P2P

16 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 In December of 2019, we started to hear news from Wuhan, China about a type of pneumonia that did not respond to standard medical treatments. Early January 2020 reports on a new disease start to spread. The disease had taken flight, literally, on direct and connecting air travel from China to cities around the world. In mid-January Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was placed under lockdown. Quickly followed by Hong Kong, as cases are confirmed there. For those travelling by air from China, screening and quarantine procedures are put into place, although later we will start hearing horror stories about cruise ships quarantined and stranded, prevented from returning to port because of positive cases. Late January 2020 coronavirus is officially named COVID-19, and we are informed that not just air travel, but person-to-person transmission will also spread this disease. And that the disease was quickly overtaking hospitals and even morgues. Starting on March 12, 2020, businesses including law firms across the United States asked their employees to leave their offices and wait for news on when to return. For how long, no one really knew. And even though we immediately started talking about our return to the office, the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months – and the months to years. COVID. Changed. Everything. But let us not see this as all gloom and doom. From a marketing, business development, and communications perspective, COVID forced marketing teams to really think, take inventory of the tools and technologies they had, become creative and more proficient in how to use those tools, and quite honestly, deal with it. A client-based focus, the clout of the firm, a range of content types, and technology would become the marketers new best friends. And with respect to our event above, it would have been smooth sailing through maybe early January 2020. After that, when live events ended, how you marketed and communicated needed to make a marked shift. And for some firms, the marketing and BD teams truly became unsung heroes. Sadly, for others, they became layoff statistics, shortsighted decisions many firms would later come to regret. Particularly since the absence of live seminars, breakfasts/lunches/dinners, conference travel, sponsored events, even swag did need to be replaced with other business building activities, not just cut as a cost savings. Those that creatively responded, those who focused on ways to increase – not cut – touchpoints with clients, and those who looked to technology, did come out as winners during and post pandemic. From The Marketing Suite: Live Becomes Virtual in the Pandemic Years The marketing suite and the activities emerging from it needed to be recreated in a virtual environment. Communications within the team would become so much more important. But the team was already proficient in one vital tool: Webinars. Video calls were not new in 2020. In fact, as noted in "Video Chat Is Helping Us Stay Connected in Lockdown. But the Tech Was Once a 'Spectacular Flop'' (Time Magazine, 11 May 2020), back in 1927 then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover appeared on a screen from Washington, DC where he spoke to reporters in New York City. The article goes on to note that later, at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City AT&T introduced Picturephone, an effort AT&T then commercially introduced in 1970, only to sputter out and die when they could not get a sufficient number of users to make the idea work. While technology issues (high cost of entry, blurry images) were noted as reasons for failure, AT&T found that people – then – just did not want to be seen while talking on the phone. And F E A T U R E S

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