It was breakfast with giants. The legendary Jill Konrath was coming to New York with a host of people were dying to meet her. I was lucky enough to be invited to breakfast.
There at the table were, Jill Konrath, the best sales blogger in the country (of Selling to Big Companies fame), Charlie Green, founder of the Trusted Advisor and the leading blogger on the subject of trust, and Robin Carey, the CEO and co-founder of the Social Media Today the leading site for social media for business.
Left to right Jill Konrath (author of Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling), Charles Green (Trusted Advisor Associates), Robin Carey (Publisher, Social Media Today), and Josh Gordon (author of Presentations that Change Minds and Selling 2.0).
Green was about to give his first webinar and asked the group for advice. We went around the table sharing. I was last and by my turn the common advice had been shared so I talked about a small account where I had been running an odd variation of the webinar for about two years.
The National Association of Publishers Representatives, the association of independent magazine and website ad sales reps, had less than 300 members and a tiny budget. But I really wanted to do something great for them. I agreed to do a series of teleconferences for a year. The first ones went well, but because I was doing more costly webinars for other clients, I knew my small client was not getting the full experience I could deliver. The great thing about a webinar is that you can show what you are talking about while you are talking about it. In addition you can reference content that can be of value for the audience.
During my next session supplemented the teleconference by posting a series of links for audience members to follow. I would ask them to click on the next link to illustrate a point I was making. It was a great success.
As the year wore on I improved the approach. I started proactively blogging so that my individual blog posts became modular "slides" that could be used in a linkinar. Each blog post contained an graphic, a complete explanation of just one idea, and links to original reference material. This "linkinar" process evolved over a period of 2 years. Now many people are using linkinars with great success.
Now, back to my breakfast with Giants. As I shared my story of the linkinar they were all taking notes like mad. They were writing notes?
Something new had been shared at the table that had not been shared before. Were linkinars something new? A quick Goggle search showed no one had used the term before. I registered it and put up this quick website to spread the word.