Birth of the Webinar Series — The Technology Rock Opera

When I was a kid, I remember my father attending seminars. They were often held in Orlando, Florida. We would drive four hours from Miami to Orlando and spend a week going to Disney and Universal Studios with Mom. Dad would join us for a few of the days, but, otherwise, he spent his days at professional seminars.

Today, seminars have morphed into webinars. Why fly or drive to a seminar when you can attend a webinar from your laptop? (Spending a few days at Disney World is a good reason.)

Webinars have gone mainstream. They’re a great way to learn and absorb deep professional knowledge from the comfort of wherever you are. A few clicks and you attend. Showed up late? There’s always video on demand.

ERP Webinars
When I started working at Panaya, I quickly learned that webinars were a big deal. There aren’t many quality sources of information in the ERP/SAP/Oracle domain. You can easily find webinars and books about mobile, marketing and B2B — but ERP? Not much out there outside of the vendors.

As Director of Content Marketing, my job is to take the webinars and add some color to them — landing pages, titles and emails. After I while, I realized what we were missing.

A story.

SAP S/4HANA — A Huge Large Cap Story
ERP isn’t the world’s sexiest topic, to say the least. What’s ERP? The best way I can describe it — the computer systems that run the world’s most powerful companies. It’s the biggest thing that no one knows about!

SAP is the biggest ERP vendor. The German company has a huge impact around the world. The new version of SAP is called S/4HANA. It has an in-memory database, a killer user interface and tons of features that will change the way that large cap companies do their business. Everyone from human resources to finance professionals will feel the impact — in a few years.

You see, ERP upgrades hatch slowly. Unlike Android, iOS and Windows upgrades, ERP upgrades take years to kick in. It’s one thing to take a risk and upgrade your Windows laptop to Windows 10, and another to upgrade a billion dollar company to the latest, greatest version of SAP. ERP upgrades involve months of planning and typically take 3-6 months to implement.

The S/4HANA Webinar Series
Sounds bad? Not for Panaya! Our technology turns frightening upgrades into “surpassable challenges”. Perfect for a webinar series.

So I created the Master S/4HANA Webinar Series. SAP upgrades are just too big to cover in one “go.” The first part of the series covers the “pains” that S/4HANA addresses. The second in the series covers S/4HANA Simple Finance — the C-Level Pleaser (“the big picture benefits” in English). Simple Finance is the first massive module of S/4HANA to become available. The third installment of the series is “How to Prepare your ERP for S/4HANA.”

Webinar Producers — Listen Up!
Take your webinars to the next level by telling a story. Go beyond the technical details and look for the journey that your audience is on. Turn technology into an adventure! Look in the mirror and see the face of your audience. Where are they now, and where are they headed? What are their fears? What do they have to gain at the finish line?

Split it into a few parts — The Why, the What, and the How.

Turn your webinars into a technology rock opera.