4. Make it personal.

Inspired by his attendance at TEDActive2011, Andy Taylor, CMP, director of the Intel Fellows Office at Intel Labs in Hillsboro, Ore., has held two TEDxIntelLabs events. “The idea of bringing TED back to Intel was a little bit of a desire to get the genie back into the bottle,” he says. “Is there a way to recapture some of the magic that comes from the cross-pollination at TED? And how can I deliver it to an audience that has at most a few hours a month to spare?

“I’ve done two short events, essentially introducing the Intel Labs audience to the concept. Response has been tremendous: 100 percent want it to continue, and many want to volunteer to help it succeed.”

At TED2011: Photography by Frans Lanting fills the giant rear screen, which was designed by Bob Bonniol, with overall stage design by Tom Hennes. On stage, artist Béatrice Coron talks about her cut-paper cape made of Tyvek.

One thing that particularly attracted Taylor was how TED presenters engaged the audience. “One of my roles is coach to senior technologists on presenting,” he explains. “TED has a powerful story-telling method I think we can learn from. The power of many TED speakers comes because you can relate to what they are saying on a personal level. As a technology company, our default method of influence is with data and facts. But few in an audience remember most of that later. It’s about breaking away from PowerPoint and telling a story rooted in personal experience in 18 minutes.”

Mark Shearon of TBA Global agrees. “Some of the best TED talks are one person speaking about something they care about, and the audience gets it,” he says. “The whiz-bang and pizazz is not necessary. Of course, your brain needs a break, so you do want a mix of didactic and interactive, entertainment and education, but everything should have a purpose. Many events are a bag of stuff with no through-line, no story. For me and for TBA Global, telling a story is incredibly important. People have gathered to hear other people tell stories forever. It’s very natural to make a meeting into that kind of experience.”

5. Expand.

TED is much more than a single conference these days. It is TEDTalks, the archived presentations. It’s TEDGlobal, a summer conference in Edinburgh with an international focus. It’s TEDActive in Palm Springs, which runs concurrently with TED and emphasizes connection and creativity. It’s the TED Associates webcast, which, for a reduced fee, gives registrants a “virtual front-row seat” to the entire TED conference. And it is the TED Open Translation project, which at last count had logged more than 17,000 translations of talks by volunteers into more than 80 languages.

Your takeaway? Let your meeting live on. Create high-quality recordings of presentations and archive them for attendees and nonattendees. Is it just the sales force that needs motivating at the annual kickoff meeting? Why not expand that audience and unify the efforts of employees in all areas of the company?

Hybrid meetings—where both live and virtual components are held simultaneously—are growing. Are there international divisions that could virtually attend the CEO’s keynote address?

One caveat: If you go the hybrid route, pay as much attention to your virtual component as you do to the live one. “It’s very important that the live-streaming audience feel connected,” says Ruud Janssen of The New Objective Collective. “If you are just watching another meeting happen, it is like bad public-access TV.” When Janssen and his TEDxBasel organizing team got together to watch the live streaming of the first day of TED2011, he says, “TED came up with the idea of doing a shout-out to those [watching] around the globe. We were selected as one of five locations to be connected to the main stage in Long Beach by Skype—by a free, easy, camera setup. It’s one little touch point, but it allows people to see the impact.”