Marketing maven Seth Godin has hit on a wonderful standard to apply to in-person events nowadays: if attendees come away saying “I came all the way here for this?”, then your event or meeting has failed.

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you’re wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don’t provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you’re wrong as well.

Here’s what someone expects if they come to see you on an in-person sales call: that you’ll be prepared, focused, enthusiastic and willing to engage honestly about the next steps. If you can’t do that, don’t have the meeting.

Here’s what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.And here’s what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.

So with businesses working hard to become Anywhere enterprises, the requirement to be Somewhere should mean something. It should include experiences that are not possible in the more prevalent Anywhere world. Committing to be Somewhere should be worth your while. And by the way, this applies to the office too:

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

I’m with Seth right up until that last duality of Interact or stay home. Hidden within that imperative is the concept that working from home — i.e., working from Anywhere — means conducting non-interactive, isolated, I-can-do-this-in-my-pajamas work.

The truth of the matter is that today, working from Anywhere is much harder than working in an office. Despite the wonders of ever-increasing ubiquitous connectivity, most of us are still a whole lot better at creating value as a team when we can interact face to face rather than asking questions during conference calls, struggling to discuss a topic over a videoconference, or fighting through a Sharepoint server. It’s always easier to draw on the tools we humans learned from generations sitting around the communal fire than on ones that only have arrived on the scene in the last decade. It takes conscious effort, newly learned skills, and dogged determination to have the same impact at a distance as we might have in person. It demands we develop great Anywhere skills to match our Somewhere ones.

So yes, we need to make every interaction count in our Somewhere world. But before we retreat into our Anywhere cocoons, we also need to consider which modes deliver the most value for different interactions. Yes, let’s aim for in-person interactions that make 1+1 = 3. But it’s equally as important for us not to settle for Anywhere experiences where 1+1 is only 1.5.