On Tuesday I sat through a webinar called The Future of Customer Connection. Two hundred and eleven people registered. Ninety one showed up. By the fourth slide, which was a stock photograph of a lighthouse, the attendee counter had fallen into the fifties, and I watched the number drop like a ticker for human patience.
I stayed to the end. Somebody has to.
Here is what fifty minutes bought: a definition of a term everyone already knew, a chart with no source, three case studies about the company hosting the webinar, and eight minutes of Q&A in which the moderator read two soft questions from a queue I know contained better ones, because I put one there.
Then a slide with a calendar link.
A webinar is a distribution channel. Thought leadership is having a thought. The industry has spent eight months confusing the two because only one of them can be scheduled.
What happened this year is that the conference budget got orphaned. The booth, the trade show and the steak dinner were cancelled, and the line item survived all of them. So it went where orphaned line items go, into the nearest thing shaped like an event. By June every B2B brand had a webinar series with its own logo lockup.
The trouble is that the booth was never a point of view either. It was a place to stand. Moving it onto a registration form did not upgrade it. It only removed the one mercy the booth offered, which was that you could walk away without anyone logging it.
Three tests before you schedule the next one.
One, could this be nine hundred words instead? If yes, and it is almost always yes, then the webinar exists to collect email addresses. That is a legitimate goal. Name it as one and stop grading it against the wrong scale.
Two, does anybody on the panel disagree? Four people nodding at each other for an hour is not a discussion, it is a group photo. The three sessions I remember from this year each had someone who plainly thought the host was wrong.
Three, would you publish this if it did not benefit you? A point of view costs something. It rules out a client, it commits you to a position you will have to defend in eighteen months. If your webinar costs you nothing, your audience can tell, and that is why they leave at slide four.
Four people nodding at each other for an hour is not a discussion, it is a group photo.
The best part of any conference was always the hallway, the argument that started at the coffee urn and finished in the parking garage. I miss it the way I miss karaoke, which I have not done since March, badly and with commitment, in a room where somebody could visibly disagree.