After two plus years of pandemic “isolation” and Zoom calls and virtual conferences etc. it is great to be back face to face with people. Since February of this year, I have been traveling basically at “pre-pandemic” numbers (about 12-15 days a month). It has been gruelling (I am already missing staying at home and working from my home office) but worth it.
I have attended live events and conferences; been face to face with clients, project site visits and collaboration meetings where everyone is in a single room, and you can see all the faces all the time. It has meant that when presenting a keynote or workshop, it is not to a bunch of white names on a black background. It has meant that I can laugh in real time and not get a frozen screen. It means that I can shake hands with people and interrupt someone or be interrupted in a conversation without having to turn a mute button on and off. It has been great!
But it is important to sit back and understand what we have learned from the pandemic and the way that it affected us personally and professionally. I had this conversation with several friends and business associates recently and here are the highlights that came from this group….
- Digital is far more effective than we ever could have imagined and that in our sponsorship programs we need to integrate digital more effectively – it can provide amazing content transfer to audiences while at the same time delivering critical detailed data about the audiences to the sponsors and properties!
- We need to embrace technology even more. It will pay dividends. This includes everything from the (once almost defunct) simple QR code that can transfer knowledge and present content while capturing data to AI and Augmented Reality. It took gaming apps for sponsorship activation to a new level and our sponsorships began to embrace this when we could not reach people in person. Now we have to continue to leverage these channels in conjunction with live experiences.
- Nothing replaces faces to face meetings. Whether it is coffee with a prospect or lunch with a partner; a site visit or office meeting in the boardroom, whether it is speaking from a real stage with 10 people in front of you or 10,000, whether it is experiencing the arts or sport event or concert or attending a conference or workshop as a patron, sponsor or property, these experiences cannot be duplicated or replaced and are critical for long term success. That does not mean that Zoom meetings and virtual or hybrid events must disappear, it means that we need to maximize efficiency with these platforms. Face to face delivers important results, but virtual can provide ongoing support and knowledge transfer that we never dreamed possible. Together they will make us better
I urge you to sit back for a bit and either by yourself or with your own “cohort” (a word that existed in obscurity prior to the pandemic other than to research analysts, to being a commonly used phrase for “group of people”) and try to figure out what you learned from the pandemic and how you can leverage or gain from those learnings. Feel free to share them with me or on our blog posts… it would be great to see what you are taking away from the pandemic!
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