After my webcast story post, a professional webcasting coach contacted me and asked if he can talk about the experience. We had a insightful talk yesterday.

What I described, and what we do in the webcast, and it’s also true for the early webinars -  was like agile development. Now in reflection, that’s what we did, although I did not notice that at the time.

We experimented, assessed what we did, and then tried to improve, usually on a weekly basis. It’s not that we’ve always succeeded (I can count a few disasters on the way) but we kept doing the thinking. In fact, the decision to cancel the webinars and explore a new path, was part of that cycle. (The original intent of the webinars was to increase our audience, and engage them. What happened is that we got a small dedicated team of people who got in every week. That was cool, but not what we wanted, so we canned them).

It’s funny that I needed someone to tell me that, but sometimes you need someone to show you the way.

During the talk I’ve gone back and revisited what we did, what we measured, what was interesting. It was interesting to do a postmortem for the entire experience (both webinars and webcasts) – I could actually see similarities between the processes that I didn’t before. For example, seeing that technical stuff works and attracts, but to a limit.

The key idea here is that: Our audience gives us his time. If we want them to stay, we need to make it worth it. Information they can get anywhere. We need to give them something special.

And once I figure what this something is, I’ll tell you.