Over the past year you have probably run more webinars than phone calls, counting the ones you organised and the ones you attended, and so you have built up considerable experience both on the organising side and as an attendee.
You have learned to choose the simplest and most reliable technology, perhaps the least expensive one too, and you have experienced both the convenience of attending events all over the world without leaving your desk and that of bringing in speakers of international standing without spending huge sums on their travel and hospitality.
In short, over the past three years the webinar has become a tool as simple to organise as it is to attend, so much so that even now, when using it is no longer compulsory, a great many organisations and companies fully intend to keep it among the tools at their disposal.
Why?
Because it is practical, agile, inexpensive, functional, and it suits a wide range of occasions.
Webinars can host training and professional development courses, mentoring sessions, product presentations, even small company conventions. They work for B2C as well as B2B, for companies as well as professional associations. They suit large and small events alike, they can be used for live events and they can be recorded to be shared again later.
But precisely because of all this, the real challenge starts now.
Now that webinars have become a tool too convenient to give up, yet not convenient enough to be the only option available, they compete directly with every other tool that fights each day for the attention of the people we want to reach.
How do you win this race for attention?
By being different, as (almost) always, and by staying at the frontier, experimenting with change.
But in practice?
We can increase the value of the experience offered to the people at the centre of every webinar, the organisers and speakers on one side and the attendees on the other, and work on interactivity.
Of course, someone might point out that even the simplest platform allows forms of interaction between speakers and attendees, whether a chat or the option to speak live by turning on microphone and camera to talk directly to the speaker and to the other attendees.
But is that enough? Really? In 2022?
No.
No, because we have all experienced it at first hand.
No tool is enough unless it becomes one piece of a fuller, richer, more articulated experience. And above all, if the people who have to use those tools cannot fit them into their own experience, if the tools do not produce value, they risk remaining unexpressed potential.
If instead you turn the perspective around, and the webinar becomes only one part of an experience that starts earlier and ends much later, a central part but only one part, where different tools fit together like the pieces of a puzzle to become something more complete (note: not more complex, quite the opposite), then that is exactly where the new begins.
Let us take an example.
Say we want to run a series of webinars to promote training and professional development for the employees of a company. We can certainly send an email to everyone concerned with the calendar of dates, the relevant information and the links to the content. Then, for each date, we can run the webinars with the option not only of using the chat to communicate between attendees and with the speakers, but also one or more Q&A sessions where questions can be asked and answered live.
At the end of each session we might send the recording of the webinar not only to those who could not attend, but to everyone registered, so that the people who watched it live can watch it again if they want to.
In a second scenario we are the same company wanting to run the same series of webinars.
This time, though, in the email we send to all attendees we include a link to a mini-site built for the purpose, where people can start reading all the information about the scheduled dates, explore dedicated content and create a personal profile to interact with the other attendees straight away. They might also start taking part in small skills assessment games or quizzes to gauge their needs, their interests or simply the topics they would like to explore. The information gathered during these activities can be used to build more targeted content for the webinars, while taking part can be rewarded with company credits, since it helps strengthen internal relationships and does team building without the need for further events. A project born with one purpose can immediately acquire at least one more, to the company’s advantage.
During the webinar, surveys and quizzes can be used to encourage participation further, along with interaction and the gathering of more information, and to make the training more effective. Speakers can share materials in real time and documents on the web platform, and every attendee can do the same with any content they consider useful for their colleagues. On top of that, all these interactions, exchanges and pieces of content stay within the company’s knowledge base to be analysed, studied and capitalised on further.
All very nice, but too complicated?
Certainly, if you imagine having to create every piece of this puzzle with different tools and stitch them together by hand, we would be the first to tell you to forget it.
But what if there were tools that let you not only imagine all this (and much more), but also deliver it from a single system for creation and management? Would that not make everything easier?
Ah, if only they existed…