With our agency blog kicking off, I’ve been trying to watch webinars and talks in my free time. This is what usually gets me revved up on a subject and then I am inspired to write about it. I’ve been having a problem though. Even though I sit down to watch a lot of webinars, I haven’t been making it past ten minutes in a lot of cases. It’s not that the webinars are bad. In fact, in a lot of cases the speaker is saying things that are perfectly interesting. It’s just, well, I don’t have a whole ton of time, and as nice as stories and anecdotes can be, if you don’t start telling me what I’m going to get out of your presentation, I’m moving on.
This all makes perfect sense in the abstract, and in fact I was going to write a post advising you to make sure you establish early on what people can expect to take away from your presentation. But then I realized a tidbit of a problem.
As a blogger, I’m doing the exact same thing as those webinar presenters. In fact, most of my blog posts don’t really provide you with any actionable items. There is not usually something you can *do* after reading one of my posts. There’s nothing you can take to your boss or your peers and say, “Hey guys, Margie suggested this in her blog post and I think we should try it.” I’m starting to wonder if that’s a problem. After all, your time is just as short as mine – maybe even shorter. Although I try to be entertaining and although we have good conversations here, I’m not really living by my own code. Sadly, that makes me a bit of a hypocrite. Now that is a label I REALLY don’t like.
On the other hand…
Maybe blogging is a different kind of animal from a webinar. A webinar is usually an investment of 45 minutes to an hour. Most of my posts don’t represent that kind of a time investment. Maybe people have more expectations from a webinar. I still read and enjoy blog posts that don’t necessarily offer actionable items. I’m not as picky. But the posts that DO give me something to do or a new way of looking at things – those are the ones I always wish I had written.
What do you make of this?
What do you expect when you come here or when you go to another blog site? Are you finding that your expectations are changing?
I certainly feel like I can’t rightly fault other bloggers or webinar presenters for doing something I do myself all of the darned time, so I am feeling like I’m in a bit of a pickle. Writing about Queen Elizabeth I is all well and good, but is it really valuable?
Weigh in!
I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!
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