Matthew T Grant

I’ve been a “thought ronin” for going on a year now.

In the same way that the lone gunslinger is a staple of the Western, ronin (“masterless samurai”) have been staple figures, and frequently protagonists, in samurai films from the very outset of the genre – an early epic of which was in fact entitled 47 Ronin.

My favorite anime film, Ninja Scroll, is the tale of a ronin, as is the more recent and rather austere The Sword of a Stranger, not to mention Kurosawa classics like Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai, to name but a few examples.

In other words, my sense of what a ronin is comes mainly from the movies (and Hagakure).

[As a total aside, it’s interesting to note that many of the most celebrated samurai films of recent years – such as the work of director Yoji Yamada, maker of the masterful Twilight Samurai – are not about ronin at all but instead about the plight of the low-ranking samurai who often had to ply a trade (e.g., building and selling umbrellas, for instance) to supplement their meager stipend. I read this as an allegory for the plight of the “salaryman” in contemporary Japan – but what do I know about it?]

Anyway, I called myself a “thought ronin” because everybody wants to be a thought leader and I guess I wanted to subtly mock that aspiration (having always been partial to the guru or “cult leader” angle).

On a more serious note, I was stating allegorically that, having served as the retainer of a thought leader and possessing many skills necessary to effective and ongoing thought leadership, I was for “out there.”

Finally, I thought the mass unemployment of “white collar workers,” including members of the intelligentsia such as myself, following on the Global Financial Crisis (is that still happening, btw?) analogous, mutatis mutandis, to the mass unemployment of samurai after the Battle of Sekigahara.

I mean, what did you think a thought ronin was?

My first session at the Mixer featured Todd Davison of Bulldog Solutions, Michael Hickey from Hoovers, and Jen Moeller of Humana. The main message of this session can be summed up in the soon-to-be-immortal [corrected: good catch, Paul!] words of Michael Hickey, “Think: Campaigns, not events.”

As the session moderator, Todd Davison kicked things off by emphasizing that webinars offer a continual opportunity to engage with potential customers and, more importantly, to gather data so that you can more effectively segment, target, and score the leads that your efforts generate.

Broadly speaking, this approach will allow you to use your webinar campaigns to create richly detailed customer personas. More tactically, and depending on whether or not you have the requisite technology in place, this approach should also provide you with behavioral data on specific prospects giving you an effective method for filtering the leads generated so that you are only handing the most qualified to your sales folk.

There were a number of very specific recommendations made by the panelists – such as Jen Moeller’s suggestion that you use video on your invitation landing page to supplement or further explain the benefit of the session; Michael’s suggestion that you explore your technical options and consider incorporating a live Twitter feed into the webinar itself so that participants can follow the ongoing commentary of others; or Todd’s suggestion that, when deciding on webinar themes, you seek out topics which are  interesting to your audience while remaining particularly relevant to your offerings or services – but I keep coming back to main point:

Webinars are most effective when managed as campaigns containing multiple touch-points (invitation email, invitation landing page, follow-up reminders prior to the event, post-event reminder, post-event landing page containing recorded event plus supplementary material and calls to action, etc.) and when they are integrated into your overall marketing mix, meaning that you are promoting them through your blogs, email newsletters, websites, and, most importantly, the actions of your sales team.

Image Courtesy of jon_a_ross.