The Webinar Blog

One-Stop Webinar Consulting

Business Expert Webinars is now offering webinar consulting for individuals. This is an innovative new approach to services in this space. It is designed for subject matter experts, service providers, trainers, consultants, and others who want to expand their business through fee-based webinars. You determine the specific area where you need help and sign up to spend an hour working with an expert in that particular niche.

Do you want help with positioning your offerings and figuring out how to put together the basics for your first webinar? Lee B. Salz is your man. Do you need advice and direction on how to market your webinar? Sign up with Jenny Hamby. Maybe you would benefit from an hour of consulting time with Susan Stoen on ways to improve your PowerPoint slides. Dan Janal is available to help with PR and publicity for your event. And who’s that down at the bottom of the page? Why, it’s yours truly! I liked the concept so much, I offered to provide my individualized consulting on speaking techniques and vocal delivery.

The great thing about this is that you get focused help at a fixed price (pretty darned low for one-on-one consulting with an expert), you’re in and out in an hour, and nobody is trying to upsell you to a package of services you don’t want or need.

Each of us is an independent business person who has been through the same concerns you face in using webinars to enhance your business and your revenues. We understand the issues and have the experience to give you straight-shootin’ advice, feedback, and recommendations to improve your success with business webinars.

Take a look at the offerings and sign up for your consulting slot today!

Technorati Tags: Business Expert Webinars,BEW,Ken Molay,webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

AirPlus Survey On Travel Alternatives

AirPlus International released a survey of 192 travel management professionals in North America and Europe, conducted in April of this year. Their first question seemed a bit ambiguous to me: “Types of travel alternatives implemented by your company in the past six months.” The options were Specialized virtual conferencing technology (such as TelePresence), Web-conferencing technology, and Increased teleconferencing. Here are the results:

It seems to me that the question specifically excludes companies who already had a stable solution in one of these technologies and didn’t have to implement it in the last half year. I also wonder how often the travel management department is aware of what virtual conferencing technologies are in place in various departments and locations in a large enterprise. But even with those doubts, the numbers were awfully high – with web conferencing surprisingly close to classic teleconferencing.

The survey concluded with this question: “Do you feel that remote conferencing is as effective as meeting in person?” Asking that of a travel management professional seems like it could possibly be influenced by conflicts of interest, but more than 70% said “Sometimes” or “Almost Always.”

This begs the question of what constitutes “effective” – which relates to my own survey on the subject. For instance, lead generation and public information dissemination would probably have much higher response figures than for socializing and team building.

For details, you can read the published PDF of the survey results from AirPlus.

Technorati Tags: AirPlus,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,virtual meeting,remote conferencing,webcasting,webcast

Yugma – Not As Dead As They Say

Publicare (owners of www.webconferencing-test.com) just put out a press release today saying that they had removed web conferencing provider Yugma from their vendor list because the company was being shut down.

Publicare quotes a letter from Yugma CEO and founder Lingaraj Mishra dated June 2. The letter says that the company’s board of directors decided to wind down the business affairs of the company.

This surprised me, and I called Lingaraj at Yugma’s offices. He says he is going crazy answering phone calls and dealing with the false story of the demise of the company. Mishra says that while there were definitely financial difficulties and management discussions of how to handle operations, the company and the product are both ongoing concerns. He wouldn’t go into details of the internal situation (Yugma is a privately held company and does not have to expose financial or operational data), but made reference to the fact that the board had brought in an interim CEO who was there for one year, leaving in April of this year. Mishra is back in charge now and is working on stabilizing financing and ownership concerns.

Mishra points to the fact that the company just put out a new release 15 days ago and has another release slated for the very near future (possibly as early as next week). He says they certainly would not be spending money on development and support of new releases if they were shutting down.

So it’s a strange story indeed, but I would advise against putting any nails in this particular coffin until we see more developments and see a public announcement from the company.

ADDENDUM (June 18): An anonymous emailer sent me a JPG of the notice that was sent and referenced in Publicare's press release. Click on the thumbnail to see an expanded version.

Technorati Tags: Publicare,Yugma,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,webcasting,webcast,Lingaraj Mishra

Survey Results – Are Webinars Effective?

I have had a public survey open for a couple of months asking for people’s impressions on webinar effectiveness. I collected 50 responses, which is not enough to be statistically representative of anything, but is interesting anecdotally. Let’s take a look at the results.

First of all, I should mention that I left the interpretation of “effective” up to each respondent. Different webinars have different goals, and companies set their own reasons for holding virtual events.

I also left open what people wanted to include in their definition of “webinar.” I assumed one-to-many or few-to-many presentations delivered live, possibly with a recording available for review. But I recognize that some people may have included collaborative team web conferences or recorded-only webcasts in considering their responses.

Almost half of the responses came from the US Eastern time zone. Interesting. The rest of North America made up the majority of the remainder, with a smattering of other countries contributing as well.

Responses reflected webinars targeted at many different industries, with good representation in education, technology, financial business, and services. They also included webinars used for training and education (included in 71% of responses), marketing and lead gen (included in 37% of responses), and customer communications (included in 29% of responses). Respondents could pick more than one use of webinars, and they also mentioned sales, employee communications, and industry communications in roughly equal numbers.

Adobe (Connect), Cisco (WebEx), and Citrix (GoToMeeting) were represented strongly, but responses came from users of many different technologies.

I was surprised that about half the respondents said they always or frequently formally measure the effectiveness and results of their webinars. That could possibly reflect a self-selecting population on the kind of people who answered the survey:

 

When asked what reasons could cause them to not formally measure the effectiveness of their webinars, the most common response was that it was too hard to establish measurable criteria, closely followed by not being able to link results solely to the webinar. It’s interesting that the third most common reason was that “Nobody has asked for it.”

 

Now we come to the crux of the matter… Do the benefits of your webinars outweigh your costs? This seems to me to be the only generic question that makes sense on a bottom line basis and should apply to any business decision. The results were overwhelmingly positive, but strangely, those who used real cost/benefit analysis were more likely to say “unknown” than those who answered based on “gut feel”:

It’s worth mentioning some of the comments associated with this question:

• Compared to face-to-face meetings, yes.
• Compared to the costs of travel for in-person training, etc… WAY Cheaper!
• The benefits outweigh the costs—but only over a long period of time. “Benefits” tend to be defined as “sales leads” and while we’ve found that webinars definitely produce these, they are typically longer tail leads which require additional nurturing over time.
• Webinars are provided as a a member service. They are highly rated, in high demand, and have very low incremental cost.

I’ll finish up with the general comments that people provided, not associated with a particular question:

• It saves tens of thousands every month, my customers accept this is the best form of formal communication, it’s easy for them to use, it’s cheap.
• We were just using this for student orientations and seminars. Now we have just started using this for Faculty Development and everyone loves it.
• Asking if Webinars are effective for generating sales/leads and image of a company is like asking if the Bravo series "Inside the Actors Studio" in NY helps Pace University increase their student numbers. Students attending this University enroll for many different reasons but I am sure this TV series, (where they interview famous actors and all the students are sitting in the audience) is a major reason why the Performing Arts Program is the fastest growing of all the University courses. The results perhaps were difficult to measure 12 years ago, but they are obvious now. I host and produce a Topical Webinar series for the education of real estate agents. Just this past Webinar we were able to measure 12 direct sales.  This is the first time we have had an actual person tracking sales from the Webinar.
• It's often hard to measure the ROI or effectiveness of a single webinar.  But, when integrated into a comprehensive marketing plan that includes email marketing, print marketing and other communications, webinars are a vital component to the overall success of any campaign.  I consider them to be the "closer" that supports these other communication methods.
• We run 5 webinars per week on average. We actively seek feedback regarding our webinars.  I can say that our webinars are effective and profitable.  My gut feeling is in the proper hands, webinars are very effective and in the improper hands, well . . . they are probably not effective at all.

What can we glean from this survey? If you are on the fence about whether webinars make business sense for your company, this should give you a little more confidence based on the experiences of your peers. Web seminars seem to be worth the effort and the money across a wide variety of industries and locations. If you haven’t taken the plunge, maybe now is a good time to try out the concept.

For those who like their data raw, here is the spreadsheet with all collected responses and summary charts. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Web Conferencing Community Forum Update

The following post was just added to the Web Conferencing Community Forum:

I have been turning to this forum for help and advice. It is sad that most of the posts have turned into self-serving advertisements. Which, in my opinion, is equal to Spam. It seems to me, with the economy in the condition that it is, this forum should be a wealth of advice and encouragement. I know Ken is doing what he can to help, but can’t we as a community put this forum back on track and make it a truly valuable resource?

I administer the forum and I have noted the same thing. It is sad. I am trying very hard not to impose censorship on posts. I have deleted a few phishing posts and deceptive entries, but I’m trying to let the community have a completely open venue for sharing opinions, advice, concerns, and questions. Vendors are a part of the community and their contributions are welcome, but watch out companies… You can easily create a backlash against your own products (and integrity). We’re not naive… We can spot the difference between a helpful, informative contribution and an advertisement.

I hope that end users will “take back their turf” and overwhelm the board with real collaborative discussions. It’s a useful place for newbies to solicit help from more experienced hands and for experienced users to engage with others experts outside the boundaries of a vendor-sponsored and vendor-controlled support forum.

Are you thinking of switching technologies or looking for your first web conferencing product? This is the place to ask others for their honest opinions. Have you had good or bad experiences with service providers? Let others know. Do you need some help and tips on best practices? There are probably people out there who have been through the same situation.

Have fun!

Bad Press For Webinars

Two articles caught my eye on Friday. Here’s a personal take on a social networking webinar written by Jaimy Marie. Check the first sentence of the article:

“I sat in on an ExactTarget Marketing Webinar earlier this week, and, although WebEx kept freezing my computer trying to get the audio to work (quite obnoxious), I thought there were a few good takeaways to share.”

The rest of her article talks about the content and value of the presented material. But she felt strongly enough about her technical experience to make it the lead sentence of her piece.

And in a California story written by Scott Sabatini in the Examiner, the technical difficulties are highlighted right in the title: “Schwarzenegger’s webcast technical difficulties don’t stop dissatisfaction from pouring in.”

The live webcast seems to have broken down and they couldn’t get it working even after 30 minutes. It looks like the technical platform was “CoverItLive,” which I am unfamiliar with.

I’m not pointing out these situations to embarrass the companies or to say that you shouldn’t use them. It was coincidence that I saw the articles on the same day. No webcasting technology is foolproof. There are too many variables outside of the control of the vendor. The quality of the experience is affected by local computer issues, network issues, conflicts with other software, and more.

What can you do as a host to help minimize frustration on a public event?

1) If webcasting your audio (streaming the audio over attendees’ computers), bridge in a telephone audioconference line and offer the number as a backup for attendees to use. You cannot diagnose attendee sound problems during an event. Don’t even try. Just tell them to call in on their telephone.

2) Plan to record and/or transcribe your event and make it available as quickly as possible. Your fallback position for attendees who tell you they couldn’t connect or couldn’t see/hear is to get them on-demand access ASAP. If it is critical information, you might want to consider two modes of recording. I have taken to using my audioconferencing vendor’s recording feature to record the audio separately from the main event audio/visual recording. If I need to, I can reconstruct an audio/video playback file using the original slides and the audio file.

3) Have multiple computers set up on the hosting side, all running as presenters. If one computer fails for whatever reason, you can switch to another one. In a “simulcast” where you are remote webcasting a local event this can be quite a technical challenge involving switches and patch cables. Get a professional involved.

4) Have a dedicated person assigned to answer attendee technical problems by email and telephone during the event. You can’t deal with problems if you are a presenter or on-air moderator. Make sure attendees have emergency contact information as part of their login instructions. If your vendor will cover this front-line support for connection problems, that’s great!

5)  This is impractical for all but the largest and most critical events, but consider having an entirely separate technology set up to webcast the same meeting. If your first technology fails catastrophically (as in the Schwarzenegger webcast), tell people how to switch to the secondary login. I recognize that this is very hard to do… You have extra costs, extra technology licensing, and extra communication channels to support. It’s the equivalent of booking another convention center in case your primary building loses power!

I ended up using option number 5 recently myself, but I’m a special case… I have access to more webcasting technologies than the average corporate user. I gave a presentation to a room full of convention attendees in the Philippines via webinar. Their primary web conferencing technology wouldn’t work, so I pulled in a backup technology I had available. Then I couldn’t hear the sound from their side while I was talking, so we hooked in a Skype VoIP line on a second computer and I ran an earphone to it.

When I work as a guest speaker or moderator, I typically use two computers and two phone lines. It’s ridiculous overkill and seems silly… Right up until the first one fails. That doesn’t happen very often at all, but if you do enough webcasts, it eventually will.

Your goal is to make the technology transparent. If your audience is concentrating on technical problems instead of your wonderful content, you’ll hear about it. And so will many others.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Webinar Vendors: Does Size Matter?

When looking for a webinar technology vendor, you need to look beyond the software to the company itself. Let’s examine the typical kinds of sales/marketing stories you may hear from big and small companies to see whether they hold up in the real world.

[I have worked successfully with the biggest, longest-established players in the business and with small startups. And I’ve been frustrated by both as well. I’ll tell you my answer up front… You’re going to find something you like and something you don’t like about every vendor. How those positives and negatives match to your priorities will determine whether it is the right company for you.]

• The big players will tell you: “We have the stability and resources of a huge company behind us. You aren’t going to be left holding a license for useless software when your little private vendor suddenly closes up shop.” True or false?

Larger organizations are typically more stable than smaller companies. True. But size is not a guarantee of stability. Ask car dealers around the US. Are they happy they signed up with GM and Chrysler for the stability it guaranteed them? The opposing argument to the “big company” message is that it is easier for a big company to cut personnel, investment, or support for a web conferencing product that is just a small part of their overall revenue mix. The bottom line rules, and it can be ruthless.

• Small players will tell you: “We will give you personal attention and flexible support for your special needs that a big company can’t.” True or false?

Cisco is unlikely to modify their two-year development plan for WebEx and throw in a new feature next month just because you say you need it. True. But the opposing argument is that the big companies with many thousands of business customers and many years in business are more likely to have seen your business need and addressed it already. I am sometimes surprised when I point out areas for feature improvements for smaller vendors and they say “Huh! I guess that could be valuable. We hadn’t thought of that.” Do you want to be the test case that your smaller vendor learns from?

• Big vendors may say: “We have a huge support department that is available around the clock. A smaller vendor can’t give you that kind of support.” True or false?

In a literal sense, this statement is probably true. How useful that support is might be another matter. A few of the largest vendors (names withheld to prevent lawsuits) send you straight to “first level support” when you call or email. This is all too often an outsourced company in a country far from the developers, working off scripts and asking you to recite your name, email, customer ID, phone number, and shoe size before they will even listen to your problem. I work with several small vendors where I call in and know the developers who answer the phone by name. And I bless the small size of the company when they answer my question or fix the problem instantly themselves.

The aspect of support where the big players really can shine is in providing technical assistance for attendees having trouble joining a meeting. Usually a script and set of troubleshooting steps is all that is needed. If I know I can rely on my vendor to take on that role, it relieves me of tremendous stress. And if they offer it around the clock, and have local support offices speaking Chinese, Japanese, or a few European languages, it can boost them to the top of the list for my international webinars.

As you can see, just about any argument in favor of a vendor based purely on size can be countered with an alternate hypothetical scenario. Instead of concentrating on size as your determining factor, look at the specific issues that are being rolled up in the size arguments. Decide which are the most likely to affect the success of your events and the ease with which you can carry on your business.

And definitely ask other users for their experiences with the vendor. Don’t rely solely on offered references. Put out open-ended requests for comment on forums, blogs, or other public access sites. One place to try is the Web Conferencing Community Forum (www.wcc-forum.com). I built it as an open exchange area free of vendor sponsorship, advertising, or censorship. Lately it’s been collecting far too many self-serving marketing messages from vendors (which I also try not to censor, as long as they aren’t deceptive or inaccurate).

Technorati Tags: web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,Web Conferencing Community Forum