A few weeks ago I wrote about the launch of a new online webinar directory in Europe. This week we have a new entrant in the field here in America. WebinarHero offers businesses the opportunity to not only list their webinars in a searchable directory, but to help promote them for extra visibility online.
By now you should know the basics for this kind of service… Enter the basic information about your webinar along with a link to your landing page or registration page and it goes into a database that people can search for free. But there are some interesting twists that are unique to WebinarHero.
For one thing, WebinarHero has trademarked “Searchable Webinar Calendar” as a way to look up upcoming events by date and time rather than name or topic. Let’s say you are sitting at your desk, looking for a way to appear busy to your boss while not accomplishing any of the tasks on your to-do list (how cynical can I get?). You go to the WebinarHero calendar, click on today’s date, and see a list of all today’s webinars sorted by starting time. Pick the one that fits into your open time slot and register. You can also choose to show a week-at-a-glance or month-at-a-glance format (although I found that the monthly view took almost two minutes to load, which is a lifetime on the internet).
This is a nice feature. If I were going to gripe (and I always do), I would point out that there is no special provision for recorded presentations that are always available on demand. The provider must specify some date in the future associated with the presentation, and people browsing the calendar are not likely to see the listing. The other thing that annoys me slightly is that you click on the title of an event you are interested in and get a popup box showing mostly the same summary info. You click on it again to see a more detailed description. Then you need to do a third click to get to the provider’s link for the registration page. That’s a lot of clicking.
In addition to accepting one-by-one manual event uploads, WebinarHero has partnership agreements with several sources to get access to their full production lists of events. That lets them populate their calendar with plenty of listings. In addition to searching by date, you can enter a search keyword or browse through events grouped under several broad interest categories.
But the search and listing capability wasn’t the thing that sparked my interest as much as the help WebinarHero provides in making an event more discoverable through other online services. The basic listing is free (you need to create an account with them). For $25 more, WebinarHero blasts your basic event details out to popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, etc. Their home page proudly states that they have more than 2200 followers on their Twitter account. They also run a real-time scroll on their home page showing the latest tweets about webinars. Interesting.
For another $30 above that level, WebinarHero actually writes a basic factual press release announcing your event and puts it on the wires, along with posting it on a site indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. That can help improve the chances of your listing showing up when someone does a search on your topic.
I can’t think of anyone else offering basic searchability assistance for as little as $55. This is a great deal for small/single business owners and others who don’t have the time, skills, or money to invest in their own promotional activities.
This site should be an interesting one to keep an eye on. The value-add of the promotional options could be enough to make it stand out in the webinar directory world.
