You Can Watch the Recording Later
I have a confession. I signed up for two webinars this week. I attended neither of them.
To be fair, one didn't start on time. I spent the first ten minutes flipping between tabs, periodically checking the webinar window, which continued to tell me it would start shortly. Eventually, I wandered off to do something else.
The second one I missed because I was having a minor existential job-search breakdown after receiving my fifth automated rejection email of the week. So... priorities.
Thankfully, both organizers sent recordings shortly afterward. I might watch them. Maybe.
I'll Watch It Later
How many webinars, conference sessions, podcasts and videos are currently sitting somewhere in your personal “I'll get to that eventually” pile? When I registered for those webinars, I was committing to being somewhere at a particular time. Once I had the recording, I was committing to... having a link in my inbox.
The information didn't change. My relationship with it did. That got me thinking about what I've actually valued most from live events. It turns out it isn't necessarily the fact that everyone was physically standing in the same room. It's that we were there at the same time.
The Room Can Be Virtual
After I was laid off, one of the first online classes I signed up for was a four-week AI in Marketing course. It met live for two hours every Monday. I could have learned plenty about AI from recorded courses, YouTube videos, articles or experimenting on my own. Instead, every Monday I logged in while someone else was teaching and other marketers were learning alongside me.
I genuinely interacted with the instructor through the chat. I completed the optional assignments. I used the take-home materials. Other people's questions made me think about things I hadn't considered. It was virtual. It was also live. That distinction mattered more than I expected.
The Best Part Isn't Always the Presenter
I've been thinking about that while writing about live events this week because some of my favorite conference memories aren't actually from conference sessions. I loved attending the annual Second Street Conference in St. Louis to learn about promotions. I brought home ideas from the speakers that changed how I approached my work.
I also somehow got adopted by the USA Today newspaper group. They invited me along to dinners and group outings. One year, that included a Cardinals game where I had some of the best seats I've ever had: buffet box seats in an upper deck. I remember sitting next to one of their reps while she told me about a sidewalk contest they were running. She explained that the idea had been inspired by a driveway giveaway she'd seen.
I knew that driveway giveaway. It was mine. Seeing the shock on her face when I told her was worth the trip. That conversation wasn't on the conference agenda. Nobody recorded it. There wasn't a slide explaining that an idea I'd worked on had traveled from a television station in Rochester to a newspaper promotion somewhere else. It happened because two people who cared about the same kind of work happened to be sitting next to each other at a baseball game.
Presence Creates Possibility
That's the part of live events I think I miss most. It doesn't necessarily require a convention center, a plane ticket or a buffet box at Busch Stadium. It requires presence. A live webinar gives you a chance to ask the question that occurs to you while someone is speaking. Someone else's question might change how you understand the topic. A conference gives you the conversation over coffee, the dinner invitation or the person sitting next to you at a baseball game.
A recording can preserve the presentation. It can't recreate every interaction that happened around it. That doesn't make recorded content less valuable. I love being able to learn on my own schedule, and there is a very good chance I'll eventually watch at least one of those webinars sitting in my inbox.
Probably.
The recordings will give me the information. What I missed was the possibility of participating in whatever happened while everyone else was there. After a week of thinking about why we still bother showing up, I think that's the distinction I've been looking for.
The value of being live isn't just what you get to hear. It's what you get the opportunity to contribute, ask, notice and discover because you were there when it happened. Apparently, my first step is to stop registering for webinars I don't attend. I'll work on that.
