Webinar Wire

How To Boost Webinar Attendance 422%

Posted by Ken Molay June 19 2008 4:03 PM EDT

MarketingSherpa has an article on their site that is must-see reading for companies using webinars as part of a marketing and lead-gen strategy. It is available for free access only until June 25, after which it goes into the archives for paid members only. Act fast while you can get the info without charge!

As with most MarketingSherpa content, this focuses on a real world case study. The SciQuest marketing department looked at their lead generation webinars and determined that they were in a rut, pitching the same old stuff to the same old crowd.

The first thing they did is cut down the quantity in favor of boosting the quality of the content. Then they went to town on their database and invitation strategies. The combined effects were dramatic.

One of the things I found interesting was that they decided to move "webinar day" from Tuesdays to Thursdays. This matches the findings of my recent survey on audience preferences.

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Suit Your Webinar Audience

Posted by Ken Molay June 17 2008 4:04 PM EDT

Tom sent me a note prompted by my article on best days for scheduling web conferences. He works at a pharmaceuticals company and says that their sales management meetings are usually held on Fridays, which have been set aside for office work and a break from field visits and travel.

I would hazard a guess that Tom's organization is not alone in this practice. If you are targeting sales people as an audience for your web seminar, you might think very seriously about Fridays as a good day for your event.

But his note got me thinking about the "big picture" for web conferencing. It is easy to slip into a myopic view of webinars as suited for a particular purpose or audience, based on whatever our current focus might be. I have to be careful not to fall into this trap, as I talk to a variety of companies, using web seminars to reach many different kinds of attendees.

Just the other day, I had a call from corporate headquarters for a nationally known franchised restaurant chain. They wanted to use webinars to give training and news to their franchise owners around the country. If we used the "best times" findings and tried to hold the sessions on weekdays a little before lunch on the West Coast / after lunch on the East Coast, we would be hitting the franchise owners right at one of the busiest times of their day. Weekends or evenings would likely be more appropriate for this audience.

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8 Killer Mistakes to Avoid In Your Webinars and Web Meetings

Posted by David Cleary June 13 2008 4:20 PM EDT

8 Killer Mistakes to Avoid In Your Webinars and Web Meetings

As both a sales rep and VP Sales that helped build a $15 million revenue software company, I've personally conducted thousands of web meetings and webinars from one-on-one sessions to large group events. The company I was with at the time, OnlineBenefits, was acquired in 2006 for $33 million by A.D.A.M., Inc (www.adam.com)

Live web events and recorded sessions were part of our corporate DNA and were instrumental in building a national customer base with a small sales and service team.  Using web events allowed us to create what I call "time and space leverage" being able to essentially be in more than one place at one time, without having to incur the frustrations and expense of business travel.  As you can imagine, productivity was very high. 

Web events allowed us to qualify prospects and serve customers efficiently while delivering our message in an engaging and effective way for all parties.

Our team prospected, qualified, presented and closed millions of dollars of deals using webinars and web meetings.  In many cases we brought deals from start to close without ever meeting the prospect face-to-face.  The last rep I brought on board sold over $600,000 of licensing in his first year to customers all over the country without ever having to leave his house in Cleveland!  He was a phenomenal sales person and quickly mastered the web meeting tools.  Our team mastered "virtual" selling, but it wasn’t without a steep learning curve in the beginning.

Here, we'll explore eight killer mistakes to avoid in your webinars and web meetings.  And while many of these may sound basic and intuitive they bear repeating.

Mistake #1 - Boring Presenter.  Nothing will drive your audience away faster than a boring presenter.  Over the phone and web, you need a presenter who can create “presence” and engage the audience.  They need to be skilled in using their voice and energy to connect with the audience.  This doesn’t mean shouting your message to be heard, but you must be compelling and interesting.

Mistake #2 – Weak Delivery.  Um’s and Ah’s sound horrible if repeated frequently in an online event.  Because the audience is relying on your voice and content, any flaws are magnified and can distract from your message.  Delivery should be strong and confident.  The presenter must know their material cold and deliver it with energy and enthusiam.

Mistake #3 – Poorly Written/Organized Content.  Your event or meeting must be organized, understandable and easy to follow.  You should have an agenda or “road map” for your content and refer back to it a few times during the event.  Remember the adult learning concept of “Tell them what you’ll tell them; Tell Them; Tell Them What You Told Them.”  Repeat key points and link those points with stories, examples or anecdotes to drive the message home.

Mistake #4 – Lack of Preparation.  This is perhaps the most important and potentially most serious “fatal flaw” you can make.  Online events can require several hours to initiate and deliver.  Preparation is required on several fronts and many times you need to work from back to front.  For instance, you need to choose dates and times before you send out invitations.  If you are going to involve guest speakers, you need to check with them before you promote the event.  Areas of preparation include: invitations, landing pages for event promotion and registration, speakers, content, rehearsals, and more.  If you were going to see your prospect and had to get on a plane, you’d have lots of details to take care of.  Don’t make the mistake of poor planning just because you aren’t leaving your office.

Mistake #5 – Lack of Promotion.  So you’ve put together some great content and are ready to roll, right?  Wrong, you need to promote your event.  We found that we could double and triple our registrations by following a three step email marketing campaign.  First email to create awareness, second email, and a third “last chance” email.  Depending on the event or timing in our sales cycle, our sales or account teams would call all registrants the day before with a reminder and to thank them for registering.  The personal touch reduced the last minute no-shows.

Mistake #6 – No Story.  All good speakers use stories and anecdotes to reinforce their message.  As humans, we like good stories.  A webinar filled with just facts and figures will lose an audience quickly.  Think about the benefits of your solution or service and weave in stories with a theme that drive home the point.  Of course, great stories usually have great endings…so make sure yours leaves your audience wanting more….and give them a call to action.

Mistake #7 – Minimal Engagement.  All the good webinar vendors have tools to help make your event come alive.  Polling, Surveys, Chat, Q&A, Annotations.

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How InfusionSoft Launches a Webinar Program End-to-End

Posted by Amanda MacArthur June 11 2008 6:50 PM EDT

1 comment

A review of the B2B Magazine and InfusionSoft webinar "Launch a Webinar Program End-to-End"

Just attended a webinar called “Launch a Webinar Program End-to-End” with B2B Magazine’s Ellis Booker and InfusionSoft’s Jeff Mask.

It was somewhat of a case study on InfusionSoft and their webinar history. Mask offered some great tips on how his business is using webinars to create leads for their e-marketing software business.

At the beginning of the webinar, attendees were asked which two things they have the most trouble with when it comes to webinars. The two biggest problems attendees had were:

1. The Logistics of Organizing
2. Getting People to Attend

While Mask noted numerous times during the presentation that these best practices were specific to his business, these were some key points he made:

• The best length for a webinar is 60 minutes
  • 30 minute webinars are only good if you have a limited amount of content and you know you won’t go over your time.
  • 90 minute webinars are appropriate if you have enough interesting content to carry the presentation for the full 90 minutes.
• The best day for a B2Bwebinar is Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday
• The best time for a B2B webinar is 1PM or 2PM EST
• Make time zones clear to your users.

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Webinar Scheduling Survey Results

Posted by Ken Molay May 27 2008 6:09 PM EDT

1 comment

I have closed off my survey for webinar scheduling preferences. Let's take a look at the findings.

The first and most important finding is that it is incredibly difficult to get people to take surveys. I only collected 89 responses, which doesn't exactly count as a statistically representative sample of the world's total business and consumer population. I offer a big thank you to everybody who took the time to participate. Only 8 responses came from outside the Americas, so please assume that conclusions apply to our domestic market. Similarly, all but nine respondents indicated that they are employed full time.

To recap the question scenario, I set up an online survey that segmented each work day into four segments: Morning, Mid-day, Afternoon, and Evening. I then asked people to indicate on average whether each day and time tended to be Great, Okay, or Bad for allowing them the convenience of attending a web seminar. I also asked them to pick a day and time that would be their number one preference for watching webinars.

Early results surprised me. Quite a few people indicated that Fridays worked well for them. But as more people voted, Fridays became quite polarized. Friday morning and mid-day events had equal numbers of people voting Great and Bad, with many saying they were Okay. It turns out you don't have to be as fearful of Fridays as you might have been. Fridays even got one more vote than Thursdays for the favorite day of the week to attend a webinar! So if you are offering an event on multiple days to give your audience options, you might want to include a Friday session as a choice. Just as long as it's not too late in the day.

In looking at the overall rankings, I decided to apply a simple scoring algorithm to the voting. I counted a Great as +2 points, an Okay as +1 point, and a Bad as -2 points. Using this system, the top audience preferences in order turned out to be:

• Wednesday afternoon
• Thursday afternoon
• Tuesday afternoon
• Wednesday mid-day
• Tuesday mid-day
• Thursday mid-day

(By the way, those of you who read my column in the Bulldog Solutions newsletter will see some slight variations in results. That column was submitted for print earlier in the month, and the figures here include some additional responses.)

The above set all had closely grouped high scores and matches the conventional wisdom. That's a good thing, otherwise a lot of companies would have been wasting their time and all of us in the industry would have egg on our faces! Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, and all evenings scored extremely negatively, also matching expectations. The remaining group was fairly evenly spread out, although Thursday mornings scored higher than the rest of the second tier times.

What fascinates me is that when people were asked to pick a single day that they would most like to attend a webinar, the results were different than the scoring above would indicate:

• Tuesday       34.9%
• Wednesday  25.6%
• Friday           16.3%
• Thursday      15.1%
• Monday           8.1%

When asked to pick the time that would best fit their schedule, results followed a time zone trend that matches conventional scheduling for the US. People on the West Coast tended to pick times between 9am and 11am. People in the Central time zone more often picked mid-day, and people on the East Coast tended to pick 1pm-3pm. Is this the result of "conditioning" by webinar providers? Whatever the reason, it makes life a little easier for you if you are scheduling an event for a US national audience.

I have made the raw data available for your own review (including a few comments from respondents). You can access a spreadsheet of survey responses by clicking on the hyperlink or by typing the following URL into your browser: www.wsuccess.com/download/survey.xls

My hope is that this information will help companies to better match the preferences of their audiences when scheduling web seminars and other online events. I welcome your comments on this subject.

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The Challenge of Managing Teleworkers

Working from home or hardly working?

Keeping tabs on mobile employees is very different from keeping track of those that work next to you. No wonder so many managers are being challenged by the growing number of teleworkers – which now stands at 28 million, according to a recent survey by the International Telework Association and Council.

"Talk to me"

The source of the problem is communication. Many managers feel cut off when an employee works off-site, says the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. It makes the solution sound so simple.

Better communication

However, better communication requires the right technology and executive support. Managers also must change the way they manage.

InterCall, a leading company providing Video and Web conferencing services used by teleworkers, and Michzel Dziak, author of "Telecommuting Success," have several tips. Here's how managers can get the most out of teleworkers:

• Don't manage attendance, manage performance.

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127 Choices And Counting

Posted by Wayne Turmel May 21 2008 8:35 AM EDT

I sat in the back of a conference room yesterday during a presentation on why companies should do webinars. People nodded, wowed, did all the usual things they do when exposed to how cool and powerful these tools can be. Then someone asked the question that all of us who deal in the virtual communications world hate: "How many vendors are there and how do we pick one?"

The answer to the first one is easier than the second one. According to my spies in the business, there are 127 recognized providers of web conferencing services. I defy you to name them all. Heck, I do this for a living and off the top of my head I stalled out at less than two dozen.

To make matters worse, there's a push among the smaller companies to catch up in the single biggest differentiator between them and the big players- recording audio as well as video.

Given that I have no dog in the platform fight (although I do cringe when customers ask me to help their team and they use a platform I've never seen or heard of) here's a quick list of things to pay attention to.

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Another Resource For The Web Conferencing Community

Posted by Ken Molay May 20 2008 10:45 PM EDT

Cool Conference Live is sponsoring a site that should be of interest to anyone involved with producing and delivering web seminars or web conferences. It is called Conference Leaders and yes, it's another blog with helpful articles related to conferencing. Why am I calling attention to something that "competes" with this blog and my own webinar blog?

Well, first of all... Helpful information shouldn't be a competitive asset to be jealously guarded. It benefits all of us in the web conferencing industry to see events get more successful and clients get more comfortable and productive in their efforts. That's why Webinar Wire invites guest authors to share the wealth with beneficial information for all. I'm delighted to see additional sources for people to learn from.

But speaking of sources, Conference Leaders has a second benefit that is not immediately apparent at first glance. Halfway down the page is something that looks like a subhead saying: "Resources for Global Professionals." It turns out that this is a link to a second page... A portal to interesting and valuable sites around the web for people researching web conferencing.

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Business Expert Webinars Goes Live

Posted by Ken Molay May 14 2008 9:33 PM EDT

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Business Expert Webinars recently started operations, with its first public webinars scheduled for next week. I ran across their website and was intrigued by the business model, so I contacted the CEO, Lee Salz, who was kind enough to speak with me about his venture.

Lee is an expert consultant and author in the field of sales and sales management. He runs a company called Sales Dodo (from the title of his book "Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager"). When Lee wanted to cut down the amount of travel he was doing to deliver business education to clients, he decided to offer training sessions via web seminars. But he didn't want the hassle of selecting vendors for audio and web conferencing, doing the technical production on his sessions, marketing the events,and managing payments from attendees. He figured his contribution was the value of his content and his expertise as a speaker. Surely there was a company with the infrastructure in place that would let him offer his content under their umbrella?

It turns out there wasn't anything available that fit his criteria. It didn't take him long to realize there was a niche that wasn't being served in the business world. Thus, the birth of Business Expert Webinars.

The philosophy of the site is easy to understand. Lee has effectively created a virtual "community college" of business topics, taught by experts in their fields. Each course is 60 minutes long and costs a flat $79 to attend. You browse through the list of upcoming subjects, find whether the time fits your schedule, and sign up online.

Speakers share the enrolment revenues with Business Expert Webinars. They must agree to deliver real educational content and they are not allowed to promote their business or services during the event. Lee is adamant that these will not be thinly-veiled sales pitches, nor will they be high level overviews that are designed to tease the audience with simple concepts, urging them to buy additional services or materials to get "the real value."

Lee told me he automatically rejects topics such as "Ten Ways To Improve Your..." Sixty minutes is too short a time to give serious education on ten different subjects. He wants in-depth content that justifies concentration (and payment) from the students. He phrased it this way: "The speakers don't pay to participate, the audience does. That means the audience owns the session and they have the right to expect real business training rather than marketing messages."

Lee says he went from concept to live operations in less than five months. He used IT help to design the site and contracted with ConferTel to provide the audio and web conferencing along with registration, payment processing, and event production/moderation.

Even before the first session has been delivered, Lee says he has 150 speakers participating, with 750 webinars scheduled. He can run as many as 8 webinars per day, offering prospective attendees plenty of options for days, times, and topics.

Over the past year, I have seen several companies taking this tack of offering participatory content from outside presenters. KRM Information Services has a Virtual Roundtable offering that is much the same idea as Lee's venture, but is targeted at organizations and associations offering directed content to their members, typically at a higher price point than Business Expert Webinars. Insight24 is the offering that ON24 uses to publish and syndicate recorded webcasts from a variety of companies. And Brainshark recently launched their Brainshark Content Network featuring shorter recorded presentations from different authors (including yours truly).

I think these developments mark an exciting new direction in the delivery and availability of quality information for the public. I hope Business Expert Webinars is successful and continues to grow its offerings.

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Bulletproofing Event Audio

Posted by Ken Molay May 8 2008 12:49 AM EDT

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I received an email ages ago (Sorry, Michael!) asking if I would write about audio problems in webcasts. Michael said that after several years and hundreds of webcasts, he hasn't found a bulletproof way to ensure audio quality and continuity during an event. More infuriating, he said, was the lack of responsibility and responsiveness he has seen from audio vendors when something does go wrong.

Audio is the lifeblood of a web seminar, and losing a speaker line or disconnecting your audience is one of the worst things that can happen to you during an event. Having a vendor say "the fault wasn't on our network" doesn't help when you have hundreds or thousands of angry audience members who suddenly find themselves without sound.

I don't think it is theoretically possible to guarantee audio continuity. There are too many weird things that can go wrong. Presenters can lose their connection in a power outage, a local line break, or tripping over a phone cord. I have taken to dialing in to the presenter line on two separate phones. My personal office setup allows me to have one traditional "phone company" line and another phone carried over the cable company's system. They are separate and distinct carrier circuits and a failure in one would still let me speak on the other. That's an unusual configuration, but you might try the same thing by dialing in on a cell phone as an emergency backup (although you would need a full battery charge ahead of time!). At the least, you could program the dial-in number on your cell phone so you just have to hit "Send" in the event of an interruption on your normal line.

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