UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 47. Tele-Summits

ONE OF THE newest trends out there is not the tele-seminar but the tele-summit. This is where someone puts together a series of teleseminars usually under one common topic.

Generally, the organizer will contact 10 to 20 experts in a certain field to speak on a common topic. The tele-summit is marketed to potential customers in a really smart way. Many of these events allow you to sign up for the event for free, under the condition that you have to phone in and listen to the live calls. Of course, over the course of a three- or four-day tele-summit, most people will not have time to listen to 20 or so one-hour phone calls. At this point, they are usually offered an upgrade. Either on the sales page, or after they sign up for the free access, a gold or platinum or another fancy metal name will show up to offer an upgrade to various packages.

These upgrades vary. One option would be access to the MP3 recordings of all the sessions. Another upgrade can be PDF transcripts of all the sessions. The top-level upgrade would be getting all MP3 recordings, PDF transcripts, and everything on CD and a printed binder. I actually really like this method. It allows you to give content away for free but also allows you to make some revenue for people who want to digest the information on their own time. If you end up wanting to run your own tele-summit, which is something you can put together once you build relationships with other experts in your industry, this would be the ...