Everyone is going digital. Even the pope did a live stream! We believe that every business should be looking to go online and capitalise on this wave of adoption and experimentation. The piece that is missing, however, and what COVID19 and social distancing has reminded us of, is that people want to be near people.
How are you using digital to hold people together?
It isn’t as simple as moving everything online. We need to tap the best of digital and use it to connect people physically.
Why should you care?
This is an opportunity to connect. People are feeling distant and looking for connection, how can you help them connect, and how can you bridge the gap? You may not have realised it yet, but that water-cooler-small-talk is an important social tool. Make no mistake, we will start feeling the absence of our neighbours, co-workers, friends, family and maybe even that creepy uncle. We feel disconnected and we will crave REAL connection.
How do we fix it? Use the best of both worlds.
Where can you make an impact?
- Re-think your customer engagement, hook them on digital, lure them to a real experience and encourage them back onto digital…repeat.
- Augment your physical product by connecting people around the experience of engaging with it.
- Embrace new technologies and new ideas. Can you have a distributed conference? Something global and local?
- Invest in a community around you and your brand. Get those super fans together in some way.
- There are large global groups of people connected virtually. Figure out how you can add value to these groups. Could you send them things to make the connection better?
- Can you ship people a physical thing, a handwritten note, something to stand out in this digital age?
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This is an excerpt from Finding North (again) — where my team at Nicework and I have put a few thoughts together around Coronavirus and its aftermath: https://nwrk.co/findingnorth.
