So, I’ve been asked to speak at the upcoming MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum. The topic – “Webinars in a Web 2.0 World.” At first, I thought: Wow, how do you make Webinars interesting to a marketing audience today with social media and viral marketing all the rage?

I mean, there hasn’t been much innovation happening with Webinars. They seem to be moderately effective at driving revenue but actual attendance rates have been dropping overall with the emergence of more immediate forms of education such as Video tutorials and podcasts. However, they are more effective, in my experience, than simply relying on a Podcast or a pre-recorded tutorial. Not actually sure why that would be the case?

And, then I thought about how we were using Webinars as a community building tool at NetQoS. Perhaps the attendees haven’t thought about webinars as a community building opportunity? In my experience, it seems that most Marketers are using a “hit and run” approach to Webinars. They pour tons of money into recruiting an audience and paying Webex to broadcast the event. Then, they grumble when only 40% of the registrants actually show up. And, finally, they turn over the attendee list to Sales for followup.

What a waste! If you are going to pour so much time and effort into attracting an audience of like-minds to attend your event, why not funnel those potential prospects into a Community where they can find educational content in a variety of formats and begin to build a relationship with them? That’s the only real way to make Webinars pay off in the long run.

I’ll be sharing the techniques we used at NetQoS to do just that at the MarketingProfs conference. The event will also focus on topics like B2B lead generation, conversion, retention, ROI and measurement, new technologies, integrated marketing - and much more. If that interests you, I recommend you sign up to attend. They are even throwing in a new research report on “BtoB Sales Lead Generation: Integration of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Media. Register and it is yours for free.

See ya in Boston in June.

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