For practitioners whose business it is to facilitate interaction between companies and communities, these are indeed interesting times.

Large in-person conferences, industry cocktail receptions with live music, and blogger lounges in hotel ballrooms where much of the tech world’s business gets done are so 2019. The new reality is live streaming or pre-recorded content, chat channels or email, social distancing and isolation.

“We’re learning that connection is so important,” said John Troyer (pictured), chief reckoner at TechReckoning. “I work with companies doing work with their practitioner communities, with customer advocacy, with influencers outside their ecosystem on relationship-based ways to get attention, ways to fill the funnel. They’ve really been both pulled apart and put center stage with our current pandemic.”

Troyer spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed adjustments being made by companies in staging all-digital events and the importance of leveraging business relationships in advance.

Rethinking the playbook

The shift from large group, in-person gatherings to a completely online digital experience has required major adjustment by many of Troyer’s clients. The global pandemic has forced businesses and industry organizations to either cancel events entirely or move them rapidly onto digital platforms.

“Now we’re trying to take all of those events and squirt them through the tiny pinhole of a digital experience,” Troyer said. “The digital event has many different roles. We’re beginning to rethink how this marketing playbook works.”

Companies are learning the importance of production value in producing digital events, whether that involves more robust connections to avoid dropout or better camera and audio gear for presenting speakers. There is also a growing realization that leveraging an existing ecosystem of clients, partners and prospects is vitally important when staging a successful event, according to Troyer.

“If you have gone to the same conference for 10 years and you know a lot of the people and see a lot of familiar faces, the hallway track is great,” Troyer said. “But if you are a newcomer to an ecosystem, if you are a new prospect, even if I provided you with a virtual hallway track, it’s not going to work for you. Companies that have established these relationships, who have these onboarding experiences now are going to be the winners.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE