Webinar Wire

Responding To Webinar Problems

Posted by Ken Molay October 13 2008 8:43 PM EST

2 comments

Lisa forwarded me an email that HubSpot sent out today. They held a webinar on how to use Twitter for Marketing & PR. They got over 3,800 registrants. Wow! Nice job of promotion. And then apparently disaster struck. I don't know exactly what happened, but here is the email they sent:

First, a note of apology.
We know there were many technical difficulties that both delayed the presentation and blocked many registrants from joining the webinar. We sincerely apologize for all these issues. We did our very best to test each and every aspect of the webinar system beforehand and felt confident in the audio and presentation system we had in place. However, there were technical glitches that presented just after a large number of attendees started to arrive, issues that have never presented before. We understand there was much wasted time and aggravation on your part, and we are working diligently on finding a new, more reliable, system for our webinars going forward.

In an effort to respond to all of the reports of registrants not being able to join, and of terrible audio issues that forced attendees to leave the webinar, we wanted to get the recorded presentation out to all registrants as soon as possible.

The video and slides have now been posted. We encourage you to share this with all your colleagues who also could not (or did) attend. We want to make sure this reaches everyone who wanted to join today's webinar. You can view the video and slides at http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-for-marketing

If you have any additional questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you again for being a part of this webinar.

This is the right way to deal with webinar problems. Up front, fast, responsive, and constructive. First, they got the note out very quickly after the webinar. Speed is vital in these situations. Second, they took full ownership of the problem. Third, they empathized with the registrants' perspective. Fourth, they reacted and gave a positive recourse, which was available right then and there... You could view the slides and recording.

Any time you deal with technology, things can go wrong. How you deal with it differentiates you from the pack. HubSpot has given you a practical lesson in best practices. File this away and hope you'll never have to use it!