The Webinar Blog

Lead Gen Taken To An Extreme

Holy cow... We've reached a new level of lead generation craziness.

I saw a press release from BrightCom announcing a customer win. Good for them. Since it's related to web conferencing and potentially of interest to my readers, I went to add it to the Industry News page on the Webinar Success website. My policy is to attempt to link to the press release as posted on the vendor's site when possible, rather than to the newswire version. I just think it's a courtesy to them to drive the traffic directly to the source. Unfortunately, many companies don't get their own news page updated fast enough to make that possible, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, I cruised over to the BrightCom press release page and clicked on the latest listing. To my amazement, I was presented with a screen saying that I would have to supply my first and last name, email, phone number, and company name before being allowed to read the public press release that had already been distributed over the wires. What's next? A lead gen registration form presented as a barrier before seeing a company's home page?

Folks, take it easy on the registration requirements... Give people some public information before you go demanding their identity (with the clear implication that you will use it to badger them later).

Technorati Tags: lead generation, BrightCom

New updates from MeetingBridge

I got an email today from MeetingBridge announcing an upgrade to their web conferencing software. The email was a pretty long and detailed list of new and changed features. Kind of like publishing your release notes as a marketing communique! If you would like to view the full letter, they made it available online at this link.

To summarize their summary (always dangerous):

1) Application Sharing requires an ActiveX installation.

This is a common requirement for many of the web conferencing vendors, but I don't wonder if it builds part of the mistrust of such software among novice users. People have been trained to avoid doing any prompted installations through the web for fear of viruses, and ActiveX has a particularly bad rep for the paranoid, since they get warnings all the time from email and web security programs with filters to prevent ActiveX controls from running. There is nothing inherently wrong with using ActiveX and you shouldn't be scared to install it when it's from a real commercial, verified company. Unfortunately its power has been misused by miscreants.

2) You can quickly stamp an annotation image on a slide corresponding to your mouse pointer (a thick arrow pointing up and to the left).

Having a pointer stamp is a big plus. I'm a solid believer in drawing the audience's attention to each point in your content. Two things bother me about the MeetingBridge implementation. First, I don't like pointers that point left. Most slides still use bullet points (usually to their detriment). Actually, for any text, it is more convenient to place a pointer to the left of the text, pointing towards the right to highlight the phrase of interest. Pointing left means you can't point at where you want the audience to start reading without making things messy with combined text and graphics. The second problem is that MeetingBridge says "To clear your pointer images and markings, just advance to the next slide." There are plenty of times when I like to put up a brief pointer to focus attention and then clear it to let the content have precedence.

3) You can now annotate a live screen during application sharing.

This is great. Only a few vendors have implemented this ability. I'm hoping MeetingBridge didn't do it in a way that makes you snap a still shot of your screen and annotate that. Building a true annotation layer that can be displayed simultaneously with your live demo is very cool and useful. I'm looking forward to seeing this in action.

4) Application Sharing defaults to sharing all applications (the entire desktop).

I don't have a positive or negative opinion on this, but I hope at some point that MeetingBridge adds the ability to display a presenter-defined region or window on the screen. I love being able to show all popup and overlay windows that occur within a region without having to worry about selecting the application. At the same time, I can keep control boxes or other private stuff outside the region so my audience doesn't see them.

Thanks for the updates, MeetingBridge!

Technorati Tags: MeetingBridge, application sharing, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar

A Conversation With Onstream

I followed up with Onstream today to find out more about their webinar business. I spoke with Brian King in their San Francisco office. Brian told me that they have ramped up services and technology this spring and summer to support lead generation webinars. Onstream has a history in delivering webcasts, which aren't designed to be as interactive. They have done the usual portfolio of earnings calls, educational topics, product launches, CEO presentations, and so forth.

The company provides a full service video webcasting production crew if desired. For instance, they handled the red carpet premiere of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movie this summer for Disney. Brian says they have an entire mobile videoconferencing unit boxed up and ready to ship to any location desired by a client.

Their technology supports the standard features we now expect to find from the major vendors: Streaming audio delivered over the Internet, slide shows, live video, polling, text Q&A, and exit surveys. The new features they added were designed to make life easier for marketing-oriented webinars with invitations that support HTML templates and list distribution, customized registration pages, and lead scoring. The latter is a concept that only a few vendors have added to their technology mix so far. The idea is that you can assign weights and scores to various registration questions. People can prequalify themselves as to their sales potential by their answers, giving the sales force a built-in priority order for followup.

One of the nice tricks that Onstream has taken to providing in its lead generation webinars is to send out an email between registration and the event date that solicits questions and concerns from the registrants. This encourages participation and gives the registrants a stake in the content of the event. It also lets the event producer see the most prevalent concerns among his/her audience so s/he can adjust content and emphasis appropriately.

Brian says the Onstream differentiator is bang for the buck (he gave me some sample prices that I found to be extremely reasonable), expertise in field production services, the availability of the complete lead generation package, and the ease of use of their platform.

One of the things that isn't there yet is the ability to support embedded Flash content (they currently require you to open a Web page to push the content). That's in late development right now. Also, PowerPoint slides must be static images... They don't support direct conversion of animations and slide transitions. While the company supports both telephone-based and Internet-based audio, there are concerns about audience reception delays that make combined audio use tricky for a highly interactive event where you are soliciting lots of audience feedback throughout the presentation. But offsetting this concern is a very slick ability to package the entire video/web/audio stream for playback over an Internet-only event connection. You can merge in video clips and keep them synchronized with your presentation audio before and after. I liked that.

You'll probably be hearing more about and from Onstream. Keep them on your list.

Technorati Tags: lead generation, Onstream, Onstream Media, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Onstream's Webinar Data

Onstream Media did their usual quarterly financial results conference call and issued a press release with a recap of the call. Buried pretty far down was a paragraph of interest to those tracking the effectiveness of webinars:

      The Company launched an extension to its Visual Webcaster Platform with
       a new lead generation Webinar service. Webinars are becoming an
       increasingly popular and cost-effective tool in the overall sales and
       marketing functions of many companies. Onstream Media's new service
       enables clients to hold real-time virtual seminars over the Internet.
       In its own test of the Webinar service, from a single event and a
       marketing budget of less than $5,000, Onstream Media received 377
       registrations and 197 qualified leads.  From those leads, the Company
       has set 27 appointments, of which the first 11 meetings have generated
       9 proposals valued at over $150,000 and signed contracts for $30,000.

I love the fact that they laid out all the numbers and showed the results of their own marketing webinar. Good luck to you, Onstream. Hope you close those sales!

Technorati Tags: Onstream, Onstream Media, webinar

Dear Sir: Greetings From Nigeria

I ran across a press release today that gave me pause. It said that an American trade delegation will be visiting Nigeria in early September. As the press release said, "Prominent among the trade delegation to Nigeria are representatives of two companies who have interest in doing business in Nigeria." One of these companies is Instantstream, which has a product called Streamphone. Streamphone is marketed as a collaborative web conferencing service (I had not heard of it before reading their web page).

Now that's all fine and good. If companies want to internationalize and find economical ways to expand their business, it's okay in my book. But it so happens that a few years ago I got interested in all those junk email solicitations that state that someone has millions of unclaimed dollars sitting around in a fund and they need your help to transfer it, for which you will be amply rewarded. First of all, I couldn't believe that anybody anywhere ever fell for those things or took them seriously for a second. It turns out I was wrong.

According to The 419 Coalition, The Nigerian Scam is "A Five Billion US$ (as of 1996, much more now) worldwide Scam which has run since the early 1980's under Successive Governments of Nigeria. It is also referred to as 'Advance Fee Fraud', '419 Fraud' (Four-One-Nine) after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria, and 'The Nigerian Connection' (mostly in Europe). However, it is usually called plain old '419' even by the Nigerians themselves."

What's interesting about the operations in Nigeria is that the Central Bank of Nigeria, members of the Nigerian Diplomatic Corps, and various government officials have been shown to be involved in the scam and actively operating as willing accomplices. (There are hundreds of sites on the web if you want to do research. Just use a major search engine and 419 or Nigerian Scam).

People who get caught up in the scheme are often told at some point that they need to travel to Nigeria in order to handle sensitive financial details in person. Once there, they have been threatened, kidnapped, assaulted, and worse. The State Department lists Nigeria in its International Travel Warnings with dire tales of violent crime (including by people in police and military uniforms), unsafe travel, military and religious fighting, and local police authorities unwilling to help. "No one should provide personal financial or account information to unknown parties."

I bring this up for two reasons. The first is to point out one of the funniest photo ops I have ever seen featured in a press release. Look at the poor unidentified American businessman in the press release photo. Seldom have I seen such a worried, haunted look on the face of a glad-handing business representative. Most of the apparently local Nigerian crew seems to be in a good mood, but what's up with that linebacker standing behind Mr. Businessman? I don't think I want that guy standing behind me. Certainly not with that expression on his face. And I want his hands in plain sight.

The second point is more serious (although Mr. Businessman might disagree with my rankings). I don't know what Instantstream is doing in Nigeria, but if they have any part of their computerized operations filtering through that country's networks, there is no way I would ever sign up with them and provide any personal information. I certainly would not authorize any financial transactions, including billing information, that is conducted electronically. I don't care how encrypted the data is while going over the wires, there are too many corrupt personnel involved in all facets of business and international trade there.

In the meantime, I hasten to point out that Instantstream is a New York company, and I know nothing about them, certainly nothing bad. They probably have no offshore outsourcing of any data services and I am not implying anything remotely negative about the company. Streamphone sounds interesting in and of itself. I just want to hear from them after their little trip exactly what their plans are regarding Nigeria!

Technorati Tags: 419, Instantstream, Nigerian Scam, Streamphone, Nigeria, web conferencing

Marketing Department, Meet Your Sales Team

I just got a superb eBook written by Jill Konrath (author of Selling To Big Companies). The offer is sponsored as part of a marketing program by Eloqua and Pragmatech Software. You can download the eBook (which does not require a fancy reader... it's just a PDF document nicely formatted) from the Eloqua website.

The document is 15 pages with plenty of white space and nice big bullet points, as well as a cartoon or two. So it's a fast, easy read. But the concepts are expressed so cogently and compellingly that it's truly a matter of quality rather than quantity.

The title of the piece is "What Sales Really Needs From Marketing." This is not new, groundbreaking material. The bottomless divide between sales and marketing in corporate environments has been fodder for business books and articles for a long time. But Konrath clearly and simply lays out the big ticket items that cause lead generation programs to be ineffective in producing additional sales. She spends some time defining the basics of value-based selling (and marketing) and then moves on to a discussion of triggering events that can spark a need for your goods and services. Additional subjects include call scripts and voicemail strategies, overcoming sales obstacles, and building a campaign plan.

Speaking as a former tech marketer, I might say she lays the blame for all inadequacies in the sales/marketing cycle a little too squarely on the shoulders of the marketing group. But I will also readily admit that she is accurate in her portrayal of many marketing programs as excessively introspective. Marketing groups that start from a perspective of "what's new in the product" and move on to "how many people can we hit with our message" may develop large numbers of contacts, but few of them are likely to be quality sales leads.

I bring it up because the concepts apply quite strongly to marketing driven webinars. If your goals for effectiveness are to get the largest possible number of new leads, the content of your event is unimportant. Just design a really good invitation and description page, capture as much contact information and prequalification questions as you can up front during event registration, and hand the results to your sales force. I once had a boss who counted our marketing effectiveness that way... What are the raw number of leads collected this month, and how does it compare to last month? iPod giveaways are wonderful for boosting these kinds of numbers.

But if you are going to use your marketing webinars as a tool to help your company develop and nurture serious prospects that the sales team is happy to receive, you need a whole different perspective. What are the concerns of your target audience? Why should they care about your company? How can you clearly describe the tangible benefits they will receive from spending money with you? And how does your webinar fit in with the other tools your sales/marketing chain uses to influence and guide your prospects?

Download the book. It's short and it's important. Then apply the concepts to your marketing webinars.

Technorati Tags: Eloqua, Jill Konrath, lead generation, marketing, Selling To Big Companies, Pragmatech, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webinar

Last Chance For My Free Webinar

It's your last chance to register for my webcast of Making Your Webinars More Effective using Adobe's Macromedia Breeze software (thank you, Adobe, for sponsoring the event). We'll be covering planning, preparation, delivery, and post-event activities to improve the quality of and returns from your public webinars. Last I heard, there were a few hundred people registered, so I'm looking forward to a lively webinar with a good Q&A session.

Show time is Tuesday, August 22 at 2pm Eastern Time. You can get a local translation to your time zone with a click of this link to TimeAndDate.com.

For those of you reading this on a feed that doesn't preserve click-through links, the easy to type, easy to remember URL for registration is www.effectivewebinars.com.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Macromedia Breeze, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

How To Grill A Web Conferencing Vendor

eWEEK.com ran an article today on questions to include in an RFP for web conferencing vendors. The article of course is available as a link from the Webinar Success Industry News page (shameless plug!). Press releases are at the top of the page, news stories and articles at the bottom.

I'll get to their recommended questions in a moment, but first a brief word from a former enterprise software marketing manager. Please, folks, think carefully before issuing a giant, detailed RFP to a bunch of vendors. (If you are not familiar with this aspect of corporate decision making, an RFP is a "Request for Proposal" and typically contains a huge number of questions about product functionality, company viability, and so on. They may be used to do initial short-list selection of vendors to bring in for demos or pricing talks. But more often, they are used purely as a CYA policy that gets filed in a drawer somewhere so if the project doesn't work, the project management team can pull out the document and say to the vendor that the product didn't perform as stated.)

I have watched many sales and marketing representatives fill out RFP's at various software companies. The typical process is to start by answering YES to all product functionality questions. Then you backtrack through the list and see if there is anything you can't somehow rationalize to say "Well... It would be possible if you jumped through these eight hoops." At great risk of personal injury, a dedicated RFP responder may try to get an engineer involved to answer a particularly tough question. The detailed response, sprinkled liberally with qualifiers, is then paraphrased back to a one sentence answer. Or back to the one word "Yes."

The problem with most RFP questions is that they don't adequately differentiate between different approaches to the same functionality. For instance, the eWEEK list has a question asking if the web conferencing product supports application and desktop sharing. This question gets a YES from just about everybody. But does the app sharing support a user-defined region on the screen, full desktop, or a named application? If a named application, does it show pop-up windows that are children of the main process? Can you whiteboard on top of the screen share (yes, at least one vendor allows this advanced feature). And so on. The YES/NO functionality doesn't give you enough information to rank-compare vendors.

I'm not saying that this list is a bad thing to have. On the contrary, I think eWEEK has done a tremendous service for many companies investigating the purchase of a web conferencing solution. But nothing beats experience in trying to use the different implementations of features.

Another thing to recognize is that many of the features listed may be unimportant for your needs. Don't just pick up the list and throw it at your potential suppliers and then count the number of YES answers. Go through it and see if the feature is useful to your company and your needs. If you don't understand the use of the feature, don't include the question... The answer won't do you any good. (This isn't just me... eWEEK also points out that purchasing company priorities should guide the use of questions on an RFP).

The big one that bothers me is their statement that "All RFPs should include requests for customer references..." That's not fair to the references or the supplier. A reference check should be the LAST step in your purchasing decision, after you have decided that everything else is appropriate for your needs, including pricing. A reference check lets you confirm your decision. It shouldn't be used in lieu of an evaluation process. Reference calls take valuable time away from busy companies, at no benefit to them. Each time a reference is listed on an RFP, a conscientious sales/marketing person has to seek permission from the reference and alert them that they might get a call. It is a strain on the relationship even if the RFP reader never does follow through. Just asking too many times can be an imposition.

But little gripes aside, this article is an immensely worthwhile addition to your knowledge base when selecting a webinar vendor. If you don't understand the questions and their relative importance, you might want to consider getting outside help in your selection process. Ahem. You know who to call.

Technorati Tags: eWEEK, RFP, vendor selection, web conference, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

MegaMeeting Goes Antiterrorist

I was mightily amused by the headline on today's press release from MegaMeeting: "MegaMeeting.com Counters Terrorist Plot With Free Video Conferencing Offer"

I'm not sure that this is what the international security community would consider "countering a terrorist plot," but we get the idea. While looking over the MegaMeeting.com website again, I either discovered a new chart or rediscovered one that I had seen and forgotten. They put in a little comparison table with self-selected categories playing up advantages of MegaMeeting over WebEx, Macromedia Breeze, and Microsoft Live Meeting. A nice marketing feature indeed and one that is sure to catch the eye of prospective customers.

Technorati Tags: MegaMeeting, MegaMeeting.com, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar

Responsive Marketing

As far as I can tell, Convenos wins the competition as the first vendor to play off the business travel inconveniences today. They just put out a press release with a sub-head of "Business Travelers Are Encouraged to Make Meetings Predictable During Unpredictable Air Travel Circumstances." The release references today's increase in security requirements for fliers.

Lest you think I'm berating them for cynically capitalizing on terrorism activities... Not true. This is quick reactive marketing in response to current events and a subject that is obviously on the minds of their target market. Heck, I'm doing the same thing just by posting these blog entries (as are hundreds of other bloggers around the world today). It's not disrespectful, as the terrorists seem to have been foiled and the only tragedy in this particular case has been inconveniences and time delays. And the realities of the situation are obvious.

Oh, and by the way, WebEx reacted as expected on the news today. The stock was up $1.04, or 3.24 percent. Convenos is not publicly traded, so no direct financial news from them.

Technorati Tags: Convenos, web conferencing, WebEx