Making digital-only work for you

Current environment has shifted everyone’s professional lives to the digital sphere but so far in most cases, we’ve taken what was happening in real life and transferred it to video. This approach is subpar as real life is multi-dimensional and human interaction involves emotion and a lot of non-verbal cues which get lost in digital media. A better approach would be to use technology to deliver something humans cannot create or scale in real life. Here I am focusing on a specific use case of webinars and online conferences that companies frequently do to build or maintain relationships and thought leadership.

At this point, many folks I know are not joining any webinars except for the ones where they know all participants and have a deep relationship with the organization.

If you are an organization that does not want to stay irrelevant until “normal life restarts”, what are your options? Below I provide two approaches- one is a “bandaid” and one is a solution which will require time and investment.

Short-term and tactical approach would focus on hyper-relevance. The approach centers on preparation with all participants and designing a tailored experience based on:

• Knowing their immediate interests and needs
• Assigning more active roles
• Use of breakout rooms with well-thought out pairings based on who should meet whom strategically and setting it up very clearly (people often appreciate dots to be connected for them, this is the time to do it)

Longer term approach would center on finding the right tools to create quality of audience engagement that would not be possible in real life. Some of the examples include:

• Collecting information to identify when people are getting distracted and changing the course of the discussion or adding more interactive elements;
• analytics on participation including comments, reactions, questions and then highlighting those whose contributions made it a particularly engaging experience. You can take one step further and record some of the comments and amplify them on social media quoting the author;
• real-time insights/ notes composing and sharing immediately after the event highlighting all participants. The same approach can be used in meetings with the addition of agenda, key takeaways, follow-up lists;
• matching audience members based on similarities of their discussion comments or niche interest areas which have come up during the discussion. This would take manufactured serendipity which is one of the key reasons many people attend events to the whole next level.

If there are more ways you have found to make digital activity as engaging or better and especially, specific companies which you have found to be effective at the functionality above, please share in comments and I’ll update.