Hublished is a startup focusing on providing value-add services for people running webinars on existing platforms. The company is not a webinar technology firm itself. It assumes you are creating and running your webinars with an established mass-market product such as Citrix GoToWebinar, Cisco WebEx, or something similar.
The goal of the company is to make it easier for marketers to drive registrations for upcoming live events or archived recordings of events. They have started with direct links to GoToWebinar, are expanding in the next week or two to WebEx, and then will integrate other products as interest and API availability dictate.
The GoToWebinar linkage is rather slick. Once you give it your administrator account specifics, you can access a list of scheduled webinars inside of your Hublished publishing page. The software grabs the title, date, time, and description. It then automatically creates a popup window that can be embedded on any page by adding a few lines of Javascript to the page's HTML coding.
You can see an example of an upcoming webinar in this event listing for a scheduled Hublished webinar this week: https://hublished.com/index#/webinar153
Notice that the software displays the start time in your computer's local time zone (determined by IP address location). It also adds social media link buttons to help spread the word. Clicking the Register button brings up form fields and your data is passed back to the webinar application.
On the back end, Hublished can link to your account in a marketing automation system such as HubSpot or Marketo so you have statistics about registrants. Hublished has its own ability to send out registrant communications such as reminders and follow up messages, but it's a wash as to whether you would want to use theirs or rely on customized communications from your webinar system or your marketing automation system.
I spoke to Nis Frome, the COO and co-founder of Hublished. He told me that the current marketing/registration support is just the first step in a planned build-out to include a searchable portal of clients' webinar content. In testing with early adopter customers, this was the feature they gave the greatest short-term priority.
Pricing is not listed on the company's website, but Nis shared the fact that the pricing model is set up on a fixed-rate monthly subscription basis. So you will know up front what your expenditures are, rather than risking an open-ended usage-based model. There is a 30-day free trial period available for anyone who wants to try out the service.
This is an interesting addition to the offerings from the webinar vendors themselves and I will be tracking it to see how it does in the marketplace.
