• What do traditional group meetings achieve that virtual meetings don’t, can’t, won’t and never will?
1. Group Connection These days, offsite meetings assume an increasingly important
new responsibility: group therapy. People share anxieties and con- cerns, plans and problems, in a way that’s diffi cult if they’re scat- tered around the country. The process of going to a meeting and mingling with others, confi rms corporate culture and continuity in a way that web-based conferences cannot. 2. Presentation Impact You can introduce a new product or service with a virtual meet-
ing, but you won’t build the excitement or feedback opportunities you get when your audience experiences the same event in one location. 3. Lessons in the lounge Anyone who has retired to a local wine cellar after a day’s meet-
ing knows that offsite assemblies provide a superb environment for informal exchange; often as useful as anything on the offi cial agenda.
Job-title barriers to candid discussion soften; anecdotes about
customer situations surface that would never make the company’s webcast. Suppressed grins, gripes and groans emerge that reveal more about marketing and sales than any email memo or pixilated whiteboard. 4. Recognition Environments Holding reward and recognition meetings at attractive offsite
WWW.MIDWESTMEETINGS.COM
locations provide a degree of employee involvement that’s tough to replicate with a webcast. It’s the nature of group situations to am- plify recognition value and importance. Those who win awards get a chance to relish in a greater degree of public envy and admiration denied by desktop isolation. 5. Executive Audition You won’t hear much about this because it speaks about the un- speakable: Meetings are often more important for those who give them than they are for those who come to them. Appearing on stage, looking like a leader at the lectern, gives
middle managers on the prod a great way to bench-press their vis- ibility and executive potential. With the VIPs in the audience, meetings can quickly build career clout in a way that geographi- cally fractioned web transmissions cannot provide. 6. Assuming some truth to Marshall McLuhan’s assertion
that, “The medium is the message” a question arises: To what ex- tent does a two-dimensional webcast alter the impact and value of information otherwise obtained in a 3-D environment?” We don’t know, but we suspect there are substantial differences.
John K. Mackenzie, author of It’s Showtime and the website www. thewritingworks.com, can be reached via his website or info@thewriting- works.com. His company specializes in sales meeting themes and out- lines as well as developing corporate event ideas.
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