My Remote Working Life

• Meetings, meetings, meetings...all day long! Talking with leadership on strategy, compliance and legal on governance and regulatory programs, bankers on managing clients relationships virtually. Oh, and my own team!
• Everyday is a surprise! There's a constant shifting of meetings and priorities as we learn how industry partners are changing their business models (events, for example).
• I think one thing our company has learned during this lock down is that it can operate perfectly efficiently and indeed profitably, from home.  Our regular on-line meetings keep us in touch and provide the opportunity to discuss our activities and swap views. Personally, I prefer to be in an office, but that is probably an old-fashioned view, as I like to get out of the apartment. 

Business After Covid

• I'm sure that our execs and real estate professionals are evaluating our expensive real estate and asking is it really necessary? Probably not and a scaled down version would work just as effectively. What does this mean to office rentals going forward?
• We have been running a lot of webinars for clients during lock down and these will surely begin to knock the need for physical conferences off the perch.
• I worry about our roadmap of planned investments that are designed to create efficiency. How will our tech agenda change as we are forced to ask what can we afford to do given new priorities?
• Business travel will diminish.  Zoom and other systems work very effectively, as proven, and the need to get on a plane regularly will just not be there.

GOOD NEWS

It took a pandemic, BUT...

• We're driving efficiency as we see opportunities to consolidate marketing practices across business lines, something we've wanted to do for a long time, but just didn't get to it. Now it's necessity. We're applying simplicity to be better and focusing on quality not quantity.
• Our executives are embracing their new roundtable-type events with clients. They're now thinking about how they can be even more visible and informative across more segments and geographies - virtually, of course!
• Our bankers are adjusting, kicking and screaming, but adjusting. They understand the urgency of the change that is required to move forward quickly and effectively. I tell them, 'You can't hug your roladex anymore." Sharing data on clients is our collective job now, and by doing so, we can deliver high quality information and intelligence to our clients.
• Really, every marketer should be validated. All of the marketing theories and practices we've espoused internally for years are now front and center. We now have the mandate to advance marketing!

Content Management and Strategy: A Disruptive Change We Need
[New Research from Content Marketing Institute]

Sometimes a crisis is the only thing that pushes an organization to become more organized and strategic about the way it manages communications. Robert Rose proposes questions you should be asking about content - based on the CMI study released today.

• How will our ability to focus on the needs and wants of our audiences change in a post-COVID-19 world? Should we re-examine our audience personas to segment them against their attitudes in the new normal?
• What is in our editorial (or creation) queue? How should we alter our content creation plans based on the new road ahead?
• How can we change our content/editorial process to rebalance our operating models to more proactively deliver against audience needs?
• Can we create new, collaborative workflows in our technology to facilitate the need for an editorial board or other cross-functional teams to set priorities for content?
• As the shift to more remote work expands, will we see more collaborative content management and strategy features integrated into classic software suites?
• Will we see a new surge in new content stack technologies being acquired as the crisis exposes the weaknesses in our current infrastructure.

Coming out of this crisis, you will be asking, “What should we change into?” or “What future should we prepare for?” more than ever. But you have to resist that thinking. You have to ask, “How do we throw off legacy processes and create new organizational structures that enable us to change full stop for whatever disruptive change may be just around the corner?”