My new buddy Geoff asked me to answer a few questions for his blog, The Buzz Bin. Here’s a teaser.
BB: Webinars tend to be viewed as 1.0 technology. It’s great to see a healthy mix of tactics from a well known 2.0 guy. Can you expand on this?
JM: Heh. I’d actually consider myself more of a 0.0 guy. I talk a lot about building honest-to-god relationships with people, whether helping customers/users connect to each other or helping customers connect with members companies. Relationships obviously came far before the Web, but in our Web 1.0 rush to automate, separate, we tended to build the (push) communication tools that helped support our own (corporate) needs. Web 2.0 has been, in my mind, a metaphor for adding participation and interaction into the technology.
Sure, Webinars have been around for a while now and could be considered “old tech”, and that’s partially true, but so what? Email is one of the earliest Internet applications, yet we continue to use it as much as (more?) used than anything else. Secondly, webinars have benefited not only from technology improvements like VOIP, cheaper costs, etc., but they benefit from the fact that people are generally more willing to try online activities than they were the last time webinars made a big hit.
At the end of the day you’ve nailed it with your phrase above, “healthy mix of tactics”. Its not about what’s new or hot or Web 7.0, its about what makes the most sense for the goal at hand. That may be a phone call or it may be a $500k online social tool.
Be sure to head over to the full interview.
