How you use Intimate Digital Conference Room technology can set you apart from your competitors, get you closer to your clients, and leave you better off than your competitors when the crisis is over.

Canopy Futurist Advisor, John Krubski, reveals how Virtual Meetings Can Be More Effective than the “real thing.”

“It’s not about mechanics. It’s about dynamics. What we make of this moment in time can have a profound impact on the way we do business in the post COVID era." www.krubski.com

"As the business world moves towards virtual meetings out of necessity, I fear we might just miss the really big opportunity," says Krubski. "I believe that, done right, digital meetings can actually be more powerful and productive than same-room meetings. I have seen that happen over and over."

Here are three of the factors the video below covers in full that give virtual meetings an edge over their face-to-face counterparts. (Workshops and training are available.)

The Safety of Digital Solitude: A virtual meeting puts up a barrier, but that does not mean it squashes the flow of ideas. Much like people are freer to speak their minds when posting to social media, employees are more likely to contribute in a bold way in front of their screens.
Permission to Think Out Loud: Just the presence of others makes thinking a cautious activity. Even though staff members are not alone during a virtual meeting, the simulated feeling of isolation is enough to get some creative thought patterns going.
Access to Collective Native Intelligence: When participating in an in-person meeting, we limit our contribution to our specific job function. Away from those constructs, people open up and open up to ideas that draw on the breadth of their experience.

There are countless ways of tracking your engagement on social media platforms, but it’s fair to say that some matter more than others.

If we take Facebook, for example, it’s easy for marketers and business owners to focus a lot on the ‘like’ metric, meaning the number of reactions (like, love, angry, wow, sad, haha) it generated. The more likes, the more successful the post, right?

Not so fast. While yes, having posts with a large number of likes can tell you a thing or two about a brand’s ability to reach a certain audience, there is another metric that is much more telling: comments.

Why Are Comments Important?

Comments are rarely a metric one focuses on. It’s great if they appear for a particular social media post, but marketers are more concerned about the overall audience that post reaches. But comments symbolize something more powerful than likes.

For one thing, it’s easier to give a like than to comment. The former involves a tap or a click of the mouse, while the latter requires a lot more effort on the user’s part. Additionally, a like does not guarantee the user actually read and understood the post. The comment, on the other hand, requires the users to go through the post in its entirety, and share their thoughts with you.

Comments essentially signal that your audience isn’t just an audience in the traditional sense - comments mean your target takes part in the conversation you start and are actively contributing to it. A post with a high number of comments speaks to a brand’s ability not only to reach a certain audience size but also engage it and get it to react.

The Benefits of Focusing on Dialog

It’s much harder to get people to comment than to get them to like something. Again, this has to do with the very effort required by each of these tasks, but if you focus on engaging in a dialogue with your audience, these efforts will pay off.

Here are two key benefits of getting the audience to talk to you:

They Add Life to Your Page: If a new user stumbles upon your page for the first time and sees a lot of people commenting on your posts, that sends a clear message to them. This page is active, engaging, and other people are paying attention. This can be enough for them to decide to follow you as well.
You Build a Community: Likes or follows don’t necessarily say much about your community, as there is no guarantee your posts will reach all of those people. But when they comment, a lot of social algorithms will continue to show these people posts of yours, and you can build a stronger audience.

Final Thoughts

Comments are a telling sign of how strong a brand is because everybody knows it takes a lot of effort to engage an audience. And as far as metrics go, you’re a lot better off focusing on comments than likes.