1) Group Connection

These days, off-site meetings assume an increasingly important new responsibility: Group therapy. People share anxieties and concerns, plans and problems, in a way that’s difficult if they’re scattered around the country. The process of going to a meeting and mingling with others, confirms 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 meeting, 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 repaired to a local wine cellar after a day’s meeting knows that off-site assemblies provide a superb environment fro informal exchange; often as useful as anything on the official agenda.

Job-title barriers to candid discussion soften; anecdotes about customer situations surface that would never make the company’s web cast. Suppressed grins, gripes and groans emerge that reveal more about marketing and sales that any email memo or pixilated whiteboard.

4) Recognition Environments
Holding reward and recognition meetings at attractive off-site locations provides a degree of employee involvement that’s tough to replicate with a web cast. It’s the nature of group situations to amplify 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 unspeakable: 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 visibility and executive potential. With the VIPs in the audience, meetings can quickly build career clout in a way that geographically 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 extent does a two-dimensional web cast 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@thewritingworks.com. His company specializes in sales meeting themes and outlines as well as developing corporate event ideas.