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I'm in the middle of the session right now, but here's one takeaway from this session:

According to CommPartners’ Richard Finstein, the leader of this morning’s Great Ideas session on web seminars, the way most organization’s screw up webinars: not planning an experience.

“They don’t plan their success. They don’t script their program,” he says. “How am I going to plan interaction? How am I going to seed my audience so there’s participation? How do I build energy into the program? If you don’t build energy into the program, then just don’t do it.”

In the opening general session, Bruce Turkel asked everyone who was an artist to raise their hand. Ten hands out of more than 500 people went up. He then said that if you ask the question in front of a class of first-graders just about every hand shoots up. In third grade it’s about half. By fourth or fifth grade it’s a few—these are the children who have been told by others that they are artists.

As Turkel says, we’re all artists. We all create. And that’s exactly what Finstein is talking about. You have to choreograph a webinar or it will fall flat. You have to imagine the experience your users are going to have—and then reimagine, adding “energy” as Finstein puts it.