Search Marketing Angle: Dialoginars

August 20, 2011

I saw a couple of comments from my one or two readers about our coverage of marketing tactics used by search and content processing vendors. The feedback was along the lines of “tell us more about the different tactics used to sell finding technology.

Okay, we will try to spot interesting tactics and write them up.

Here’s an angle that we joked about at lunch on Friday (August 19, 2011). Some organizations are pitching seminars delivered via the Web using GoToMeeting.com, LiveMeeting.com, or some other service. The idea is that a sponsor can deliver an audience or at least an email blast to the hapless folks who wittingly or unwittingly signed up to receive “information” from a marketing oriented outfit.

The Webinar is a PowerPoint or Keynote deck which appears on the participants’ monitor. One can listen via a Skype type VoIP set up or just dial in to a conference node. Our approach here at the goose pond is to post a password protected PDF of the visuals and get the participants to dial into a conference node. Not perfect, but it works reasonably well and does not display the buttons, links, and weird artifacts that pepper the screen when some of the commercial services are used.

IBM does webinars, presumably as part of its cost cutting actions like killing its high profile supercomputer project. But does IBM do webinars? No, no, no.

IBM does Dialoginars. Be still my heart.

Apparently when the information is not causing the webinar attendees’ adrenaline to flow, IBM is trying to add life to webinars. Witness the now 100-year-old company’s “IBM Presents- Dialoginars.” IBM has been posting webinars for some time now, but I’m guessing their sales force wanted to freshen things up. The pitch reads,

Tired of the same old webinars and PowerPoints? Then join Randolph Kahn and IBM for the Dialoginar series…a fun and entertaining way to learn about a variety of Enterprise Content Management topics. On the site, you can access a new Dialoginar each month that features a candid conversation between industry expert Randolph Kahn and an IBM ECM expert. They’ll demystify and explore such topics as Information Lifecycle Governance, Content Analytics and Defensible Disposal. It’ll be insightful, simple to understand…and best of all, it’ll be fun!

Fun? That may be overstating things. Stephen E Arnold was the dialoginarator on a Fierce podcast which featured most of the interactivity features mentioned by IBM. But Fierce is not IBM, so think webinar interactivity and an interactive session about Watson.

Cynthia Murrell, August 20, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.