The Webinar Blog

Is Web Conferencing A Viable Business?

Three years ago I wrote a blog post in which I said “Low-end collaboration is getting commoditized and provided for free to the masses… the basics are going to be expected by consumers as free and universally available utilities, just like the instant messaging they use for free today.”

By “low-end” I did not mean that it is not valuable or worthwhile. I was attempting to isolate my comments to collaborative solutions built for “quick and easy” online conferences with a few people. Extensive feature sets and advanced capabilities are not as important as ease of use and lack of technical barriers.

Today I received a link to check out another new entry in this niche. Join.me is a screen sharing utility currently in beta. I rather like the sassy hip feel of the site, with things like technical requirements lumped under a tab labeled “talk nerdy.”

I tried out the service briefly. It is not my intent to do a real product review… Every time I mention one of these small-group conferencing products I get buried under an influx of dozens of emails from similar vendors also offering low/no cost conferencing solutions. Join.me has taken the very basic screen sharing model popularized most successfully by Citrix GoToMeeting and dumbed it down for even easier public use. I can’t imagine many people having problems operating the software. One person shows his or her desktop and everybody else sees it. Almost no options, almost no settings. A simple group chat feature is about the only extra functionality offered (although viewers can change the “zoom” factor in their view).

I admire the programming skills necessary to make this stuff work. I appreciate the usefulness of it for quick collaborative sessions (although you should read this article for a look at how it can backfire terribly when it goes wrong). I just can’t figure out the business model for a vendor. With so many competing solutions available, as a consumer I’m not going to pay much/anything to use it and I’m not going to accept a bunch of ads getting in the way of my business collaboration. So how the heck are these companies making money?

Oh well. I’m going back to my concentration on more complex webinar/webcast oriented software and events. The value proposition and differentiation here becomes easier to define, with aspects such as registration, attendee management, reporting, recording, multimedia content, vendor support, and telephony integration all coming into play. And it also gives me a business opportunity as a service provider to offer the benefit of experience and expertise in using such features to their best advantage in public-facing web events.

I’ll tell you this… There has never been a better time for companies and individuals to make use of collaboration software as a matter of fact part of everyday business. It’s a consumer’s market with vendors literally giving away their functionality!

Technorati Tags: Join.me,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,online meeting,web collaboration,online collaboration

How To Manage Webinar Promotion

MarketingSherpa has limited-time free access to a very interesting case study on a company’s methodology for promoting their webinars, encouraging attendance from registrants, and following up to enhance interest in future webinars. Notice that doing marketing as a methodology to accomplish both long term and short term measurable objectives takes planning, effort, multiple steps, and attention to detail. It’s more than just sending a quick email blast to a rented list and sitting back to see what happens.

If you are using a feed reader that doesn’t allow embedded hyperlinks, here is the clear form URL for the article.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31672

Please note that this is only open to non-members until July 29, so don’t put this in the “read later” pile.

Technorati Tags: MarketingSherpa,marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event,online seminar

VenueGen: Are Virtual Worlds Appropriate For Webinars?

VenueGen asked me to look at their virtual collaboration platform and write about it on my blog. I told them that I was coming to the table with a healthy dose of cynicism and they said they were eager for the challenge of winning me over. After my demo conferencing session with CEO David Gardner and just a bit of exploration on my own, I’m afraid my cynicism remains – as applied to outbound webinars or presentations. But it is tempered with enthusiasm and appreciation for some of the technological innovations that VenueGen is showcasing.

I want to give VenueGen a special acknowledgement right off the top. I told them that I had some negative impressions and reservations, and that it might be best for their image if I just chose to concentrate on something else a little closer to my typical coverage niche. To their credit, they told me to write what I felt and they did not even try to get a preview of my post before publication (which I wouldn’t have granted).

VenueGen is concentrating on virtual sessions hosted in an analog of real world settings. In this regard, the concept is similar to a handful of other virtual event platforms such as INXPO, ON24, Unisfair, and even the social networking-oriented Second Life. I have seen demos of the other platforms, but I am not an expert in this software category by any means. I was interested in whether VenueGen would be practical for the kinds of webinars and webcasts my clients typically produce.

There seem to be two major obstacles to smooth applicability of the VenueGen platform to public webinars. The first is access to the virtual event. Attendees must register with ValueGen to set up a “Free Trial Account” – which immediately makes me think of all the nasty sales approaches that have ever happened to me. Will I start getting sales calls from pushy representatives? Am I being added to this vendor’s email list? Is my free trial going to turn into a paid subscription unless I take positive action? As an attendee of an informational webinar, I may be willing to share my contact information with the hosting company, but I don’t like having to sign up with some other company I have never heard of. Especially when I am directed to a sales-oriented page with a comparative marketing points checklist of VenueGen vs. WebEx.

If I do make the decision to sign up as an attendee, I have to go through automated download, install, and update of software on my computer. On a Vista operating system, it triggers repeated confirmation security popups. I also had an experience on one attendee computer where I was unable to join the meeting after the initial download and install step. I had to reload the session from scratch, and log in again to join. Things have to be faster, easier, and smoother in order to get one-time attendees into a webinar. I found that the software installed a startup process on my machine called the VenueGen Updater. Vista didn’t like it, and keeps informing me that it is blocking it. I’m not a fan of permanent processes installed without my explicit okay.

Once I create an account, I am presented with options for my online avatar. It’s hard at first to tell which steps are mandatory and which are optional. VenueGen lets you choose all kinds of facial types, hair styles, and clothing, going so far as to let you upload pictures of yourself to turn into an illustrated rendering of your own face (By the way, in repeated attempts with pictures painstakingly taken to their specifications, I could never get anything out of their customizer that even remotely resembled me. I’m not African American or Latino, but the software sure seemed to want to color me that way). It turns out that as an attendee, you can just pick a gender and let the software choose a random look for you, if you know to stop there.

Once you get into the virtual event space, the second major obstacle is apparent. There are just too many damned controls. VenueGen says it is based on an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) engine, and the interface looks like an ultra-sophisticated gaming console. I entered a room as an attendee and found myself looking at 40 icons spaced around the bottom and right side of the screen. Click a button and you see another 24 control icons! I felt like a puppeteer at Jim Henson’s workshop. Most of the controls cause your avatar to make gestures or facial expressions. You can jump up and down, do a little dance, point a finger at your head, indicate surprise, happiness, sadness, grouchiness, and dozens more. If you do nothing, the software makes your avatar have little “natural” movements so you don’t look too stiff and lifeless. You have a setting bar to control how much animation and “life” to put into your character. Other controls manage camera angles, audio functionality, views of yourself and other attendees, etc.

The programming sophistication in the virtual environment is obvious. Everything is done to try to replicate what happens in a real room. You drag the cursor around to look in different directions, and you can’t see beyond your peripheral vision. But unlike the real world, you can scroll in and out to get a closeup view of anything you see. It’s like having very powerful binoculars with you at all times. Wearing a computer headset (and the environment is heavily biased towards this interface) creates interesting audio effects. If someone speaks while sitting or standing to your side, you hear them through that ear. Sounds pan as people move (oh yes, you can walk around and see others as they move). Each setting is programmed for acoustic effects including how rapidly sounds dissipate with distance from your character. In a lecture hall, you might hear the people next to you muttering or making comments while people a few rows back are muted.

And now we come to my favorite part of the interface… Infinite content display. A presenter (or attendee given the privilege) can share a PowerPoint, Word document, PDF, picture, or live desktop on the screen or screens in the room. The screens always seem to magically have space for more content, and you can have all kinds of things displayed at once. No tabs, no switching between items. The presenter can choose to focus on one document and progress through it, or the audience can distractedly look at the other things up and on display, zooming in on each one. This is powerful stuff, and a fascinating look at the new way of thinking about information display unbounded by the practical considerations of the real world or predefined consoles.

Unfortunately, the desire to make things relate to real world dynamics means that you may find yourself looking up at a skewed display as if from the first row of a movie theater. Or you may see it from off to one side, emphasizing the parallax shift from that perspective. Once you have a little training, you learn that you can pop up a content piece in a flat view overlay and even adjust how transparent it is to the room behind it. But that is going to be beyond the skills of first timers and large audiences.

David was very proud of the amount of emotive control possible with the avatars and the feedback they can give a presenter – the “body language” missing from traditional web conferencing. But my cynical expectation is that the audience will play with the controls at random for the sheer interest in making their character do funny things. I wouldn’t trust the feedback as indicative of real responses. And since people often forget they have set a control, I might see an audience member with a permanent frown on her face even though she was only momentarily annoyed a long time ago.

There are 28 predefined venues available for you to choose from when you schedule a meeting. These are quite inventive, including a church, an outdoor courtyard, a coffee shop, a classroom, a debate lectern with podiums, and even a yacht (huh?).

But the maximum capacity I could see for any of the venues was 50 people, so we’re not exactly scaled for large public webinars. I also saw no way to customize registration fields, get meeting reports on registration versus attendance, or set up confirmation and reminder emails.

I have to place VenueGen firmly and unequivocally in the space of being useful primarily for internal collaborative meetings with a defined universe of people who have taken the time to create accounts and get familiar with the interface until the novelty of treating it like a toy wears off. As the VenueGen main help and support page says: “The vast majority of new users have indicated in survey after survey that they learned how to use VenueGen in under ten minutes.” That is just 9 minutes and 30 seconds too long for a public webinar. Still, like a concept car presented at an auto show, there is some exciting technology on display that could be trickled down into “dumber” versions of the platform designed for public web events. I’d be interested in seeing that!

Technorati Tags: VenueGen,virtual world,virtual event,web event,web meeting,online event,online meeting,web seminar,webinar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast

Get Your Free Webcasting Production Guide

The fine folks at MediaPlatform, Inc. just published a guide to webcasting production best practices. I took a look and heartily endorse it. Although it is obviously focused on web events with live video and streaming audio, many or most of the tips apply just as well to PowerPoint-based webinars.

The electronic document starts with an overview of the webcast process and participants. This might be useful as a backgrounder for a new person on your team and certainly will give you a little more comfort on what you are getting into if you are producing your first webcast.

After that, you get five chronological steps to follow, each accompanied by a checklist of tasks that you can print out and use to track responsibilities and deadlines.

You’ll want to modify the specifics to match your own needs, but you couldn’t ask for a better starting point on organizing all the little things that are too easy to overlook or procrastinate.

Considering that they are giving it away in return for your contact information, it’s a heck of a deal.

Click the following URL to go to the download page, or copy the address into your web browser:

http://bit.ly/bc6hsU 

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event,webinar,web seminar,online seminar

SCOOP! WebEx Lowers Pricing On Event Center

I haven’t seen anything on the wires yet, so this may be your first chance to hear of a new lower price option for Cisco WebEx Event Center. If you are not intimately familiar with the WebEx family of web conferencing products, you can easily get confused by the different names and versions. There is Meeting Center, Training Center, Remote Support, Remote Access, and a Beta product called WebEx Meet. Confusing, isn’t it?

The version that I always end up using for formal scheduled webinars is Event Center. It adds features to support registration, reporting, tracking, attendee communications, Q&A management, eCommerce, and other things necessary for complete control and analysis of a webinar. It also has an integrated telephony and streaming audio option for attendees that includes some very nice international access features.

One of the biggest negative perceptions of WebEx Event Center has been its high price. Traditionally the company focused on selling big enterprise accounts allowing many users to host webinars. These commanded premium pricing that practically excluded smaller users who just wanted a single account to do a webinar or two.

Today my Cisco representative gave me a new pricing option on Event Center, available immediately. A single user (webinar host) can have an Event Center room with up to 100 person capacity for a flat rate charge of $99/month on month to month billing, or as low as an equivalent $79/month when you prepay for a year of service.

Higher capacity rooms are also available. A 500-attendee maximum costs $399 or $319/month (per month vs yearly billing) and a 1000-attendee maximum goes for $499 or $399.

These prices include attendee audio through their choice of computer audio or toll telephone access. Presenters can speak via their preference of a VoIP computer headset or a toll telephone call. Toll free and local international access numbers can be added at an additional charge. There is also a one-time optional charge for branding your room with corporate logos, hyperlinks, and a domain-specific URL.

I’m quite pleased to see WebEx becoming practical for small business webinars through Event Center. There are a lot of great features in the product and the low flat rate usage option should be attractive to many who had previously eliminated WebEx from their selection short list based on price.

Technorati Tags: WebEx,Event Center,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,online event,web event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Webinar Questions From Australia/New Zealand

It’s a little before midnight and I just got done presenting an educational webinar to a large audience in Australia and New Zealand. As usual when the audience is really interacting and participating, I couldn’t get to every question so here are some answers to questions we didn’t address in the live event.

Q: Would you have a fill-in on hand in case a speaker couldn’t get on?

A: I am a big fan of every type of backup I can think of, but this is one area where I think a backup is (usually) inappropriate. Your speaker is typically identified in your webinar promotion, and when a replacement is announced at the last minute the audience can feel “cheated” or at least apprehensive about getting an emergency backup instead of the “expert” they were promised. You have also run rehearsals with your speaker (right?), and bringing in a replacement at the last minute is likely to create a less confident-sounding and smoothly run event. I would suggest spending more effort on backup failsafes to make sure the scheduled speakers are able to join.

 

Q: How can you address the concerns of non tech-savvy registrants who may be worried about the technology involved in attending a webinar?

A: Oh yes… They’re out there. The number one thing you can do is to provide a human contact for questions and concerns. That person’s name, email, and telephone number should be listed in the confirmation and reminder emails that go out to registrants. I have assuaged many worried souls who wanted a reassuring “pat on the hand.” The second thing to do is to include a Technical Considerations section at the end of the confirmation email. Tell people what they will need in order to connect, and ideally give them a way to test ahead of time.

 

Q: How do you deal with polls when you have a small number of attendees?

A: Most web conferencing programs have the option to show poll results as percentage figures rather than absolute numbers. Your audience doesn’t have to know that the 25% response rate on answer #1 only represents 2 people! If you are hiding the fact that you have a smaller than desired attendance, just talk to the percentages in the same way you would if there were more people participating.

 

Q: How well does a 30-minute webinar fare?

A: One of my clients experimented with 30-minute marketing webinars. They found that with an introduction and closing remarks and time for audience Q&A, it left very little time to present much detail about the promised topic. This has the possibility to be frustrating for your audience, so it is vital that you set expectations. On the other hand, I saw a high tech vendor who promised a five minute webinar as a gimmick to demonstrate their technology and how fast it worked! So as long as your audience understands the amount of content and the specific value they will receive in your shorter session, you should be okay. Thirty minutes may be plenty for a team meeting. or specific announcement.

 

Q: How do you track where people have heard about your webinar?

A: There are several ways to do this. Some web conferencing products allow the use of a source tracking parameter in the URL for the registration page. This lets you use different versions of the URL and it automatically records the source code with each registrant/attendee. If you don’t have that capability, you might build different landing pages for different promotional channels. Each page looks the same and directs people to the same registration page, but you can use web analytics to track how many visits and click-throughs each page received. And finally, you can always add a field to your registration form asking people to select where they heard about your webinar.

 

Q: What do you recommend charging for a webinar?

A: I’m going to direct you to this response from my associate, Lee Salz. The Webinar Minute - What Should I Charge For My Webinars-

 

Q: Besides polls, what are your recommendations on making a webinar more interactive?

A: Use your Q&A or Chat features. Ask for contributions, have your audience suggest answers and solutions, brainstorm with them. Instead of simply reciting facts and giving information, make your delivery more Socratic by asking questions and challenging your audience to get to the right answer.

 

Q: If you encounter a technical problem, how do you keep audience interest while troubleshooting?

A: This is a highly situational problem and there isn’t a single generic answer except for this one… KEEP TALKING! Let your audience know you are still there while you are working on fixing things. Dead air is deadly. If you have lost audio, use the chat feature to type and tell the audience what is going on. Never interrupt your full session to deal with one person’s technical problem… Leave that to your assistant, moderator, or technical facilitator to resolve in a private chat with the attendee. If the problem is bad enough to make it impossible to continue your event, don’t work on it for more than two minutes. If you can’t figure out how to fix it in two minutes, let people know that you aren’t going to waste their time hoping it gets resolved. Tell them you will reschedule the webinar and automatically re-register them for the new session. You want to avoid behaving like an airline and holding your audience in their seats on the tarmac while you wait and hope that the plane will eventually be able to take off.

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

Does Your Webinar Title Work?

Excuse me while I violate a prime rule of informational writing (and presenting). I’m going to start this post with a sidetrack instead of the topic I promised in the title. I promise that if you keep reading, you’ll get to the tips about webinar titles. But I’m so bemused by the circumstances that got me thinking about this subject that I want to share them with you.

I just received another email from NeedAWebinarBeAWebinar (or as they call themselves, NAW/BAW). I honestly don’t remember signing up for their mailings, and I don’t think I would have done so through my generic “info” mail account, so I suppose they pulled that email address off of some list or database somewhere.

When I enter their website address in my browser, all I see is a blank page with entry fields for Name and Email and a big orange button saying Sign Up. I’m not sure what I’d be signing up for, and I’m unwilling to submit anything on a completely information-free, unbranded page.

Today’s email alluded to people wondering what NAW/BAW is, and directed us to personal LinkedIn profile pages for the two guys running it. Still no serious information about the company as an independent entity, but we get to see their resumes.

The concept seems to be that webinar hosts have the option to list webinars with this service, and the webinars will be sent in a huge long list to the subscriber base. Which finally brings me back to the point of the post.

The NAW/BAW email presented me with a long vertical text list of 136 webinars (yes, I counted them). Each showed three things: The webinar title, the date, and a shortened encoded hyperlink. As a reader, I have to idly scan through the webinars wondering if there might potentially be something I’d be interested in learning more about.

Think about the amount of work that poor little title is doing! It has to be short enough to take in at a sub-second glance, while simultaneously giving me a strong enough value proposition to make me take a proactive response and click on something without even the benefit of a domain name to know where I’m going. And it has to do it with no supporting help from a subtitle or summary description.

Let’s look at some of the good, the bad, and the ugly:

How to Deliver Marketing Content to Mobile Devices – Fantastic! This is about as good as you can do. It tells me exactly what will be presented, succinctly and clearly. If I care about doing that, I know I can go here to find out how.

Website Optimization Tips. Live review of some submitted sites – Ooohhh… So close. At first glance it seems like the one I just mentioned. Isn’t it telling you what will be covered in the session? Not really. What kind of optimization? For SEO? For browser performance? For sales conversion? And how compelling is “live review of some submitted sites?” I don’t know what those sites contain and whether they are relevant to me and my interests. Pass.

Performance Management – Ugh. What about performance management? Zero value proposition, zero promise, zero information. So zero interest.

How to Plan, Design, and Deliver an Effective Virtual Event – Wow! Did I write this one? Nope, I just clicked on it. I should have known… Roger Courville titled this one, and he is expert at this sort of thing. Tells you exactly what will be contained. Value proposition is included… your event will be more effective. Perfect.

E-Mail Communication: Power, Peril, and Protocol – Somebody got cute. Short, punchy, and packed with alliteration. It tells you that the topic has something to do with email communication, but I don’t know what they are covering. Is this a historical backgrounder? A survey of the state of the industry? Tips and guidelines? We’re missing the essential ingredient… Why I should care. It catches the eye, but fails to provoke a response.

Hey, PR pros: Do you ‘Flip?’ – Oy. Without the support of its descriptive text, I have no idea what this is about. There is no value proposition, no indication of topic content. It looks like they want me to answer a poll question!

You can never tell the context in which your webinar title might show up. Make it strong, make it sell your webinar.

Technorati Tags: NeedAWebinarBeAWebinar,NAW/BAW,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast

Book Review: Stop Speaking For Free

Lee Salz has written a book called Stop Speaking For Free! The exclamation point is part of the title, but I’ll leave it out of the rest of this review, as it makes proper sentence punctuation difficult.

Do you hate long reviews where the writer spends the first 80 percent of the article summarizing the content and only tells you if he liked it at the very end? Okay: The book’s great. Buy it.

Since you are still reading, here are the details behind my opinion.

Lee has taken a niche subject and really dives into the details on everything it takes to plan, prepare, promote, present, and profit from attendee funded webinars (or AFWs, as he abbreviates them). This is a welcome addition to the many tips available on webinars as a generic communications medium, or how to use free marketing webinars to collect sales leads.

Lee has targeted businesses and individuals who want to charge attendees to attend training or consultative webinars. He even talks about the considerations involved in converting or complementing in-person training courses with online sessions.

I was particularly impressed by the writing style. The book is densely packed with practical guidelines, tips, and methodology, yet it never feels like a dry textbook or reference manual. It is genuinely readable, but doesn’t slow you down with “fluff” or sideline anecdotes that distract from each topic point. That is a delicate tightrope act to pull off for a nonfiction work and Lee’s writing (along with co-author Jenny Hamby) is an example of how to do it right.

The book takes you on a progression from general concepts such as how you and your potential audience think about attendee funded webinars into more and more detailed methodologies. For instance, Chapter 4 leads you through eight specific questions that help you scope your event. Chapter 5 works through constructing an effective webinar description on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 look at different aspects of promoting and marketing your event, with attention given to timelines and tasks, how to use social media and online networking, and ways to get media attention.

Applying the concepts in Stop Speaking For Free should repay the book’s cost many times over for trainers, consultants, and companies that want to expand their business through attendee funded webinars. I don’t know of another reference that addresses this subject so succinctly and effectively.

Lee asked me if I wanted to sign up with his affiliate program and offer the book at a discount to my readers. I also get a small percentage of each sale. That left me with a dilemma. I don’t accept advertising or kickbacks from authors or vendors associated with web conferencing solutions. It would undermine my objectivity and cast suspicion on my motives when I give a good review such as this. On the other hand, why should you pay more than you have to when I have the ability to let you save money on something truly worthwhile? So here’s what I decided. If you use the link and discount code in the next paragraph, I’ll save you 20% on the list price through my affiliate discount. I’ll track any affiliate payments I get and donate them at the end of the year to one of my favorite charities… Feeding America. You can benefit from your own revenue-generating webinars and also support domestic hunger-relief programs across the country.

So here’s how to order the book at 20% off. Click on Stop Speaking For Free or copy the following link into your browser: http://bit.ly/SSFFws. On the order form, enter this Promotional Code: 4c300740. You should see the screen change to show 20% off. Enjoy your discount. Enjoy your skills development. Enjoy your revenues.

UPDATE JULY 7. LOWER PRICE!

Lee just told me that he is improving the discount rate, effective immediately. My discount code now saves you 30% off the list price. How's that for moving in the right direction?

Technorati Tags: Lee Salz,Jenny Hamby,Stop Speaking For Free,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online training,web training,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,web conference

Promoting Webinars Is A Key Concern

WebAttract ran a poll through LinkedIn asking people to vote on the biggest pain point in producing and managing webinars. The winner, by twice the vote over the runners-up, was “Audience attraction.” You can create a great presentation, rehearse the heck out of it, give a boffo delivery, and still have nothing to show for it if nobody watches.

I used to be director of product marketing for a software company, and there’s nothing special about webinars in this regard. No matter the communications channel we choose, we’re all desperately trying to find ways to make our message get noticed and acted upon. Meanwhile, our audiences are increasingly being paralyzed into inaction by the sheer volume of marketing messages thrust at them in every facet of their lives.

At Webinar Success, I usually don’t concentrate on helping my clients market their webinars. Sure, I’ll offer advice and help craft better copy for invitations and reminders, but the tactical aspects of running marketing campaigns take too much time and detailed oversight. I’ve been there and done that… I’m happy to let other marketing specialists take over that part of the game.

Here are some resources that might help you as you look for ways to make your webinar promotion efforts more effective (or cost effective, which is a separate concern).

I have been covering webinar listing sites on this blog as I discover them. My personal favorite is still EventSpan for the range of features it offers and the ability to get web-embeddable widgets that help you promote your event and drive registration from sites other than the listing directory. Other listing services include Finervista, Webinar Base, Webinar-Directory, Webinar Hero, and WebinarListings. Some of these services offer included or optional social media and SEO tie-ins. You can do a search on my blog for reviews of the services.

Webinar Resources is a services company dedicated to customer acquisition, with full marketing and promotion assistance including tracking, testing, and sales integration. Quantum Leap Marketing is more of a general sales/marketing company, but with a strong emphasis and experience in webinars. Bulldog Solutions is another full service marketing agency that knows their way around webinars and how to run a serious marketing campaign.

There are a million marketing specialists, websites, and blogs that all have valuable tips for making your marketing efforts more effective. Honestly, I could list them all day long. I always read Seth Godin for meta views on thinking about how you choose to run your business and interact with your customers, but don’t go there expecting specific tactical tips. For that, I like what Jep Castelein has been writing on the Connected Marketer blog. MarketingSherpa is the 800-pound gorilla of marketing research and resources. Don’t overlook it. MarketingProfs is another very well known and respected general marketing site. I know, I know… I left out your site or your favorite. Sorry about that. Please feel free to write it in with a hyperlink in the comments section. I’ll allow blatant self-promotion on this post!

I’ll end up with two interesting developments I just saw in conjunction with webinar marketing and promotion. PresenterNet gave me advance notice that they are going to allow their customers to embed the webinar attendee console directly on a web page. That means your attendees never have to leave your site or log in to another domain name when joining a webinar. You can promote and run your webinar all on your own site. Pretty neat. There should be more details and documentation coming out soon.

Business Expert Webinars just announced the Schedule Promo Generator for affiliates who produce and deliver webinars through BEW. It lets businesses or associations group all their upcoming BEW webinars on a single page under a private branded header, along with a discount code to encourage paid registration. Here is a sample collection page, which looks prettier than just about any other listing collator I have seen.

Comments are open… Add your resources and service providers!

Technorati Tags: webinar marketing,webinar promotion,marketing,webinar,web seminar,web event,online seminar,online event,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing