Better Meetings Day #18: Making Webinars Worth It

I had a fantastic conversation recently when connecting with a new Qworky Community Member, Shelley Ryan of Killer Webinars, on the phone in light of a suggestion from Cathy Larkin (aka @CathyWebSavvyPR) on Twitter.

Ryan is a consultant for all things related to online meetings, with a keen focus on webinars. Webinars were not something that I had thought about at an especially deep level, but she quite successfully stoked my interest!

So What’s a Webinar Exactly?

But what exactly is a webinar in the first place? Here’s what wikipedia has to say:

A webinar is a neologism to describe a specific type of web conference. It is typically one-way,[1] from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. A webinar can be collaborative[1] and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter. In some cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, while pointing out information being presented onscreen, and the audience can respond over their own telephones, speaker phones allowing the greatest comfort and convenience. There are web conferencing technologies on the market that have incorporated the use of VoIP audio technology, to allow for a completely web-based communication. Depending upon the provider, webinars may provide hidden or anonymous participant functionality, making participants unaware of other participants in the same meeting.

It seems that the key principle is a one to many communication format, yet there are a host of different technologies to use to tailor it to the meeting. This is where Ryan comes in, as a matter of fact.

Making Webinars Easier

“I’m not an engineer, I’m not about to try and develop any kind of webinar tool or platform,” Ryan says. “There are already 117 out there. I know which ones are good, which are my favorite. What’s not out there right now is an easy way to get into doing webinars to do them yourselves.”

Bias certainly could be a factor here, especially considering how much we value our Qworky Friends, but I think she’s onto something. The wikipedia description portrays a confusing landscape of all sorts of choices to make when deciding the best way to organize a webinar. It probably is easy, especially for the less tech-savvy amongst us, to get lost with all the options and varied set ups they necessitate.

Perhaps this is why Ryan declares that “too many webinars suck. They do. They suuuuck!”

Better Webinars in Better Meetings

As our 30 Days of Better Meetings campaign suggests, we’re trying to spread the notion that meetings don’t have to suck. Making sure webinars don’t suck within what would otherwise be a good meeting, then, seems pretty key.

For this reason, I’m especially appreciative of the work Ryan is doing, and am excited to learn more from her.

So, what do you think about webinars?