If you’ve been reading TheIntegratedLab.com for any amount of time, you’ll notice that both John and I promote the idea of attending in-person conferences – that meeting others in-person is more powerful than just reading a bunch of information someone gives you or that you find posted, somewhere.
But I was just having a conversation with someone regarding how much the on-line tools can or cannot replace the in-person venues and something came to mind: I haven’t noticed any webinars given by end-users.
Some of us in the industry have had conversations in various places regarding the fact that end-users can be biased in their presentations just as those of us selling things are, but here’s the issue – the conferences we would attend in-person tend to try to get a variety of speakers. Not all of them make this effort, but I’d claim that’s true of a good portion of them. Thus, if you see a variety of speakers, from end-users to software vendors to consultants, if each is biased toward their own ideas and area, by seeing what each has to present, you’ll be able to compare their ideas that overlap to see where the truth lies.
If end-users never give a webinar, we can never get their point of view to weigh-in with the others. And, regardless how educational a webinar is, it’s a common marketing tactic to give away a webinar in order to promote one’s software products and/or services, which means it has that much more potential bias built-in.
As such, I have a problem with the notion that we would stop attending conferences in-person and rely entirely on webinars. It’s not that anyone has come out and said exactly that (that I know of), but I think there are some conversations leading in that direction.
