Virtual Insanity
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Virtual Insanity
Three rules for better webinars + new conversational AI webinar marketing tool
Future’s made of virtual insanity
Now always seem to be governed by this love we have
For useless twisting of our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound, for we all live underground
Before I start ranting about webinars, let me first rant about how if you don’t know this song or have never seen the iconic, spellbinding 1990’s music video for Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity, please fix that now:
The deluge of webinars has continued even as the pandemic has waned.
Why? Because they’re relatively easy to do.
Problem is, while they’re easy to do, they’re hard to do well.
Most webinars show remarkable disrespect for the potential viewer. This usually comes in one of two broad forms:
Overreaching in requests for your time.
Lack of creativity in execution.
Marketers should begin from the starting posture that precisely zero people want to watch your webinar. Not your customers, not your potential customers, not even your own employees.
From there, work backward to try to concoct a webinar that is actually unique, actually compelling, actually value-added so that it absolutely must be attended.
Only then do you have even a slight chance of getting people to be there.
Let me give you three rules for webinars that, after having been part of hundreds of them as moderator, panelist, and marketer, you should always adhere to:
Webinars MUST have someone - at least one person - as part of them (and advertised in advance) that is not part of your company. This can be a client, or an analyst, or a member of the media - any somewhat objective third party. Doing so drastically lowers the risk the entire thing is nothing but sales propaganda and raises the likelihood of actual value being obtained.
Webinars MUST be 30 minutes in length, stopping sharply at the half hour mark. If this seems difficult, you haven’t constructed the webinar correctly, purging it of things that don’t matter and reducing it down to its most distilled essence for the potential viewer you’re trying to attract. This also requires an experienced hand in running the webinar, who has a feel for how they flow and can guarantee it ends with punctuality. If you have too many guests as part of a panel to where the length has to be longer, then don’t call it a webinar at all. Call it a town hall, or something similar that signals a longer experience, and even then, cap it at no more than an hour.
Webinars MUST provide on-demand viewing for registrants to view or re-view the webinar later, and advertise this when you’re initially selling the viewer on signing up. Paradoxically, offering on-demand viewing increases, not decreases, live viewership of webinars, in my experience. Not including this signals a lack of experience in executing webinars and raises the risk that attending will be a waste of time.
Don’t do these things, and you’ll turn your potential audience into this:
Realizing there’s so many webinars these days, many of which do have content that actually has merit and is worthwhile, I am rolling out a new feature of this newsletter called Webinar Rewind.
Webinar Rewind will have webinar names, links, and one-sentence descriptions for some noteworthy webinars generally from the recent month or two, that you may have missed amidst a very noisy world.
We’ll start with this below. And if you’re a marketer wanting to advertise your webinar here, we now offer that here (bottom of the page).
Webinar Rewind: recent conversational AI webinars you may have missed
The Growing Ethical Considerations of Generative AI - a panel discussion which I moderated on behalf of Cyara discussing AI ethics surrounding the rise and continued growth of generative AI
Cobalt Speech produced a three-part webinar series discussing the care and consideration that goes into deploying machine learning systems. Part 1 (Intro to Machine Learning), Part 2 (Importance of Data), and Part 3 (Real World Deployment) are here.
How Enterprises Can Maximize ROI From Conversational AI Investments - good webinar from Cognigy and Forrester focused on creating automated yet personalized experiences that strike the right tone and balance.
Conversational AI for Education webinar produced by Learning From The Extremes, a European education advocacy group