The Webinar Blog

New GoToWebinar Pricing From Citrix

David Chao from WebEx pointed out on his Web Conferencing Blog that Citrix has introduced new pricing for GoToWebinar. His post actually focuses on the wrong piece of their lineup. The price for the “lighter” personal user account of GoToMeeting remains constant at $49/month or $468/year. They did alter the number of attendees allowed per meeting under that plan. It had been a maximum of 10 and now allows 15. So that’s nice!

But the interesting wrinkle is the new pricing structure for GoToWebinar. GoToWebinar has long been the huge “disruptive pricing” leader for the webinar industry. The software gives you full registration, reporting, and similar webinar functionality. They had been offering it at $99/month or $948/year for anything up to 1000 attendees per meeting. That was an incredible value for giant webinars and impossible to beat. The $99 price level still exists, but now that plan caps your maximum meeting size at 100 participants. To get up to the previous 1000-person capacity, you have to pay $499/month or $4788/year. That represents a price increase of more than 400 percent for a maximum room size.

Citrix has also introduced a mid-range capacity plan for rooms of 500 participants. Interestingly, the price is not halfway between the other two. It costs $399/month or $3828/year.

My personal opinion is that $99/month is still a good value for a 100-person webinar room. But now there is more price competition for larger room sizes between Citrix and other web conferencing vendors.

Technorati Tags: Citrix,GoToWebinar,GoToMeeting,David Chao,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web collaboration,online meeting,online seminar

Stop Call-To-Action Overload

Read this article by Katie Walsh at Bulldog Solutions. I have something very important to add:

Yes. YES. YEEESSSSSS!!!!

Take a stand. Pick an action item. Tell your audience what you expect of them. Then stop.

Technorati Tags: Katie Walsh,Bulldog Solutions,call to action,marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,web event,web conference,web conferencing

Adobe Connect Pro Now On iPhone

I haven’t been able to find a formal press release on the wires, but Adobe has finally released its long-promised “Connect Pro Mobile” that allows meeting participants to watch and listen to Connect Pro meetings on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Sandy Lo wrote about the release today on the Adobe Developers blog and I also received word from the company’s PR agency.

This announcement may be a bit confusing for people who read an Adobe User Community post by Alistair Lee last October. In it, he talked about Connect Pro Mobile in the present tense, as a working app. Now the company says the October demonstrations were a “sneak peek” at future technology. No matter, it’s here and available for download.

I don’t own an iPhone, so I won’t be giving you a first-hand report on the user experience. I would be immensely grateful to any commenters who can share with us how practical they found it when watching live video of the presenter, screen sharing demonstrations, or community chat messages inside a meeting.

WebEx is the only other web conferencing product I am aware of that allows mobile access. Although I just read a press release today that Onstream Media has launched a mobile version of its streaming video support intended for iPhone and BlackBerry users.

When the pundits talked about our world getting smaller because of web conferencing, I didn’t realize they were talking about screen sizes!

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Connect Pro,Connect Pro Mobile,iPhone,Onstream Media,web conferencing,web conference,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,online meeting,online seminar,streaming video

Webinar Success Website Works On Firefox Again

www.wsuccess.com is back to proper operation on Firefox after a long evening of updating every page. Somewhere along the course of Mozilla’s incremental updates to their browser, my site navigation bar stopped displaying in Firefox, although you could still see it in Internet Explorer. Similarly, centering worked in IE but not in Firefox.

Everything should be back to normal operation. If you see anything that looks amiss, please email me so I can fix it.

Technorati Tags: Webinar Success

Dimdim Releasing Version 5.5 Next Week

Dimdim (why do I keep wanting to capitalize the second Dim?) has been hitting the social media circuit with a passion. Today they slipped a little teaser into a LinkedIn group for professionals in web conferencing saying that “DimDim will launch its 5.5 edition next week with creative new features making web conferencing effortless!” (The exclamation point is theirs, not mine. And look at that… Their Corporate Relationship Manager gets the capitalization wrong too!)

The company also used an innovative viral marketing campaign to encourage Twitter users to spread the company’s name. For every tweet and retweet about a special fund raiser, the company has been donating money to the American Red Cross (chosen via public Twitter responses as well).

And lately they have been promoting free trials of their software with Apple iPad giveaways boosted by Twitter users.

Web collaboration awareness and marketing is a natural for social collaboration tie ins. I have seen plenty of companies with a named individual assigned to make Twitter comments and updates mentioning their products. But Dimdim seems to have figured out a holistic approach to truly tying in Twitter with comprehensive marketing programs on a corporate basis. That is still innovative as companies figure out how to make serious use of the new channel. Kudos to Dimdim.

Technorati Tags: Dimdim,marketing,Twitter,lead generation,web conferencing,web conference,web collaboration

Joining A Webinar? Hire A Lawyer First

This nonsense has to stop!

I was testing a vendor’s webinar product today. I registered for an event and followed the attendee link to join the meeting. A small scrollbar box showed three sentences starting with an admonition in uppercase: “IMPORTANT – READ CAREFULLY:”

Notice that the scrollbar is too small to even use a thumb scroll to jump down farther in the text. All you can do is scroll a line at a time. The software prevented me from clicking the Join button unless I first signaled my acceptance of the text in the box.

Intrigued by what I was agreeing to, I scrolled farther. Sentence number three (still in uppercase) said “CUSTOMER IS ENCOURAGED TO PRINT OR DOWNLOAD THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND SAVE THEM FOR CUSTOMER'S RECORDS.”

Now that was a bit of a challenge. I could not use keyboard shortcuts to capture the text in the box and copy it. There was no button letting me copy, expand, or print the text. I finally copied the contents of the entire web page and edited out everything but the legal agreement contained in that box.

I pasted the agreement text into a Word document with standard 1-inch margins and chose a 10-point font. The agreement took up 13 pages. That’s right… 13 PAGES!

This is what my meeting attendees are supposed to agree to before they can see or hear any of my content? 13 pages of fine print having nothing to do with me or my company, but instead dealing with stipulations by my technology provider?

My response as a potential attendee is the same as my response as a potential customer of the web conferencing company. Thanks, but no thanks. I have neither the time nor the interest in reading and agreeing to your legal boilerplate. I can get my communications elsewhere.

Skimming through the agreement, I was amused to see that I was “prohibited from purchasing from any internet search engine provider the following keywords: <…> or any phrase or combination containing these keywords.”

Not only are they trying to restrict my choice of internet search advertising phrases, but they even had a typo in one of the keywords, effectively stopping me from using a keyword reserved by another brand name in another industry altogether!

The vast majority of the legal text applied to me only as a purchaser and user of the software in meeting host capacity. It talked about my requirements to pay on time, etc, etc. None of which applies to my meeting attendees.

Legal notices like this are lazy and harmful to the normal flow of business. And unless I miss my guess (I’m no lawyer), they are probably unenforceable in a court of law, given the unreasonableness of display, use, and improper terminology.

Stop the madness!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online event,online meeting,web meeting,web event,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,web conference,legal disclaimer,legal agreement

Why Does Webinar Registration Stink?

If we try (unsuccessfully in most cases) to distinguish “webinars” from “webcasts” or “web conferences”, one of the important pieces of functionality for a webinar is usually advanced registration for the event. A collaborative group meeting may be scheduled with a simple link for all the participants to use, and a classic webcast may be pushed out to a massive audience with an attitude of “whoever wants to watch it, can.” But a web seminar for training, marketing, or lead generation relies upon getting people to sign up in advance so you can send reminder messages, track attendance, and conduct follow up communications.

Given the importance of registration for a public webinar, I am constantly surprised and depressed at the woeful capabilities provided by technology vendors to support this vital function. Some major vendors who trumpet the use of their product for webinars make you pay significant extra money to get any registration capabilities at all. Others provide only the most rudimentary fixed format registration pages.

One vendor forced the first registration field to be “Full name.” This meant that I couldn’t even separate first and last name fields for sorting, use in communication templates, or export to a CRM system. What on earth were they thinking?

When vendors offer me the ability to customize registration pages, it rarely meets my expectations for design flexibility. Customization most often ends up meaning that you can slap a small logo in the upper corner of the page and add a few text entry fields after their own required fields (with their own labels). You may think that “First Name” and “Last Name” are applicable for any occasion, but if I am dealing with a mixed Western and Asian audience, I prefer to use “Given Name” and “Family Name” so that my registrants and I aren’t trying to guess which name order format we’re using.

I usually have no control over where my additional custom fields get placed on the page and I can’t place additional descriptive text with them to add instructions or explanations. I don’t think any vendor has enabled conditional display of registration fields (eg: only show “State/Province” if the Country is USA or Canada). It is vanishingly rare to find a vendor who provides pre-populated dropdown fields for things such as Country or State/Province. Many of them won’t even let you put in 50-60 dropdown selection choices if you had the patience to try to load the field yourself.

All the way back in 2007, I gave a rave review to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook. I have yet to find a vendor that lets me implement many of MarketingSherpa’s suggestions for registration page design. That means I am losing potential registrants just because I can’t use best practices to encourage completion of my registration form.

There are some third-party registration and audience management tools that are built to work with web conferencing products. In the best cases, these offer additional design flexibility for registration pages and a reasonably easy to implement integration with your chosen web conferencing tool. But you end up paying for the use of the tool – sometimes a lot more. And you have to worry about support, billing, and training from two different vendors. That’s not knocking the third-party providers… I’m glad they are around to fill a needed functionality gap. But come on webinar vendors… Shouldn’t you be trying to put those other guys out of business? Give me the functionality I need as a part of your product!

It is getting harder and harder for webinar technologies to differentiate themselves from competitors. Registration page design is wide open for that kind of differentiation. Let me customize my registration page. REALLY customize it. Text and background colors, all field labels, placement above/below/beside other fields, pre-built dropdowns, conditional field display, graphics in line with other items. Wow… You could sure show that off in your marketing and sales demos!

Technorati Tags: registration,lead generation,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web event,online event,web meeting,online meeting

How Do You Create Successful Lead Generation Webinars?

For those of you who love to register for webinars at the last minute, this is your chance! I’m giving a free online seminar at 10 Pacific / 1 Eastern (US times) on Thursday, February 4. I’ll be discussing the secrets of preparing and presenting effective lead generation webinars for business.

This is in conjunction with Adobe, so it’s also a good opportunity to see Adobe Connect Pro in action. They are very good about not taking up my education time with product marketing. They run a separate session afterwards for anybody who is interested in learning more about the technology. I think that’s a lovely way to do it. I promise that I won’t be promoting my business either. This is real tips and guidelines, not a sales pitch.

I hope you can make it. Click here to register, or if your feed reader doesn’t support hyperlinks, open a browser and go to http://bit.ly/ldgen

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect Pro,Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro,Connect Pro,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,marketing,lead generation

Webinar Conflicts: Live vs. Recorded

Tim Bourquin wrote a thought-provoking column talking about his company’s use of both live and recorded webinars. Tim is very open and detailed in his description of how they use webinars to boost awareness and revenue and it’s worth reading as a business use case. But he also brings up two major problems he is running into:

1. People are signing up for live webinars just to get the link to the recording. They never plan to attend the live session.
2. There is no sense of urgency driving people to watch recordings. The indefinite availability lowers the priority of ever watching the content.

Tim has asked his readers for commentary and solution approaches and he was kind enough to ask for my advice as well.

You may wonder if item #1 is actually a problem. “Who cares whether they watch your content in the live session? You have their name for your lead list and you have their money.” That’s a short-sighted view of the situation. There are many reasons you want your registrants to really attend. First, a webinar with a good-sized audience generates more interaction and feedback, which stimulates greater involvement in your message. Second, names captured during a registration process are not leads… They are merely contacts. If you don’t know the difference, you should do some study on the subject. Third, your content should have a purpose. It advances your goals and makes your attendees more receptive to an idea or action you want them to pursue. If they don’t see the content, you lose that.

If we stipulate that having people see your content is desirable, how can we help it occur? Here are a few ideas. Finding the ones that are appropriate for your audience and your goals is an exercise left for the reader:

1. Advertise extra content in the live session that will not be made available in the recording. This might be extra (or all the) Q&A time with the expert presenter. Or it could be a case study or group exercise. Make attending the live session have perceived value up front. It’s perfectly fine to tell people that you are doing this to encourage a large and lively live session.
2. Use a giveaway. Some companies like to offer all attendees a special goodie such as a white paper or software download. You can advertise that this is only available to live attendees. Or you can always go to the live drawing approach for an unrelated but desirable toy such as an MP3 player, Kindle, or so on. I don’t like these as a way to pull in registrants, but I do like it as a way to get registrants to attend! You can advertise the drawing AFTER people have signed up, giving them notification in their login instruction email.

How about encouraging people to go ahead and view on-demand content? Are there ways to bump up the perceived priority of watching the recording? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Let people know that the recordings are only available for a limited time. This is my LEAST favorite approach. The whole value of recordings is that they can keep working for you over time.
2. Give people a time-limited password. “This password expires at the end of the week/month/geological era.” It is easy in most systems to change a recording’s password.
3. Use the advertiser’s trick of “The first 50 people to view this recording get something.” You don’t tell your audience when the 50 limit has already been reached or how many people have viewed already. You can then play the game either way… Stop giving the freebie after the first 50 or keep giving the freebie to everybody. Don’t stiff the first 50 though… That’s dishonest and illegal.

With these concepts as starting points, I’m sure you can come up with other variations. Good luck, Tim!

Technorati Tags: Tim Bourquin,recordings,marketing offers,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing