple times, then you can delete your old Live Stream feature or Agenda session, then add a new one. 👍 
• Refer to our guidelines on choosing between a single Live Stream feature and Agenda sessions for best practices on streaming multiple sessions.

• Recordings for each Live Stream will be available after each time you click End Stream. However, if you click Go Live again, the Download recordings button will disappear until you click End Stream again.

  

• Each individual recording is available for 30 days. That means that videos will "fall off" one at a time as the 30 day mark is reached. Make sure you download right away!
• This update also makes testing your stream a whole lot simpler. 

Studio name change

With this release, we've also ensured that your Socio Streaming Studio always reflects the right name so guest speakers don't get confused. Previously, if you changed the name of the associated Live Stream feature or Agenda session, the studio would retain the old name. That's all fixed now. 👍 

⭐ Keep in mind, if you have the studio open when you change the name, you must close the studio, and then click Launch Studio again for the name change to be reflected.

We're excited to keep working with Restream to make your Socio Streaming experience more robust! 

Clickable checkout form hyperlinks

Small, but mighty, this update lets you add clickable hyperlinks to your Socio Registration checkout form Questions. Anytime you add a new Question to a checkout form, you can add a Label Title and Description. If you put a URL into either of these fields, attendees can now click on the link and it will open in a new tab! This is great for supplemental agreements, venue information, or anything else you can think of.

The Socio Platform will automatically detect and format any text beginning with the following as a URL: 

• https:// 
• https://www 
• http://  
• http://www  
• www. 

That's all for today, folks. Keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep improving! 🎁

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

Category improvements

Most features in the Socio Platform that show a list of individual items - Speakers, Sponsors, Documents, etc. - let you apply one category to each item. Attendees can see which items are related and filter the items in the feature by category. In short, categories have been very basic — until now! 💥

We're pleased to announce these awesome improvements to categories:

• Multiple Categories - An item can now be assigned to multiple categories. This lets attendees filter lots of items with more precision to find exactly what they're looking for. 🕵️‍♀️
• Category Colors - Categories can now be assigned a color for easier visual distinction between categories. 🌈 
• Visible To - You can now apply groups to categories to restrict visibility to only attendees in those groups. 🔒 

Attendees will now see categories listed very similarly to tracks. 

On mobile, if the categories don't fit on the screen, users can scroll to the side to see the rest.

Take a look at our guide to using categories to learn more about these improvements!

Show participants list 

Under Agenda settings, you can uncheck the Show participants list box to prevent Attendees from seeing who else has added an Agenda session to their personal agenda. 

Unchecking the box now also removes the participant count from each session.

For more on the Agenda feature, check this out.

Your Events with [Connection Name]

Web App attendees can now see which other events they'll be attending with people they've connected with. When viewing a connection's profile, the Your Events with [Connection Name] section that was previously only visible on the mobile app now appears. 

Connection search in messages

Attendees can now search their connections when creating a new private message or adding someone to an existing one. This makes it much easier and faster to start conversations after connecting! 🗣️ 

As always, we're thrilled to keep improving the Socio Platform for YOU! Keep the feedback coming - we're listening. 👂 

Load New Posts button

When attendees are browsing the Wall, and someone makes a new post, they'll now see the Load New Posts button. Previously, the Wall would automatically refresh, taking the attendee back to the top of the wall.

Faster load times

Last, but not least, we've made some improvements to how quickly pages load on the Web App and Mobile App. This is especially impactful for events with high attendee counts. 🏃 

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

We've received a lot of feedback lately about the limitations on sharing pre-recorded videos in Socio Streaming. We've been working hard with our streaming partner, Restream, and we're very pleased to announce that both the number and size of Video Clips you can upload to the studio have increased! ⏫

Previously, uploads to the Video Clips feature were limited to 10 videos of no more than 150 MB each. 

The NEW limit is 200 videos of no more than 2 GB or 1 hour in length each. 😮 🌈 

⭐️ Keep in mind, video clips MUST be MP4 format, 16:9 ratio, and no less than 720p. Processing/upload time will vary depending on internet connection. Uploads could take up to 2x the video duration (example: a 1 hour video may take up to 2 hours to upload and process).

We ❤️ feedback, so keep it coming, and keep challenging Socio to be better and better!

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

Partial Refunds/Cancellations

You asked, and we answered! When multiple people registered for an event or community on a single order using Socio Registration, there wasn't any way to refund a single ticket - until now. 🥳 

When you click the Settings (⚙️) icon next to an order on the Orders page and click either Cancel Order or Refund, a new modal appears.

You can select one or multiple tickets to refund or cancel. When you complete the action, the order's status will reflect the change, and email notifications will be sent out as usual. 

With this change, there are now two new statuses: X/Y Complete and Refunded/Canceled.

If only some of the tickets were either canceled or refunded, the Status shows X/Y Complete. If one or more tickets were refunded, and the rest were canceled, the status shows Refunded/Canceled. 

It's that simple! Go check out the Manage Orders article for a complete look at the refund/cancellation process.

Metrics: Filter by Groups

Another highly requested feature is the ability to see metrics for only people assigned to specific Groups. Now you can! Simply click the new Filter by Groups option and select the Group(s) you want to see, then click Apply Filters. 

To return to seeing metrics for everyone in the event or community, simply click Clear All, and then Apply Filters. 

⭐ Keep in mind, the Filter by Groups function only affects metrics as viewed on the Metrics page. Data exports will always include all attendees in the event.

Take a look at the article about the Metrics page for a complete overview of all the data goodies it has to offer. 📈 

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself.

Web App image messages

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then is the ability to send infinite pictures worth infinite words? 🤔 We'll let Web App attendees decide that with the new image message feature for private chat! They can simply click the Image button beneath the message field and then drag and drop or click to select an image.

Video Room Picture-in-Picture improvement

You try not to miss any of the action, but sometimes the action makes you miss the action. Confused? So were Web App attendees who left a live stream to join a Video Room and were hearing both the live stream and Video Room participants at the same time! 🙉 

When you click away from a Live Stream feature or Agenda live stream, the stream will continue to play picture-in-picture (PiP) in the bottom right corner of the screen. We've now made it so that Socio Streaming by Restream and Socio RTMP Player live streams will automatically mute when someone joins a Video Room. For all other streaming providers, the live stream PiP window will close.

For more on Video Rooms, check this out.

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

Invoice & Check Payments

If you want to let registrants pay cash, write a check, or use some other means of payment, you now can! We've just rolled out two new options for Registration: Check and Invoice. Get. Paid. 💰 

When you visit the Payments page of your registration event, you can enable one or both of the new options in the Additional Payment Options field. 

If both options are enabled, registrants will see three options on the registration form - Credit Card, Invoice, and Check. 

If registrants choose invoice or check, they'll receive their invoice, but no ticket or receipt, and they won't be synced with a linked Event or Community. The ticket(s) and receipt will be sent in a separate confirmation as soon as you click Mark as Paid from the Orders page. How and when you collect payment is up to you. 👍

For full details on using Invoice and Check payments, check this out!

Email Recipient Type

With the release of Invoice and Check payment options, we've also added the new Recipient Type selection in registration emails. 

You can now select Attendee or Purchaser as the type. The Attendee selection lets you choose attendees by Tickets and Groups. The Purchaser selection lets you choose All Purchasers, Invoice, or Check. This lets you send payment reminders to people who paid offline or anyone who paid for registration! ⏲️ 

For a complete look at registration emails, check this out!

Socio Platform URL restructure

This one may not seem exciting, but it's going to open the door for future improvements to the Socio Platform! We've now greatly simplified the URL structure of each page in the Socio Platform to read more like breadcrumbs than gibberish. Drake likes it. 🐉 

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

We think you'll "love" 😃 this one. We're excited to announce a new way to gather feedback from your attendees - Attendee Insights! With this release, your Web App attendees will see a pop-up that asks them for feedback on the event, after they've completed certain actions in the event.

After people leave feedback, you can see who and what they said on the Metrics tab. 

Don't want to use Attendee Insights? No problem! You can turn it off in your event Settings.

For a complete look at Attendee Insights, including what attendee actions trigger it and what is included in the metrics export, check this out!

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself. 

'Sup streamers? Ever since Socio launched Socio Streaming, we've been working exclusively with StreamYard as our preferred streaming provider. Now, we're bringing on an additional streaming partner - Restream.

When you select a live streaming provider for an Agenda session or Live Stream, you'll now see two options for Socio Streaming: Socio Streaming by Restream and Socio Streaming by StreamYard.

When you select Restream, you'll still see the Launch Studio button and the Speaker instructions. When you enter the Restream studio, you'll quickly realize it's a lot like StreamYard in many ways. You've got access to Chat messages from attendees, custom branding, overlays, captions (banners), video clips, and more! For a full feature comparison, check this out.

Got a speaker that's much more comfortable with StreamYard, but others are excited to try Restream? No problem! No matter which Socio Streaming provider you select, your streaming credits can be used for either of them, so you can mix and match.

We're thrilled to be providing you this additional option for producing amazing live streams, and, as always, we're excited to always keep improving Socio for YOU!

For a complete look at using Restream in your event, check this out.

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself.