Last week a reader asked my opinion about web-inars. The quick reply is “how many have you felt compelled to ‘attend’?”
Let me tell you a story about my experience with a webinar.
On short notice, I flew to California to fill in for our ill sales manager at a webinar (this was done in conjunction with a trade-show). He was to appear as an expert with a company we had a loose ‘partner’ relationship with, along with another partner rep. We had two sessions of meetings and rehearsals. The host company had four people at the first meeting, in addition to their expert.
Then we all drove to a small film studio in LA somewhere. We used someone’s office as a set. The three of us took turns recording our speeches. We spent a good amount of time discussing how we would make it sound like this was a live event and not recorded. We had lunch with the film company president (who, to the midwesteners who were there, came across as a pompous jerk). After lunch we watched while a technician edited the piece. We looked like news reporters without the benefit of a teleprompter. I was happy when we left.
A couple weeks later the web-inar actually broadcast. 400-something people had signed up, 100-something actually watched that day. The webinar allowed the viewers to ask questions…to make it interactive. We got quite a few questions, but their quality varied quite a bit. I suspect a competitor was peppering us with questions about competing methodologies. In the end, the questions were such a pain to answer that we didn’t answer them.
In summary: If you are going to use multi-media, have a compelling reason and use the strengths of the medium. I think that in-person teaching simply cannot be matched.