Webinars may have started out initially as valued training and instruction tools but over time webinars for the most part have been coopted and converted by aggressive marketing types into new ways to lure in sheep and to fish for easy prospects.
Their webinar attendance offers show up in our email boxes sounding like things we really would like to know or need to learn. When we sign up we are placed on a “suckers” list, when we attend we become target prospects.
It will be a shame that once we grow weary of this cycle/trend we will give up in mass on webinars altogether. A powerful/valuable tool will be lost to legitimate sources of information, content, and services that could benefit from having such a robust means of interacting with their customers and public.
Comments
A reader describing himself as a trainer strongly objected to my post outing Webinars by attacking both my position and subject matter expertise. What he didn’t know is that I have over 13 years invested as a professional trainer and that I founded and successfully ran a community-based computer training center in a crime-ridden underdeveloped area of East Oakland and that we managed to train well over 70,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and financial condition.
My opinionated take on webinars is that even if it they are a valued emerging trend many Webinars these days are simply marketing schemes that too often prey on innocent users that really need the training only to end up opening themselves up to all sorts of exploitation by shifty and crafty marketers hoping to lure them into a whole multitude of spurious tricks, snares and traps designed to victimize them. Like confidence games in which victims give their trust and it is used against them. Sure there are some good even great webinars, however, lately I see the vast majority actually being otherwise.