How NOT to Give a Webinar

I signed up for a music-related webinar a few weeks ago, and after sitting through it — or, trying to … twice — I’ve been stewing about it ever since. It was that poor an experience.

In fact, I have very little nice to say about it, so this is probably not the best way to follow up the post in which I admitted my tendency to be more critical than discerning. I can say that in my ongoing struggle to be less overtly critical I tried to follow the “praise in public, criticize in private” principle; if that had worked, I probably would not have written this post. Still, I will not link to the product or the responsible person, nor will I call them by name.

Part of the reason the whole experience annoyed me so much is that I am — or was — a fan of the person giving the webinar: I appreciated their music, and found their songs to be insightful, profound, and even brilliant. The lesson here is that it takes a lot to turn a fan completely and totally against you, but you, too, can alienate and drive away some of your fans if you follow these aggravating steps:

E-mail your fans and invite them to your webinar — emphasize the interactive nature by calling it a “workshop” — and be sure to offer multiple sessions, and also to employ neat tools like countdown clocks and e-mail reminders about tuning in;
Set it up and make it appear to be a live event — have “live” be part of the web address, start with some banter directed toward people listed in the sidebar, allow attendees to post their own comments, and even answer questions from a few of the listed people;
Have the event freeze partway through;
Don’t respond to e-mails about the event freezing;
When people tune into the next available session, replay the exact same thing even though the URL again says “live” — sit there wearing the same T-shirt, repeat the exact same banter and questions from the exact same people … make it blindingly obvious that not only this session but also the first session they saw was actually a recording;
Have the event freeze at almost the exact same spot; and
Don’t respond to additional e-mails about the event freezing, and especially don’t respond when called out about deceitfully presenting the session as if it was live.

Yes, if you follow those steps, you’re almost guaranteed to alienate someone who was coming to you for useful information and who expected a different experience. (Most importantly, be sure to bill it as a webinar –a web-based seminar — and sometimes as a workshop: don’t you dare bill it as simply a video tutorial, and especially don’t bill it as the long-form advertisement it really is.)

Web-based seminars can be great, but they can also leave people wanting more — especially when they don’t deliver what they promise. (Image: “the world wide web,” by frankieleon, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

Note that twice I followed the “critique in private” principle by sending e-mails directly to the party involved, to no avail. The silence was stunning.

The sad part is that I’m not sure I can bring myself to listen to that artist’s music again. As much as I appreciated their music, I’m certainly not a fan of the person as an Internet marketer. I found them to be deceitful, uncommunicative, and manipulative.

But, in the “silver lining” department: obviously I did learn from them some things not to do if I ever decide to produce a webinar.

So that’s something, I guess.