3 Ingredients to change a boring B2B webinar in to a show or episode

With the three key ingredients that could change a webinar, a boring webinar into a show. And then if you can just basically kind of share some example or how a standard boring has been transformed, if at all.

Yeah, absolutely. So, okay. So, yeah, thank you for the question. I guess the first thing would be making a decision, once again, making a creative decision making to call it a show. You know, and this may be a conversation that you, that, that would be had with the leadership team, or maybe, you know, the team is autonomous to decide on that. But to basically give that a show and come up with a name for that show, that would be the first thing. The second thing is to really brand it as such. So if you think of some of our favorite shows, there's always like a hook and then like, there's like an intro sequence. There might be some like a quick like music jingle or something like that. And this really helps to create it, to really help that packaging piece as well. So the second thing would be creating a dedicated show intro and outro that really helps to bookend the content as such. And then last but not least is to really, and this is the hardest one left, the hardest one for last, but really think about how you can actually make that content as binge worthy as possible. Now, again, there is no guarantee of virality with, with, with creating a show, but if you think about it, that's not really what we're after anyway. We're, we're after, you know, the compound effect of being able to create consistent great episodes from the, from the recorded events that we are creating, you know, week on week, month on month, year on year. And really one of the things that we found, which is not really a formula for making something binge worthy, but it is something that we found is a trend, is to actually think of how you can juxtapose something that you're talking about with something else. So applying juxtaposition, Ricardo, if you know what I mean. So I'll just give you one example and I'll hand it over to you. But let's say, you know, taking something that's very, very formal and making it easy, playful, fun, or taking something that's very nuanced and people don't really think much about it and become obsessed with it, you know, so let's say hamburger cheese, for example. People may say, oh yeah, it's just cheese, you know, like, just put whatever. Maybe if someone creates a show, he's like, no, no, we are obsessed with this. There's 24 different types of cheese. This, there's this one, there's this one. This one comes from this country, this one, you know, so this helps to make it a bit more binge worthy in that regard, if that answers your question. But Ricardo, tell me what you think, please.

Yeah, no, I think, I think that's great. I just want to highlight the key part is making something boring like a webinar. It's as you said, intro, outro, the way that you interact, the way that you break it, the way that you use technology like this kind of disappearing, appearing, all that stuff, making stuff small, big. That's all really cool. What I've seen on a serious note.

With.

Companies that we've worked with is that we have encouraged them to the first, at the very beginning, number one, a webinar. Open the webinar five minutes before or open your show five minutes before. Try to keep it light. Try to get the audience to crack a joke, to say something particular. Then obviously you got the music. When you kind of enter the show, there's always a way of welcoming people in a nice way. So some people would either use, okay, as you said it, what is your different. What is your best type of cheese? Or what has been the weirdest tasting cheese that you've ever tried? Or you would create towards the end, you would create like a collaborative jamboard. So everyone would get a chance to kind of provide the summary of what they've learned in that particular session towards the end. And it's collaboratively. And I've seen that working very well. You could also have again, there's generally kind of funny things or funny videos as a one minute just to kind of, to break the ice and everything. So all, all that stuff helps to turn something that's kind of really boring into something really nice. Interesting even, because it's just that. Not taking yourself too seriously. Some of the organizations I've seen that they've just, on the intro, they just kind of bring someone different from the organization that is providing the show, introducing themselves, creating that kind of linking the brand with the audience or putting faces to names and then entering into the particular show. And I think that's kind of pretty. Pretty cool and pretty particular.

Yeah. Just to add to that as well, Ricardo, one of the things. And again, it depends on how creative you want to be with this, right? So we refer to this part as the different show types. So you could actually think of, you can actually, you know, we can actually challenge ourselves with the types of webinars that we're creating. So first of all, starting to call them episodes as opposed to webinars. Right? That's step one. But also looking at all the other types of types of shows that you could create. So it could be some, you know, you could refer to it as like a video podcast show, or it could be a panel discussion where you have multiple people, you know, having that. That you're having that conversation with. These, these two are the most common, but it could get a lot more wild and wonderful from there. Number one, you could create reaction video series where you're reacting to some current events or current topics that are happening in your specific B2B industry. You know, people will be interested to see, let's say, I don't know what Michael Jordan has to say about some recent news in basketball because of their stature and the place. Right. Beyond that, you can also decide to create something like a documentary series or a docu series where you start off, people may say, how is this different from a podcast? Well, the way a documentary starts in this context is you start the entire series by asking one golden question and then use maybe a question that's very important to your industry or a question that's very important to your specific company, perhaps. But ideally something that the audience can relate to and to really set off on an adventure across different episodes where every episode you might be meeting with customers, internal team members, prospects, thought leaders, trying to find answers to this question, and at the very end, you come to some sort of a conclusion. This very end, by the way, could only be, let's say, 10 episodes, and then you do a season two or something like that. But again, like to get, to use a Netflix example, this question could be like, okay, what is the cause of true happiness? For example? This could be like this big golden question. And then they go on all of these adventures, have all these conversations, and at the end they come up with an interesting conclusion. One of my favorite examples on that from a B2B perspective comes from Wistia. So Wistia, who's a video hosting platform, so they deal with video and stuff like that. So naturally, they made a docu series called 110100, where they. They took one of the questions that people ask them a lot, which is, hey, does it depend, like, the budget I have to create video? Does that have an impact on the quality of the video in the end, in terms of how much, how successful it will be? So they came up with a video idea and they shot it for 1,000, for 10,000 and 400,000. The same video idea. They shot it for three different budgets and they came up with some very interesting conclusions in the end. And they're a video hosting company, video hosting software, so you see the connection there. So there's a lot of different ways that you can make a webinar series a lot more exciting. It's all about how creative you're willing to go. But the easiest thing you could do is to start calling it a show and start calling them episodes.

Yeah, yeah. And I just wanted to, I wanted to share with you, with the audience the framework that we use for everything we produce, especially on video. But before, I just wanted to add also onto those specific ideas on series that we've seen at work. So again, number one, outside the ones that you've highlighted will be the lessons learned. So if you look at it from the point of view from a conference or an event point of view or community, you will have big people, big thinkers, thought leaders that are sharing views, are sharing thoughts, and some of them are extremely useful. So, and especially right now, you know, after, after, with what we've been through, it's very important to see what people think from, from, from what's happening and what can be learned from what are the lessons learned. So when you create a series where you can bring either one per episode or two per episode of these thought leaders to share what are the lessons learned about your industry? There's a way in which you can kind of frame case studies about lessons learned. You know, what you've done and what, and how you're moving forward. There's also about those lessons learned is what is, what is the, what is the future of the industry? There's the element of predictions where people would say, okay, to a thought leader, what is your prediction is going to happen within the next two years? It's very common right now for us working in the events and like everyone saying, okay, what is your prediction? What do you think? How do you think 2021 is going to look like? What you think actually is going to be 2030? And then that kind of opens up a lot of conversations you can have serious about all that sort of stuff you can have series about. So if you've got working on a particular topic or in a particular industry, if you look at it a conference program, you have technology, you have regulations, you have a variety of different themes among the, the topics that you're covering, either on an event or in a series of events. So then you can serialize that and then focus on and honing in on various of those different aspects. And again, personally, I think predictions, top leaders and everything, everyone always wants to have or hear a top individual, a top professional in the industry about it.