Webinars Are Back

For a while, they had lost their effectiveness, but now webinars are back with a vengeance. There’s only one element that appears to be missing from the old way of running them. Have you noticed?

When you’ve been around Internet marketing as long as I have, you tend to see waves, as in tactics being recycled over and over. And for a while, webinars were quite popular as a means to both launch a new product, or revitalize older ones.

Of course, something always went wrong. Either the sound didn’t work, or the video froze, or the audience couldn’t comment. And there were people who inevitably couldn’t get in no matter what they tried.

Yet, in spite of all that, webinars were all the rage just a couple of years ago. In fact, an entire industry of webinar software rose up because of it. Rooms got larger, connections got better, and there were more options available.

Heck, even my business partner and I were thinking of creating software that could be used during live seminars so alternative webinars could be offered for the same event.

Then poof! webinars went away for the most part.

Now I’m sure you could put ten people in a room and ask why they lost popularity after a while, and you’d probably get ten different answers. But personally, I think it was because people just didn’t have the time anymore to sit for an hour or two just to get a pitch at the end.

However, there was something really cool about the old webinars . . .

They were scheduled around each other!

Back then, there was just a handful of marketers who ran webinars, and it seemed they all knew each other. So they would talk amongst themselves and schedule their events so they didn’t overlap.

I wasn’t all that big on the whole webinar idea, but that part always impressed me. It was a great example of organization!

Now though, it shouldn’t surprise you to get two or three webinar notices a day, all of them taking place at the same time, and often for competing systems or products.

So if a prediction can be made, I’d say the new wave of webinars is going to be short-lived unless they can get them organized like before.

What do you think?

Have you attended any of the latest webinars? Can you offer any suggestions on how they might be better organized to avoid overlapping? Maybe a new Joint Venture system for webinars?