Alec Hogg: The webinar mania – and why corporates are blowing it. Again.
Webinars have become the new spam. There's invariably half a dozen invitations daily to attend "events" ranging from worthies pontificating on what the future holds. Most of them are puke-worthy. Yet someone must be reacting, because the unsolicited invitations keep coming.
Worst are corporate webinars on supposedly critical issues. While a handful have indeed lived up to their billing, most are a waste of time. They appear to have been motivated by over-paid fools in under-monitored marketing departments who somehow convinced ignorant bosses webinars will transform the company's reputation. It won't.
Such adventures are an awful misallocation of resources – just like the corporate must-have-website craze of the late 1990s and, of course, the Y2K scam. With most corporate-sponsored webinars it's even more obvious, because at the first whiff of authentic debate, "upstairs" is sure to pull the plug. Much as they may want to, corporate leopards cannot change their spots. Antibodies to controversy are just too powerful.
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