In this third segment of my interview with Alan Ryan, we discussed how the Rainier team has responded to isolation, digitalization and virtualization. We'll explain the lessons learned over the last six months and how we're helping our clients lay the crucial groundwork necessary to emerge from the pandemic in as strong a market position as possible.

Alan Ryan: These, as we all know, are some strange times globally. The pandemic has hit the U.S. especially hard. So how have you and the Rainier team had to change how you work and how is it working out?

Steve Schuster: We have really amped up content into overdrive. We've taken advantage ourselves with our own blog and video content to create a lot more. We've gone from a couple, two to three a month, to more like two to three a week. And we've advised our clients and helped our clients do exactly the same things, because what we're finding is two things. One is the trade media is still covering technology announcements. They still want to deliver to their readers content that's valuable to them. And the second thing is, people have a lot more time just online.

Nobody's sitting in meetings, sitting in Zoom meetings, but time is less in a Zoom meeting than it typically is a physical meeting, so people are online. So the more content that you can publish online, the bigger your search footprint is. And so that's what we're really driving right now.

We're also really helping our clients envision what the world is going to look like in the coming months, in the coming years. We all know that some kind of change is coming. The whole idea of a new normal is kind of a fallacy. We're going to be in a very, very different world. And I think that what's happened here is that we've been dragged, kicking and screaming into a virtual world that all the technologies existed for previously, but we were still getting on airplanes, we were still paying for hotels, getting in our cars and I don't think we're ever going to go back to that.

I think that marketing has got to recognize exactly how to drive that. This is especially true around trade shows. We just don't know if trade shows will ever come back. A lot of clients that I talk to still see value in them, but are adapting now because there are no trade shows or they're postponed or repurposed to virtual. So there's going to be a huge emphasis on communicating virtually.

Alan: So that makes me ask the question, how do your clients view this pandemic, and have they found any kind of a silver lining on all of these negatives?

Steve: There's more time to concentrate on the things that are the most important. And I think people are finding this in their personal lives. Family or their friends have bubbled to the surfaces of being what's most important for them. The people that they miss physically connecting with. I think for the businesses, it's really distilling things down to what's important. What's important for us to spend our time on? What's important for us to spend our money on? What's important for us to focus on from a message perspective? Because the pandemic has taught us that we just can't have everything and we can't do everything. I don't know if I would call it a silver lining, but I think it's caused us all, including all of our clients, to really focus on what's important.