Webinar Wire

How To Drive Adoption Of Web Conferencing In An SME

Posted by Ken Molay March 6 2008 12:05 AM EDT

Premiere Global Services gave me permission to post this collection of tips for small and medium enterprise (SME) companies wanting to introduce web conferencing into their operations. It was written by Stephane Guiblin, a Netspoke Product Manager at Premiere Global. I thought our readers would benefit from the concepts and recommendations Stephane lays out.

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Web conferencing has come a long way over the last few years. What was once seen as a tool for the huge Corporates to streamline their internal communications is now finding a new market; the SME.

SME’s are now also experiencing the business benefits that Web conferencing offers, not internally but for their external communications. Offering a powerful audio and visual medium, web conferencing is being used to communicate more effectively with customers, prospects and suppliers. The result; cost savings, greater productivity and a closer relationship with customers.

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Oprah's Webcast Exceeds Operating Capacity

Posted by Ken Molay March 3 2008 10:45 PM EDT

10 comments

The last time I saw a statistic, Oprah's webcast "class" covering "A New Earth" had over 700,000 registrations. Like hundreds of thousands of others, I logged in to see how it went.

Things started off promisingly. I liked the pre-show countdown telling people how long it would be until "the doors opened" so you could get a seat in the virtual classroom. They let people connect starting thirty minutes before show time. They ran some recorded snippets from Oprah shows to keep the audience entertained while showing another countdown clock at the bottom of the video window showing how long to showtime.

Just in case you were wondering about the economics of an event of this size, an indication is that Chevrolet, Post-it, and Skype bought sponsorship rights in the top frame of the media player window and the show started with some video advertisements before moving on to a closeup of Oprah.

The early few minutes went pretty smoothly. I noticed a brief puase to rebuffer the video every now and then, but generally I was getting good performance on my home cable modem (with the "turbocharge" performance option courtesy of Time Warner). The Move media player would resynch to the live feed when it had to stop to buffer, so you would lose the paused section rather than letting the webcast drag farther and farther behind real time.

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Web Conferencing Survey Results

Posted by Ken Molay February 27 2008 1:15 PM EDT

I have completed my open survey of web conferencing technology providers and written up an analysis of results. The complete report is available for download from the Webinar Success website at www.wsuccess.com/download/survey.doc

I had been hoping to use the survey as a way to get a broad view into general web conferencing usage patterns and volumes across the industry. Unfortunately we had no participation from four of the largest conferencing technology providers, so a lot of important data is missing from the results. There is still no valid estimate on the total number of web conferences produced by individuals and businesses.

But the companies that did participate gave a great insight into web conferencing trends and patterns. We had inputs from very small startups, medium size providers, and very large market leaders. Some companies concentrate on niche applications and audiences, while others work with a wide cross-section of web conferencing applications.

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Effective Use of Webinar Style Content

A recent question on another forum sought advice over issues with providing content delivery to customers (users) and Ken and I have had a brief discussion about my thoughts in responding to the question.

In essence the question was 'I have a big file that I offer as a download or as a streaming option for customers and I have technical issues across certain platforms - what should/can I do?...'

The general gist of most of the people who responded offered all sorts of quality technical based advice on how to fix the problem, types of files to use, different services for delivery and so on.  All good, relevant and helpful ideas that were worth their time to read.

And for me, the real issue appeared not to be the technical challenge of delivery (which focused on the internal issue of 'How do I get my message out there?') but rather the fundamental issue of 'in what way and what messages might the customer prefer to gain access to this content?'. 

This 'Outside - In' focus prompted the quick discussion between Ken & myself that leads to me posting almost verbatim, the response I provided at the time.

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West Grabs Genesys

Posted by Ken Molay February 20 2008 10:20 AM EDT

Let's see... It's been more than two weeks since the last web conferencing corporate acquisition, so we were way overdue.

Fortunately West International Holdings Limited has stepped up to the plate and made things interesting by offering to buy Genesys.

For those of you unfamiliar with the players, Genesys is a French company providing audio and web conferencing solutions in North America and Europe. West Corporation (that being the holding company's public-facing corporate moniker) owns InterCall, a one-stop shop for audio and web conferencing technology and services. InterCall has proprietary products and also resells conferencing solutions from other manufacturers such as Microsoft and Cisco/WebEx.

West bought up conferencing provider Raindance in 2006 and promptly turned off all marketing and promotion of the product. To all public intents and purposes, Raindance disappeared. Genesys is larger than Raindance was and West seems primarily interested in it for the increased foothold it would provide in the European market.

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Warrillow Report On Marketing To Small Businesses

Posted by Ken Molay February 18 2008 4:51 PM EDT

Warrillow & Co. is a research and analysis company helping corporations with marketing to small businesses. Warrillow provides research to members of a "subscriber network" (in other words... clients). I recently contributed to a Warrillow report on how webinars can help enterprises generate sales leads from small businesses. Other companies quoted in the report include Bulldog Solutions, Citrix Online, Quantum Leap Marketing, and smallbiztrends.com among others.

While Warrillow does not make its research available for sale outside the subscriber network, they gave me permission to quote a few small pieces of information from the report for the benefit or Webinar Wire readers. I thought some of their findings were particularly interesting.

In a survey of small business owners, they found that 23% of those surveyed said they had ever attended a webinar. That leaves a lot of room for growth and expanded market penetration!

In a surprise to absolutely nobody, business/technical/heathcare service company owners were overwhelmingly more likely to have attended a webinar than other types of companies. But a statistic that really caught my eye was the fact that attendance was significantly higher for owners of companies with high revenue growth rates than for companies with lower growth rates. I wonder which is the cause and which is the effect?

When Warrillow surveyed large enterprise marketers targeting small businesses, they found that a quarter of the respondents said they have no plans to use webinars at all this year. For shame! The good news is that 47% said they planned to increase their use of webinars.

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Why You Should Thank Oprah

Posted by Ken Molay February 15 2008 1:30 AM EDT

14 comments

Confession: I really don't pay much attention to Oprah Winfrey. But that doesn't mean I'm culturally deaf and blind. The woman has an absolutely massive multimedia empire and a recommendation from her can directly translate to unimagined success for a designer, entertainer, author, actor, or politician (well, maybe... that remains to be seen).

What does this have to do with an article about webinars? I'll tell you. Oprah is hosting a 10-week webinar series and it is shaping up to be the most significant single event our industry has ever seen.

Oprah's latest book club selection is "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle. From March 3 through May 5, Oprah and Eckhart will host a live interactive webcast every Monday night to discuss the book and its concepts.

Yesterday's press release said that in the two weeks since announcing the webinar series, they have received more than 250,000 registrations. I decided to sign up as well and found that first I had to register as a member of Oprah's book club, respond to an email confirmation link, and then register for the event itself. So much for "Extra clicks act as barriers to registration!" To be fair, I assume that most registrants were already members of the book club, in which case registration for the webcast is quick and easy, with no additional signup questions or required surveys.

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For My Next Webcast, Can I Use Slides From Our Last Analyst Conference?

The correct answer to this question is (quite frankly), “What do you think?”

Let’s step back for a moment and re-think the purpose of your presentation? Essentially, each PowerPoint presentation is a conversation. So ask yourself, would you use the same conversation you had at your last analyst conference with a group of 500 potential clients? Probably not.

In fact, if you’re like most speakers, you probably didn’t have a conversation with the audience at your last analyst conference either - you just presented. And that’s exactly my point.

Webcasting provides a unique opportunity to engage individual clients (or prospective clients) on a one-to-one basis, regardless of your audience size.

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Webinars As Nurturing Tools

Posted by Michael McKinnon February 8 2008 1:02 PM EDT

In the B2B sale, the key to winning business is being engaged in the early phases to ensure you are chosen at the end of the process.  As a B2B marketer, I have several tools at my disposal to accomplish this, including white papers, free trials, demos and press releases. In essence, all of these are ways in which I can attract the attention of potential buyers, establish credibility and bring them into the sales cycle allowing them to be nurtured.

The webinar is quickly becoming a tool of choice to move prospects along the buying cycle, build credibility and establish thought leadership. Consider the advantages of a webinar over the formerly mentioned tools:

• A webinar is interactive and can engage your potential prospect
• You can acquire other key information through the use of registration tools
• A webinar is more committing than a white paper download. These prospects are already more qualified than a free download.
• A webinar can be recorded and disemminated for later playback.

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The Week In Review

Posted by Ken Molay February 7 2008 12:42 PM EDT

I thought I would take the opportunity to jot down some thoughts and impressions about random news and notes from the web conferencing industry this week.

For those of you wondering about the status of the vendor survey I created to identify overall usage patterns, I have full or partial entries from many technology vendors both large and small. Companies such as Adobe, WebEx, iLinc, Intercall, ON24, vCall, and MeetingOne are represented, along with many others. I have been hoping I could get someone - anyone - from Microsoft's Live Meeting product group to contribute, but so far I've had no luck there. I'll close it off soon and do an analysis of responses. But there is still time to add your data. Even if someone else from your company has contributed, you can add data about a particular geography or type of usage you are more familiar with.

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