The Webinar Blog

Save The Earth: Attend A Webinar?

Tomorrow, April 22, is Earth Day 2006. Two web conferencing vendors have fired up their marketing machinery in honor of the event.

On April 11, LiveOffice Corporation issued a press release stating that "Any American worker willing to telecommute to the office at least once during the month of April is entitled to a free 30-day trial of web conferencing from LiveOffice." (Their normal free trial is 15 days, and this is still what you see when you click on the website link.)

Not to be outdone, WebEx issued a press release today announcing a partnership with Carbonfund.org where people who hold two meetings during their free 14-day trial will have a tree planted in their name.

I have great respect, admiration, and thanks for anybody who consciously tries to moderate their negative impact on the planet. As a global community, humanity is causing changes to natural systems faster than the Earth usually has to cope with such things (meteor strikes and massive volcanic eruptions aside).

But the natural marketing cynic in me gets a little annoyed and a little creeped out when such good intentions are coopted for corporate lead generation and trumpeted as altruistic. Both press releases spend a lot of time talking about facts and figures associated with the impacts of travel. Neither company mentions what it as a corporation is doing to change its impact on the environment... only what its customers should do (mainly, use the products).

WebEx has long offered a 2-week trial, so that's not a new customer benefit. But the tree planting is a laudable and tangible action by the company, and I'm delighted to read about it.

I guess that advanced awareness of environmental impact and a call to action are good things to have in as many places as possible. It just seems so... so... manufactured a sentiment when it's placed once in a press release along with exhortations to use the corporate product. Perhaps the companies could keep the word going year round, perhaps with some examples of ways in which they were fighting the battle on their own property?

Webinars That Stink

You see what happens? You write something nice about another blogger and they ask you what you think about Smellovision. Sue Pelletier sent me an email referring to her recent blog entry covering the use of scents as a way to engage and/or influence your audience.

If I could get the technology to smell-o-vise my webinars to enhance concentration and learning, would I? Not a chance.

Smells are tricky things. Ever notice how many perfumes are on the market? Don't you think if there was one that had a universal effect it would have long ago edged out all competition? Ever worked with someone who used WAY too much cologne or perfume? Why aren't they bothered by it? Why do some cultures cover up the smell of sweat while others view it as perfectly natural and acceptable?

Manipulating your audience's senses is a very difficult business. I spent five years of my professional career as a tour director/tour guide. I'd be on a bus for one to three weeks with a varied group of tourists. Do you think they ever universally agreed on the comfort of the temperature, microphone volume levels, light levels, or amount of talking vs. silence? Not hardly. I can't imagine trying to pump the bus full of a scent that a researcher somewhere had decided was beneficial. The people near the distribution outlets would be overwhelmed, those far from them would be unaffected. The introduced odors would mingle with the other odors already in the room to form an entirely new mix (I wonder how much the smellovision movie researchers studied the effect of their scents when combined with the overwhelming aromas of buttered and/or burnt popcorn?).

Call me a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist, but I'd far prefer to win over my audience with quality content, well-planned pacing, and stimulating presentation skills.

Murphy Has A Meeting

Wow. I thought *I* was snarky and cynical! Here's an article by Ben Grabow, who was obviously having a very bad day with his web conferencing software. Folks, if things are going like this, it's time to find a new vendor -- and fast!

Another Great Reference

Meet Sue Pelletier. You'll have to do it on your own, as I don't really know her. But she's been kind enough to pick up on some of my entries and link to them in her blog. Which, of course, got me reading her blog to see where the heck I'm being cited.

It's a creation called Face2Face, which is funny to me, seeing as how my business is all about helping people work in virtual meetings rather than face-to-face! But it turns out that her incredibly prolific entries (Nine in the last 3 days? Sue, you're embarrassing me!) cover a wide range of topics including web collaboration, live audience meetings, marketing tips, advice useful to people who travel for meetings, and sometimes just little tidbits that she finds personally interesting.

Sometimes she uses her blog as a portal, guiding you to other entries she has found that seem to offer value. Sometimes she writes her own thoughts and opinions, and she is one of those people who writes succinctly and well. I occasionally manage one or the other, but hitting both is a special challenge.

Check it out. I'm adding it to my blog subscription list.

Mistakes of the Experts

I watched a webinar today given by a person who does much of what I do... It was about how to design and deliver persuasive web seminars. These were the things he did that didn't work:

1) He used a cheap webcam in his office. It showed jerky broken motion, he swayed back and forth the entire time, and you could clearly see his cluttered office with papers and folders scattered and stacked all over his desk. This did not contribute to an air of professional presentation. A coworker walked in and sat in view of the camera with his back to the audience in the middle of the webcast!

2) He started with a series of poll questions before ever presenting anything to the audience. During the polls he gave promotional pitches about associated businesses in his organizational umbrella. Don't ask your audience to give to you before you have given something to them. He never used a poll later to break things up during his monologue to recapture attention.

3) He used illustrative examples of good graphics that included an unreadable circular picture with text written upside down, sideways, and too small to show up.

4) He used illustrative examples for presentation preparation including talking about the books of the bible with the Jews' entrance into the promised land and a picture of a pretty model in a slinky black dress. This isn't explicitly wrong, but you have to watch out for the potential to alienate or discomfort a portion of your audience. Feminists or people uncomfortable with their self image might not have liked his model example. Certain religious affiliations might not like the use of that biblical reference. They weren't necessary for his points about presentations and could have been made in a safer way.

5) While talking about using graphics on your slide designs, the majority of his content slides were simple collections of text bullet points.

6) It took 20 minutes of intro before he got to his first tip or guideline to the audience. Give the audience what they expect, quickly! I would venture a guess that he lost some portion of his audience before he really "started" his content.

7) He mis-read his timings. He said he had about a half hour of content to leave plenty of time in the hour for questions. He actually stopped talking at the 52 minute mark, at which time he announced that he had left about 15-20 minutes for questions. Rather confusing.

8) He prefaced his answer to a question with a disingenuous "Good question!" The others weren't good?

9) He answered questions without reading the question out loud to the audience. We had to pick up the question from context. Somebody obviously wrote in about this during the Q&A and he defended himself, saying he had been paraphrasing the questions, and would continue to do so. If your audience thinks something is wrong, it is wrong for them. Don't tell them they are mistaken.

10) He gave a long, rambling response to a question that went into completely different areas. We lost focus on what he was answering.

Am I just sniping? Okay, maybe a little bit. I take this stuff seriously and I think a provider of services for coaching and training others needs to be held to a higher standard where they demonstrate expertise in their own presentations. But I also think it makes an excellent training guide for you, since negative examples are powerful learning aids. If you give presentations, use every presentation you watch as a way to check yourself and watch for bad habits. Even the best of us can fall prey to complacency and overfamiliarity with our own style. You need outsiders to check you every so often.

It Starts With A Title

I came across a new online article by Anne Holland in her MarketingSherpa research portal. She starts off by pointing out that webinars are not the novelty they once were and that audiences are much more discerning in picking the ones they will attend. A pity for those of us in the business, but a tremendously important true fact. (I miss the days of doing webinars in 1999 and 2000 when we'd get registration rates of 60% or more!)

She then says that one of your most important steps in planning your event is to pick a compelling subject title that calls out to your audience's interests. I'm with her 100 percent on this. I talk about it in my presentation on "Making Your Webinars More Effective" (you have signed up for tomorrow's webcast, haven't you?)

One of the most important things to do in the first phases of putting together your event is to stop thinking like a representative of your company and start thinking like your audience (whether those are current customers, employees, or sales prospects). Most webinars get put together from a concept such as "We have a new product release. We'd better tell people what the new features are." The webinar title comes out like "XYZWare 4.2: New Product Features". Okay, it's accurate, but the only people interested by it are the fanatics who would be seeking out the new release notes on their own.

Turn it around and ask what your potential audience cares about. Structure the title from their perspective. Alternate title possibilities would be: "Productivity Enhancements With XYZWare 4.2" or "Reducing Development Time And Costs With The XYZWare 4.2 Upgrade". Now you have a reason for the crowd to care that the new release is out. You mentioned benefits right in the title.

Remember, you can't tell your story if there's no one there to listen!

Eschew loquaciousness

One of the marketing newsletters I get is from iMedia Connection. In today's email blast, they feature an article talking about how emails should be brief and to the point, with the main pitch point and call to action "above the fold" (this is an old newpaper writers' term and refers to telling the main story summary in your first paragraph, above the fold line of the newspaper - everything else is just supportive detail). The article states that people spend an average of 15-20 seconds per opened email. That average may be correct, but I'll bet it's WAY overstated for mass marketing blasts. People spend longer on notes from friends and the latest joke of the day, leaving scant time for your invitation to a webinar.

Your invitation email should state right up at the top the subject of your webinar (which is more important than its formal title), the date and time it will be broadcast, ONE reason it is of value to the reader, and a clear request for them to register, along with an easy to use click through. Everything after that is just supportive detail.

In a similar vein, when you send the login instructions for registrants, make sure the email starts out with a clear statement that these are important instructions for listening to the event they already registered for. Tell the reader to keep them in a safe place for reference on event day. If you start with a recap of the event title, subject, and description, your readers are likely to discard the message, thinking it is another marketing solicitation.

The practice holds true, by the way, for introducing content in your webinar. Tell your audience the important thing up front, then substantiate it with details. Far too many web presentations start with an introduction to the speaker's company, where it is located, how long it has been in business, how many employees it has, and so on. Your audience has not decided that they are interested in you yet. Give them the main message, support it, and then when you have them hooked, supply them with comforting facts that let them know they can do business with you in confidence.

Measuring Success

Nice post from Eran Livneh in the MarketCapture Blog yesterday. He talks about hard, measurable results coming from a recent webinar with a client. I took a look at the MarketCapture website and it looks like they help clients with a wide range of end-to-end lead generation and campaign management activities. Webinars are naturally a significant weapon in their arsenal.

I love hearing people talk about the successes they can directly attribute to good webinars. I'll be talking about this in my upcoming ON24 broadcast about making your webinars more effective. A significant part of your effectiveness comes from activities performed AFTER the event is over! Eran demonstrates the power of following up with your registrants after the event quickly, while they are still in a receptive mood (or at least remember who the heck you are). And then measuring your results so you can plan your next activities with the extra data you have from your event. Knowing how you will measure your success and what you will do with that information is vital.

If you think it's strange that I'm boosting a competitor in my blog, then I haven't been clear enough about what kind of work I do. I don't handle end-to-end marketing campaigns or build complete lead generation strategies. I did that for years in the high tech software business and I got tired of dealing with all the things it entails. So at least I understand what you're going through in those situations and I can help fit in your webinar requirements to match the rest of the activities you'll be pursuing.

My company, Webinar Success, offers assistance on the detailed mechanics of making sure your webinars are the best they can be. Selecting the right vendor for your needs, working out the setup details, punching up presentations for use online, and most importantly, working with you to develop your online presentation skills. I even offer on-air assistance as moderator or narrator.

I just finished creating a complete presentation script for a client to make their detailed technical software solution understandable to their audience. Then I recorded an archival webinar for them as their spokesperson. We tried it once with a formal narrator voice and again in a more natural conversational style. They elected to go with the latter. You never know. We also had to work out details on how the archive would be hosted and delivered to their audience.

I've been working on a new webinar series with another client that will offer educational webinars to doctors and medical office workers as a paid online course. We have been working with in-house information systems personnel and the webinar vendor to make integrated registration work smoothly, design effective participant communications, create polls and feedback questions, and use the software to its full potential. On this one I've had to spend a lot of time on the phone with technical support reps and sales engineers from the webinar vendor, as the client's needs are tricky.

I love being able to focus on these challenges. I get in, make it work, and get out again. The client gets the specific help they need at a reasonable price without a long term contract for services that aren't necessary. It keeps things interesting for me, since I get a chance to help out in many different industries and uses of the technology. Lead generation is probably the highest profile application, but there's a lot of other activity going on in web conferencing! You'd be surprised at the recent growth in web conferencing for local government and for religious broadcasts.

Public Slugfest!

Cool! iLinc put out a press release today directly socking it to WebEx with a customer conversion announcement and figures about how much they are saving over their old WebEx contract. If we're lucky, WebEx will fire back and we can see a return of the grand old technology publicity wars that made life so fun when I was living in Silicon Valley in the 90's. Informix and Oracle used to put up nasty billboards along Highway 101 (the main business commuting stretch through the valley) denouncing each others' business, products, executive management, and probably their taste in office decor.

Everybody is so darned politically correct and lawsuit-shy that it's refreshing to see a shot fired directly across the bow like this. "Avast ye, scabs! Prepare to be plunder'd!"

Anyway, it makes it fun for an outside observer and commentator like yours truly.

By the way, don't forget to register for my April 19 webinar in conjunction with ON24.

What Language Would You Like That In?

Another partnership announcement today from WebEx (on the Webinar Success Industry News page as always). I think this bundled service option is pretty cool. They are working with Language Line Services to let customers record a webinar event and then ship the audio track and files for translation into one of 8 non-English languages. The Language Line guys translate the text on the slides and re-record the audio, then slam the pieces back together to create a complete translated recording that viewers in other countries can watch on-demand.

The concept is a great one, and is absolutely necessary in a global business environment. There is a lot of North American (or at least English language) egocentricity in the web conferencing biz, and companies who figure out a smooth and convenient way to open new markets for their customers are going to do well.

I certainly haven't tested this service (it was just announced today!) but I have used other slide translation services in the past. You've got to be very careful with that kind of work. If you have embedded graphics with text, you're probably out of luck, since the normal translation routine deals with native PowerPoint textboxes. And sometimes these companies have a hard time ungrouping items for translation, regrouping them, and re-applying animations (especially if you use a lot of overlays and fancy PowerPoint tricks). There's also a potential problem with formatting, since the new text is never the same length as the original. You can have a tough time shoehorning the translated words onto a chart or table. The principles of good PowerPoint design should apply to all versions of your presentations, and this means you should demand the right to review and reformat your slides before the final reassembly with the audio track.

I have found that translation works best with the worst kinds of PowerPoint creations... boring sets of bulleted text on slide after slide.

None of this is a dig at Language Line. They might be incredible at their work. I have no idea how they go about their business. But if you are planning to take advantage of this new offering, I hope I have given you some hints on what questions to ask beforehand and what to review before accepting the output. If any of you try this, let me know how it comes out!