“Travel is a luxury. Communication is not.”

by William Todd on January 19, 2009 · View Comments

in events

The title to this post is actually the headline from a full page ad in the business section of today’s New York Times. The ad extols Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro Web conferencing software as the online product of choice for communicating with clients and customers in these challenging times.

In addition to selling Adobe software, the ad draws attention to the biggest issue that we face today in the corporate events business. Projects are being put on hold and budgets are being slashed as clients try to cope with the current economic downturn in ways that minimally affect their marketing objectives.

istock_000000221955xsmallCompanies understand that they cannot afford to stop marketing altogether so they’re looking for ways to have their cake and eat it too. One of the easiest targets, if not the smartest, is to hold fewer face to face meetings, hence Adobe’s attempt to capitalize on the trend.

One of the adjustments we in the industry can make, is to take a closer look at the genre of virtual meetings and see how we might take our face to face meeting skill sets and morph them into the virtual world. Web conferences still need creative development as well as writing and graphic design. They also need to be closely aligned with the client’s overall business strategy and not just ad hoc solutions to budget problems. Offering virtual packages that make web meetings a single element in an effective, targeted online strategy would help clients save money and still enable them to communicate smartly.

I’d love to know what you think.

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