The Webinar Blog

Twitter Stats And Business Webinars

I'll just start off with the old chestnut about "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics."  Picking and choosing statistics to support an agenda is an easy game. Especially when you disregard any contextual background of definitions, measurement methodologies, and confidence limits. But it's so darned fun!

So let's dig in to a wonderful site I just tripped across. Modestly titled "143 Amazing Twitter Statistics," it is a collection created by blogger Craig Smith. To his credit, Mr. Smith actually source-links each factoid with its publication date and he attempts to periodically update the figures as new information becomes available. I'm going to cherry-pick a few tidbits I found interesting and comment on how they might influence your concentration on Twitter as a tool in your business webinars and webcasts.

 

STATISTIC: TrackMaven studied 1,500 Twitter accounts having more than 1,000 followers. It found that originating tweets were overwhelmingly sent during Monday through Friday work hours (as you would expect, given the selection criteria). But retweets (indicating when followers actually saw and interacted with the content) were overwhelmingly outside business hours (nights and weekends).

STATISTIC: Statista reports that almost 30% of Americans admit to visiting Facebook during work hours every day. Almost 15% admitted to using YouTube during work hours every day. The percent saying they used Twitter during work every day? A little less than 10%.

STATISTIC: Another Statista finding states that 15% of American employees are blocked from accessing Twitter at work.

COMMENT: If you are using Twitter during your business webinar to stimulate real-time interaction, you might be disappointed. The majority of reading and viral action happens outside of work.

 

STATISTIC: A YouGov poll of UK Twitter users showed 52% saying social media activity diminished their trust in a merchant, while only 37% said it raised their trust.

COMMENT: This is tricky, since the poll was specifically about retail merchandising and online shopping behavior. It is also not corroborated with other geographies or actual observed behaviors. But it makes ya think, don't it? It certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom that businesses must be active on social media because their customers expect and demand it!

 

I put other personal opinions about the interaction between Twitter and webinars into a blog post two and a half years ago. It generated some excellent comments and opinions from readers and I encourage you to have a look. There are both positive and negative aspects to consider before staging a major push to integrate Twitter with your business webinars.

 

Technorati Tags: Craig Smith,Twitter,tweets,social media,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online seminar

An Alternative To Pain Point Marketing Webinars

Yesterday's post went through the reasons Why Pain Points Are Hurting Your Marketing Webinars. I used up a lot of words telling you why a classic "Pain Point Selling" technique is counterproductive to mass audience lead generation. This left me with the obvious challenge of offering an alternative approach. Is there a way to introduce and explain your offering as a valuable and beneficial solution to real problems? A way that will keep your audience listening?

There is. And it can be encapsulated in two easy words: Think Backwards.

Or in four words: Outcomes first, background later.

Or in the following whole bunch of words:

The way to keep an audience interested is to give them what they want. If they sign up for a webinar promoted as a way to learn about a service or product (or even just a general solution to a problem), they want to hear about the solution. They are a million times more interested in the solution than in the problem. So give them the solution!

This means you have to throw away the typical linear agenda. "First I'm going to give a little background and history of the industry. Then I'm going to talk about recent advances. Then I'm going to focus on some of the problems you face in today's world (ughh… I HATE that cliché phrase!). Then I'm going to introduce our product and tell you how it helps. Then I'll summarize and take questions."

Wow. You have just told the audience that their top priority and interest is number four on your list. (Number five if you count introductions and agenda-reading.) Goodbye or goodnight… I'll try to recapture your interest 20 minutes from now if you're still here.

So get rid of the agenda and the presentation flow it promises threatens. Instead, start with the outcomes the audience can expect:

What should you expect to get from this webinar?

• A new way to use audience data to improve your viewing share
• An understanding of the software that can gather and interpret that data
• What it takes to implement a competitive programming solution

Your audience is hooked already. You have told them not how you organized your slides, but what value, benefits, and new knowledge they are going to walk away with at the end. They have a reason to stay and pay attention.

Next you introduce your offering with the quickest of references to the benefit statement promised in your promotional materials. Very simple. "You showed up today to find out about a way to improve viewing share. That's what our VwrSoft solution gives you. A new and innovative way to build your broadcast audience."

Now your audience knows what the solution is. They could be called away to another meeting and still have enough information to do a website search later or ask a sales rep for more info. Don't make your lead-gen webinar a 30-minute teaser leading up to a surprise reveal.

Now you start introducing capabilities that your offering provides. With each capability, Think Backwards. Outcome first, background later. What does your solution do? Why is that important? What problem does it solve? How is it different from other approaches?

Instead of offering all the background material in a big lump at the beginning of your webinar, you space it out… intersperse it with the practical benefits and capabilities your audience is most interested in.

What's great about this is that it lets you trick the audience into associating your solution with their own pain points. Instead of starting by setting up generic needs with generic problems, you introduce a capability. Then you invite your audience to fill in the blanks for you… "What could this solve for you? Do you have a problem capturing viewers from a few major network anchor shows? Or is your problem capturing attention from the mass of channels during more competitive hours? Think how this could help with your number one priority."

They can make the connection in a way they can't do with a traditional "pains then solutions" flow. And you can do it over and over again. With each specific you introduce.

Don't think it works in practice? Watch Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone in 2007. One of the biggest marketing presentations ever. He had a captive audience of rabid fans primed for some big unknown announcement. He had an hour of speaking time on the agenda. He could have led them on with thirty minutes of pain points and setup justifying the iPhone before showing it. He didn't. He told the audience right away what the new offering was and what it did. Even with a little opening fluff, he had the device, its name, and its capabilities introduced at the three-minute mark. You can too.

 

Technorati Tags: marketing,lead generation,pain points,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting

Why Pain Points Are Hurting Your Marketing Webinars

"Pain Point Selling" has been taught for decades. It can be a very effective way to build a link in a prospect's mind between a specific problem and why they need your product/service to solve it.

I see a lot of lead generation webinars that use "Pain Point Marketing." In most cases, this is a mistake and is NOT effective. Why not? What is the difference between Pain Point Selling and Pain Point Marketing?

In the sales process, you are working on closing a deal with a single prospect. The idea of the Pain Point process is to identify specific, tangible problems that are a priority in the mind of that particular company (or individual). A good salesperson does this through a combination of research and dialog, getting the prospect to share their perceived problem area, helping them identify the costs to their business caused by the problem, and then showing them that your solution is a more reasonable, logical, cost-effective alternative than doing something else or nothing at all.

It seems reasonable that the same approach would work in a public marketing webinar, but I would argue against using this structure for building your lead generation efforts. There are two primary pitfalls…

1) One Target vs. Many Targets. Pain point selling works when it is very specific. You focus on detailed problems your prospect has. You draw the prospect into a conversation where they share more details of their situation and how it directly impacts their business. You then adjust your pitch accordingly, focusing on their issues and how you resolve them.

This is impossible in a mass-audience webinar. You can't focus on a specific problem for any individual viewer. You can't spend the time to draw him/her into an ongoing exchange of information. As a result, you are forced to create generic or "commonly-seen" pain points. They don't have the impact and immediacy for any given attendee because they are not tailored to the context in which the person thinks about the pain. There is a world of difference between these two pain points:

"It is hard to get viewers to watch your TV shows. There is so much competition from shows on other channels."

"You are only pulling a 4 share on Friday nights at 11:30. Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, and Jimmy Kimmel are cannibalizing your audience."

2) Preaching To The Choir. Using generic, common "pain points" to set up your webinar and your solution turns off your audience in three distinct ways:

a) You are repeating the information that got them to sign up for the webinar in the first place. Your promotional materials must have identified those generic pains, otherwise your attendees wouldn't have signed up for your webinar. So the setup has already been done. You are not creating an infomercial shown on television - trying to capture the attention of a disinterested audience that is not looking for your message. Your audience CHOSE to attend. Treat them accordingly.

b) Demonstrating your credibility by showing that you "get it" establishes you as an outsider. While it is gratifying to develop an understanding of your target audience and their business, don't let your newfound perceptiveness blind you to the fact that your audience lives these problems every day. The TV executive doesn't need or want a primer on how hard it is to attract viewers. If you present that as if it is some sort of brilliant new insight, it confirms for them that they are dealing with a neophyte who hasn't been facing that problem for years.

c) Setup delays value delivery. The audience has come to get value, to hear something they didn't know before, to hear about solutions. Every second you spend covering obvious problems they are familiar with is an invitation for them to tune out - mentally or physically.

 

What does that leave us with? Am I telling you to abandon any mention of problems? How else can you introduce the value of your offering?

It turns out you CAN incorporate problem setup and resolution into a lead-gen marketing webinar. And in tomorrow's post, I'll tell you how to do it. (Now available online in An Alternative to Pain Point Webinars)

 

Technorati Tags: marketing,pain points,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,lead generation

Adobe And CMI Release New Webinar Report

Shelby Britton at Adobe has let me know that a new report is available online. Titled "Webinars: They're not just for leads anymore" the report is available for immediate access without registration. How refreshing!

Adobe Connect sponsored the report and the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) performed a survey of marketers this February and summarized the results. The impetus came after an earlier CMI report on content marketing trends showed that webinars were ranked the third most effective content marketing tactic and that 62% of marketers were using webinars.

I particularly liked a short quote from Jay Baer: "Webinars are a means to an end, not an end unto themselves." This seems trivial, but is actually overlooked by too many marketers who simply have a checklist calling for "two webinars a month" or something similar. The CMI report found that webinars were deemed significantly more effective for companies that had a documented strategy for their webinar programs. If you are just cranking out webinars because "that's what we do" then you should step back and reevaluate your goals and measurements of success.

For me, the most telling statistic was the most confusing to grasp from the numbers CMI reported. It is very important and I hope they won't mind if I expand on their analysis. I have never seen this comparison studied or reported before and it contains a great insight. Look at the following graphic:

The percentages indicate the relative number of people who chose a given problem as their biggest challenge. The two columns segment the responses into those marketers who rated webinars high or low on a scale of being effective overall. So both groups had about the same percent picking "Getting registrants to actually attend" as their biggest problem. 16% for one group and 17% for the other. No big surprise… That is certainly a challenge.

Now look at the differences in how they rated the other two challenges: "Developing the content" vs. "Securing enough registrations."  The group members who identified webinars as being an effective medium put more much more priority on their content. The group members who identified webinars as being ineffective? Their concentration was all about getting registrations. It was a numbers game for them, with good content a secondary concern.

I hope some of those companies in the second column take a serious stab at rearranging their priority of concentration. Get known for creating engaging content that has tangible business value for your target audience. Work on decoupling your informational value from your sales and marketing efforts. Spend some time on thought leadership and a perception of 'altruistically' giving benefit to your audiences. Once you start thinking about how your webinar can benefit attendees rather than the host, people start wanting to sign up again and your webinars magically become more effective.

There are other insights and resources highlighted in the report and I don't want to steal any more of its thunder. Go get it. You can't beat the price.

 

Technorati Tags: Shelby Britton,Jay Baer,Adobe Connect,Content Marketing Institute,content marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Webinar Tips From The Pros

Michael Ventimiglia at GetVoIP.com asked me to contribute to an article featuring short tips from various "webinar pros" (well I should blush). The combined wisdom of a dozen experts is now available online in How to Give a Killer Webinar: Tips from the Pros.

I was a little surprised to see what Michael chose to focus on in the extract he used from our dialogue. He pulled a quote about the power and reach of webinars, and I certainly stand behind it. But since I have a little more space available here, I wanted to share with you some additional tactical tips I suggested as well. I thought it was important to highlight differences in presentation style when addressing a remote, unseen audience.

Webinar speakers certainly need to concentrate on the fundamental skills important to any good presentation: Proper slide design, focusing on audience priorities and interests, telling a compelling story. But a great webinar presenter takes extra care to account for strengths and limitations of the online environment.

• Your speaking voice needs to carry additional energy and passion to overcome the lack of physical presence.
• You should talk to your audience in the singular rather than plural form… addressing each listener as an individual, rather than addressing the audience as a group.
• You must continually engage and encourage audience members to respond and contribute through interactive challenges, questions, polls, and thought-problems. Don't just declaim "at" them for 40 minutes!

Remember, the most successful webinars are the ones that feel less like pre-recorded lectures and more like conversational dialogues.

I encourage you to read through the tips in Michael's article and more importantly, follow the links to the online resources provided by all the experts. You will find much more depth and insight that simply could not fit in the short space allotted.

 

Technorati Tags: Michael Ventimiglia,GetVoIP.com,webinar,web seminar,onilne seminar,web meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

What Is A Wobbly Webinar?

In my daily search through the interwebs for anything referencing the word "webinar" I came across an article by Susan Esther Barnes. It was titled "Wobbly Webinars" and was posted on the Jewish Journal, of all places.

What is refreshing about the article is that it is not a list of best practice proclamations from an industry insider. It's not a thinly-disguised promotional piece from some vendor. It's just Susan ruminating on webinars she has attended as a participant, with her impressions of why some seemed to work and some didn't. We can glean some valuable insights from Susan's straightforward descriptions.

1) Sometimes a conference call is all you need. Webinar participants expect visual stimulation and value-add from the display capabilities of webinar software. If your content consists of people talking for long periods with no visual information, why ask your audience to logon?

There actually IS a way to make a webinar work even when you have no visual content to add. You use the web functionality as an interactive medium throughout the talk, complementing the presentation with questions, answers, debate, and audience conversation while the presenters do their thing. This is impossible to implement in a conference call (unless you use live Twitter streams or other third party software). For this to work, you have to be willing to use an open chat where participants can see what others have typed. If you use privatized/moderated chat that shields participants from others' comments, it takes away the vibrancy, interest, and group participation.

 

2) Live video is a minefield. I have written about the hazards of "talking head" video several times in this blog. The technical functionality of webinar software is far more capable than most of the people using it. Special setup and training is necessary in order to come across as comfortable, professional, and persuasive on camera. Most casual webinar users have neither the experience nor the physical setup to make it work well. Do video right or don't do it at all.

 

3) Polls should be used to drive and advance the content. Early in her article, Susan mentions companies using webinars just "to be cool or one of the in crowd." I think this applies much more specifically to the use of interactive polls. Companies decide that they should have some polls just because a vendor told them it's a good way to engage people. But they don't have a REASON for the polls. The questions feel forced and offer no value-add for the attendees.

Susan is complimentary about a webinar she attended that used polls well. It's exactly the same setup that one of my clients used this week in a webinar that received many compliments from attendees. Each piece of learning or factual content was preceded by a short hypothetical case study. A poll asked attendees if they knew the answer that applied in the described situation. Then the speaker could present the relevant facts that covered such cases.

This is not just engagement. It actively improves the learning process because attendees get a firm grasp on the applicability and relevance of the facts BEFORE they get the raw information. And it helps the speaker know which sections they can breeze through quickly and which ones need more explanation and possibly debate!

 

Susan never described why she used the title she picked. I like the phrase. I think a "Wobbly Webinar" is one that doesn't have a firm foundation and can't stand up under its own weight. If the basis for using the webinar software isn't well thought out, with obvious value for your attendees, they are going to walk away wondering why it was wobbly. Work on wowing them and writers on the web will welcome your work.

 

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