When Good Marketers Go Bad: Another Segment in an Ongoing Series

I just listened to one of the worst teleclasses I’ve ever heard.  What was particularly shocking was that it was done by someone well known in the PR field. (No. I’m not going to name names for reasons soon to be obvious but if you email me I’ll tell you.)

People expect that in a 60 minute teleclass you’re going to talk for 45 – 50 minutes then take questions.  This is important for two reasons.

Problem #1: Asking Questions Throughout the Teleclass vs. Questions at the End

When people are in listening mode, they aren’t thinking of questions to ask you in the next 30 – 90 seconds. Asking if there are any questions every 3 – 5 minutes is annoying and leave a lot of uncomfortable dead air.   Solution: If you’re going to ask questions through out have some plants (people on the call ready to ask pre-determined questions). Also, in your promotional copy tell people you’re going to take questions throughout the call so they have time to think of stuff.

Problem #2: Listening Mode vs. Discussion Mode

Taking questions throughout a teleclass requires Discussion Mode which means we all get to hear what’s going on in the background of each attendees life. It’s surprising how noisy many people’s lives are. One is bad. Imagine how much worse it is when there are 6 attendees with serious background noise.  Unfortunately, they are usually the last to realize they’re the problem so it pretty much ruins the call for everyone.  Solution: Don’t do discussion mode unless people know up front that it will be discussion mode and people will need to mute themselves. Also, tell them how to mute themselves in the call in directions.

P.S. If you’re going to charge $67 A MONTH for a press release template, be sure to communicate the value other than it shows you where to put your business name, address, website and email.  I can get that info for free with a simple web search.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.