I just listened to a tele-seminar based around landing pages and marketing. I’ve never really had to sit through one before so it was a completely new experience to me.
The program was free and I was subscribed to it through my CFO. He sent me instructions to listen to it with the explicit intention of taking notes on how it was run as much as the material itself.
You might have listened to one of these things before, so I won’t go into too much detail.
Basically:
- I called a phone number
- Dialed a code
- waited for the conference to begin.
The entire thing was run like a presentation and the speech, which I couldn’t respond to, was based around a PDF that had been sent out with the confirmation email.
As I sat listening to the program, I realized that it could be run much more efficiently, and probably much more cheaply if it were simply run like a podcast instead of being handled over the telephone.
The podcast route would have made all of the same features available, but it wouldn’t have cost telephone fees, and it would have made a downloadable version available after the fact!
But, instead of making the program a simple audio file online, they went out of their way to make it more difficult. The question is why.
Why would they have gone through one of the most difficult routes?
The answer varies between monetization and ignorance and all points in between.
If you look at it in the context of a conventional business environment, you can imagine that it would be more difficult to explain to some attendees how to get to the audio file online and hit the play button than it would be to walk them through the much more complex steps on the telephone.
Also, I’m sure that the producers of the program might be considering making some money of the presentation in the future, and they think it would be harder to make it unavailable after it was easily available.
Both of these excuses are just that, excuses for doing something in a way that may be more complex and costly but is, ultimately, on familiar ground.
That’s a lot of the difficulty with introducing technology into business environments I think. It’s not that people want to make their job harder, it’s that they are already comfortable using the old way.
So, when I find a new easier way to do something, I no longer tell people about it. Because the reaction is always the same, their eyes glaze over a bit, they stop listening, nod their head, and say something like, “That’s great.” Then they never use the advice.
That’s what’s so confounding to the rest of us. But, how do you beat that? Any ideas would be worth gold to me.
