Collective Intelligence webinar…oh, well, nice try

Yesterday, I tuned into eyeforpharma’s webinar on collective intelligence, an event I previously announced on this blog.

Verdict: an hour that could have been better spent. Actually, I did spend it better, as I was multi-tasking throughout the presentation. It did not hold my interest.

Here’s the main reason – this event was put together around a theme – the use of collective intelligence techniques/technologies in relation to a pharma sales force. However, it was not organized around a particular audience. Therefore, the presentations were widely disparate in application and focus.

The presentations were either too basic, too granular/technical, or irrelevant to a United States pharma company. The use of most conversational Web 2.0 technologies is pretty much a non-starter here in the U.S., where all communications to/from the sales force are potentially “discoverable” in a lawsuit, and therefore it is simply dangerous to allow open forum discussion (and no-one is going to dedicate resources to try to moderate such a thing). The presentations did not give any real help in this regard.

Also, the pacing of the webinar was not well-controlled, and one presenter’s slides could not be uploaded. A webinar like this needs far better strategic planning and direction in order to provide actionable insight to the audience.

All in all, not a top production. My advice for future webinars: make a clear identification of the desired target audience first, then build the theme to address very tangible needs. If the listener does not get the sense in the first 2 minutes that there is something really meaty about to be discussed, e-mail and YouTube are only a click away.

That’s a lesson for trainers, too, by the way…