“There’s something about online meetings that makes people more willing to engage with each other”

Last week, I hosted a big online meeting with the digital marketing and development teams from several of my company’s clients, as well as a few other interested parties. The purpose of this session was to show them some of the things we’ve been working on recently, and to try to get them to think about how their online strategy needs to adapt and change in the post-coronavirus world.

I can’t tell you much about the meeting because of a shedload of client confidentiality clauses. What I found interesting, though, was how these clients – all unrelated – were willing to share experiences and best practices with each other. None were direct competitors, but despite that I’m sure that if I’d got them all into a big conference room and done a pre-Covid-19-style meeting, they wouldn’t have opened up to anywhere to the same degree. There’s something about online meetings that makes people more willing to engage with each other than they would be in a face-to-face environment. I found that really encouraging, especially as GoToMeeting (in this instance), Zoom, Microsoft Teams and all the other tools are likely to figure much more prominently in our futures.

Less encouraging was when this session exposed communication issues in the companies themselves: marketing people not being aware of the things that the development teams have been working on, the tools they have available or the reports that they’re able to create. Likewise, development teams not being aware of the promotions the marketing