There are lots of new ways to communicate up and down the value chain. Virtual Conferences are all the rage for Partner Conferences. Vendors and resellers are experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as a communication platform. Videos are making the rounds for training, marketing, and even sales promotions. Cisco is even promoting Telepresence to allow people to be in two places at the same time.
With all this activity, one thing is clear. Webcasts are outdated and increasingly ineffective. They cost a lot to conduct (cheaper than face-to-face for sure, but you still have to pay those monthly fees) and marketing them is a real hassle (Can you say “email blasts” without including “spam” in the same sentence?). Most of the people who register do not show up because they expect it will be recorded. Then if you can actually get someone to attend the webinar (which is harder and harder) they sit there with the webcast in the background as they multi-task.
To make it worse, resellers get bombarded with so many requests to attend webinars that they use their spam filters to block emails with the words “webinar,’ “webcast,” and “training” before they get to employees. Owners know from experience that there are some employees that will sign up for any webinar at all, as long as it means sitting at their desk instead of those pesky sales calls. So the thousands of email invitations to vendor webinars, carefully crafted for maximum viewership, end up in the spam filter more often than not.
Luckily, technology is coming to the rescue again. New products like Brainshark are poised to replace traditional webcasts in the coming years because they are easy to make and circulate. Brainsharks do everything that a webcast can do, only better and less obtrusively. They are passive communication tools, meaning that users can pull them up for viewing when needed without having to attend a scheduled session. And presenters can make them anytime, update them anytime, and make them available anytime for their resellers. Pretty cool.
Try MyBrainShark for free
Channels Managers can experiment with a free version at http://mybrainshark.com. This is absolutely something to check out if your company does a lot of webcasts using PowerPoint slides. (You really should move to video as soon as you can!) Let me know what you think.
