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Today I participated on a webinar by Marketo and Demandbase.  I was very interested in the topic of this webinar, as I am with everything going on in Marketing Automation.  This is because I am in charge of Demand Generation for the organization I work for.  Unfortunately, I could not pay attention to the webinar as I noticed something that was very distracting to me.  (Hopefully, it was recorded so I can check it out later since I am excited about both of these products.) 

There were anywhere from 70-95 people on the webinar during the presentation.  And I know this because it told me at the top of the screen.  (See picture below)

I also know this because it listed out every single person on the webinar and then added the ability for me to copy the email addresses of these people so that I could capture their email address in a spreadsheet.  (See picture above) I’m sure this was particularly interesting to the competitors on the webinar.  I noticed two people I knew from their competition, one from Eloqua, and one from Hubspot. 

This means that these competitors would have been able to copy the names and email address of the almost 100 people on the call with little effort and potentially contact them to promote their services.  While not the most ethical thing to do, I am sure this could be a strategy by some companies.  And some of the people on the call were from great companies including CareerBuilder, Cisco, Philips, and Harte Hanks who would be great prospects for these competitors. 

As someone in charge of Demand Generation at a company that regularly does webinars for training, lead generation, and lead nurturing, I ensure the people giving these webinars change setting to prevent this from being visible when my organization conducts a webinar.  In addition, we have a checklist for webinar a presenter that includes removing items from their desktop, having all slides approved, and testing out webinar functionality prior to using.  I would encourage Marketo and Demandbase to do the same , too. 

Tagged as: Demandbase, Go-to-Webinars, Marketing Automation, Marketing Best Practices, Marketo, Webinar