Webinar Fatigue?!? Not at TechStar

The new buzz word making the internet rounds today is “Webinar Fatigue”. Experts say that people are getting burned out on attending online webinars during the pandemic.  Attendance at these virtual events has been dropping significantly.  I have another word for it: “Lame Excuses”.

This same thing happened when I was helping to run the Microsoft seminar team for over 12 years.  People explained that the reason attendance had started to fall in the later years was because of “Seminar Fatigue”.   I never bought it.  Here is why:

Humans don’t get tired of participating in things we enjoy.  You never hear of “Binge Watching a Great TV Show Fatigue,” or “Eating Ice Cream Fatigue” or “Making Whoopee Fatigue”.  (Editors note: that last one can make you fatigued, but usually in a good way.)  The point is if it is something humans find enjoyable, we typically don’t get fatigued to the point we want to stop doing it.

This was the case with Microsoft Seminars, and the evidence did not add up at Microsoft either.  If seminar fatigue were real, then attendance at all six of the seminars we conducted would have dropped in equal measure.  Instead, attendance in three of the five dropped to an average of 15 people, while the other two of the seminars remained with high attendance, averaging 150+ people per event.  The excuse for Seminar Fatigue was, in actuality, BAD CONTENT fatigue.

This is very common.  For example, in the last year, the pandemic hits.  Every Microsoft partner switches to online webinars. Few of them are good at delivering online content.  They provide lousy content that customers think wastes their time.  Attendance falls.

At TechStar, we have great content.

How do we know?  Our attendees tell us.  We share all the evals of our events with all our attendees.  They have told us that our events average a 4.87 rating out of a possible 5.0 ranking system.  99% of attendees would recommend to friends that they attend the event.  97% of all the complaints we received from 200 events delivered in the past two years has consistently been “I loved the event, but it was not long enough.”  That is the best kind of complaint. Last month (Jan 2021), we had twice-weekly events with registrations of 208, 167, 135.  You know you have good content when your weekly webinar attendance keeps growing instead of shrinking.

Why is our content so good?

It is all original.  Other partners use Microsoft cookie-cutter content that sounds like a giant Microsoft commercial.  We also praise and criticize Microsoft fairly.  If we say a technology is good, it is good, but not because we are trying to appease Microsoft. We have fun. We tell stories, share insights, crack jokes, and our guiding principle for content is “Explain it like it is two people sitting at a bar talking technology over a couple of beers.”  Leave the marketing mumbo jumbo at home and give it to me straight.

If you participate in a Webinar with content like this, we are betting that you will keep coming back for more.

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