The Webinar Blog

Webinar Topics For Discussion

I have received some great topics and questions to cover this Wednesday on my webinar about webinars! I hope you will join us for an open and lively discussion about all things related to producing, administering, moderating, and presenting web events.

I will provide my insights, opinions, and experiences from 16 years of webinar use and working with clients and webinar technology companies. But even better than that, you will be able to share your own thoughts and see what your peers have to say. I will leave the chat panel open for public discussion.

Let's expand the size of the community sharing information on this webcast. Please help Tweet, Email, or notify others who work with webinars so they have a chance to participate as well.

• DATE: Wednesday, December 30
• TIME: 10am California, 1pm New York (click for time zone conversion)
• REGISTRATION: http://j.mp/wbrdiscuss

I want to reiterate that this is NOT a lead generation or marketing exercise. Your email from the registration page will ONLY be used to send you login instructions and reminders. You will not be added to any list and you will not receive any sales or marketing contacts or follow up messages. I will not be marketing my own services or those of any webinar technology or provider. I'm going to be running the session on Webinato (formerly omNovia), so if you are not familiar with that platform it's an opportunity to try it out.

Here are just some of the topics submitted so far from registrants:

• Technology/platform options, opinions, experiences
• Horror stories and lessons learned
• Recommended duration
• Use of live video and video clips
• Effectiveness of roundtable discussion format
• Webinars for software training
• Flash vs HTML5/WebRTC vs installed client
• How to compare webinar technologies
• How to failsafe a webinar
• Increasing participant engagement and interaction
• Promoting and marketing webinars
• Setting and managing participant expectations and preparation
• Tips for running a webinar by yourself
• Webinar support as a business

I'm looking forward to sharing with you and learning from our combined knowledge and experience. See you online this Wednesday!

 

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

Webinara Is Ready To Promote Your Webinars

I have been tracking the early days of Webinara, a new online service for posting and discovering public webinars. They are now in full production mode, with registered audience members and a slate of listed webinars from a variety of providers. I even posted a listing for my own webinar next week!

To get a better insight into the site, I spoke with the CEO of Webinara, Kristian Haanes. Mr. Haanes and his company are based in Norway, but the website is currently written in English and early participation has a predominance of users from North America. This makes sense, as webinars are farther along the adoption and maturity curve in the US and Canada than in many other regions. Mr. Haanes looks forward to eventually expanding functionality to include other languages, with heavier global promotion.

Mr. Haanes tells me that posted webinars are coming from a wide variety of industries, with hosting companies ranging in size from the SMB market up to Global Fortune enterprises.

Posting webinars is a fee-based privilege. Subscription plans are available on a monthly or annual basis, starting at $39/month for Non-Profit and Educational use. For your money, you get your webinars included on the search pages, indexed by topic area and date. Webinars are promoted to the community of registered users in emails and tweets. Hosts can also activate social collaboration features such as following and private messaging.

I found it easy to enter the basic information about my upcoming webinar. One feature I appreciated was a way to list three short bullet points that appear under the heading "Why attend this webinar." That's a best practice for promotion and helps prospects quickly determine whether the information is right for them. You can add a banner graphic or let the Webinara team select one for you. I was satisfied with the one they picked for my topic.

If you happen to use Citrix GoToWebinar or Onstream Webinars as your web conferencing platform, you can set up automatic connection to your account. Then when you create a webinar it gets linked to Webinara for promotion and one-click registration from within the search engine. Instead of driving users to your registration page, their basic name and email information is transferred directly into your webinar registration. This may reduce abandonment rates in the registration process. You can also check registrations from inside Webinara without having to log in to your webinar account. Mr. Haanes plans to add connectors for other technologies over time. Webinar platforms without a built-in connector just use your webinar's standard registration page as a destination click-through from the listing.

Unlike some webinar search platforms, Webinara asks end users (potential attendees) to register in the system. When you register, you select topic areas of interest. These can be general ("Accounting and Finance") or specific ("Energy Cybersecurity"). Choosing categories lets Webinara send you periodic emails and tweets of newly-added webinars in your topic areas. This means that promotion does not rely on users proactively coming to the site and initiating searches. Notifications are pushed to them.

Registered users can follow their favorite hosts, send messages to webinar organizers, and take advantage of one-click registration for webinars with connected platforms.

At the moment, Webinara is going through the difficult startup hurdle that all search facilities must traverse. Attendees are hesitant to use it until there is lots of content available. Hosts don't want to use it until it reaches lots of users. So the first months of operation are a struggle to get early adopters on board.

Mr. Haanes has additional plans for adding functionality for webinar hosts. The website lists upcoming features such as allowing users to supply feedback and ratings, giving organizers more statistics and data on the performance of their listings, and providing optional value-add services for webinar hosts.

I always appreciate expanding the convenience and utility of webinars for businesses and the public. I hope Webinara succeeds and I will be watching it closely.

 

Technorati Tags: Webinara,Kristian Haanes,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web event,webcast,webcasting,web meetings,web conference,web conferencing

Let's Talk About Webinars

Please join me on December 30 for an open discussion about webinars. There's not much going on in that "dead week" between Christmas and New Year, so I thought it would be a nice way to close out the year with a communal meeting for webinar presenters, hosts, moderators, and administrators.

This is NOT a lead generation exercise. I'm asking you to register with your email so you can get reminder messages. That's the only thing you'll get. No solicitations, no offers, no salespeople, and you won't be added to any list of any kind. This is not being run by a webinar technology firm (I got the folks at Webinato to donate the use of a conference room, but they won't be doing any marketing and they don't get your personal information).

It's just a way to get together and share horror stories, experiences, opinions about webinar technologies, advice, best practices, and camaraderie. If a lot of people show up, it will be a great way to learn from each other. If you're the only one there, you can count it as a private consulting session. Either way, you can't lose!

DETAILS:

• Wednesday, December 30
• 10am California, 1pm New York (click for time zone conversion)
• One hour, audio via telephone or computer
• Free admission
• Registration: https://wsuccess.webinato.com/register/86951450477674

I don't have a set agenda. You can suggest topics and questions when you register or you can bring questions to the meeting. I plan to leave the chat panel open for public discussion. I hope you will join me and help to make this a valuable learning and sharing experience for us all.

 

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

2015 Filler Word Of The Year

2013 was a great year for "sort of" and "kind of" qualifiers. 2014 featured a surprise winner with "so" at the beginning of sentences. As we move toward the final weeks of 2015, the judging is complete and I am ready to call out the most annoying filler word of the year (based on the audio editing I do to clean up client webinar recordings).

This year the award goes to the word "again." As with our previous winners, there is nothing inherently evil about the word itself. It has meaning. It plays a useful role in communication. Nobody should be afraid to conscientiously apply it in their presentations.

As with all filler words, the problem arises from overuse without contextual relevance. I hear increasing numbers of speakers repeatedly saying "again" even though they are introducing a new point rather than repeating something they have said earlier. The reason is almost identical to my analysis of "so" from last year. The word acts as a connective crutch to signal that the presenter is still talking.

"Again" feels natural to presenters. If they have prepared correctly, they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the topic and figuring out what they want to say. Hopefully they have practiced the talk or they have given it in other venues. As they deliver each point, it is easy to feel as though the information is a little repetitive or redundant. "Again" is almost a way of excusing the fact that the information feels familiar.

This is why the word is insidious enough to win top honors for 2015. It is not merely distracting and annoying from sheer repetition (as with perennial favorites "uh, umm, and you know"). It subconsciously sabotages listener satisfaction with the content and with the speaker by signaling attendees that their time is being wasted. If you say "again" over and over, you introduce the sense that the information is just a repeat of something you have already said. And that is an invitation for your listeners to check out. "Oh, this is just the same thing again? All right, I'll pay attention later when something new comes along."

Is "again" a part of your vocal mannerisms? Don't be so quick to say no. None of us can hear our own filler words. If we noticed them, we wouldn't use them. The only way to find out whether your brain has filtered out recognition of an overused phrase is to enlist the help of a trusted friend, coworker, or professional coach. Ask them to listen to one of your presentations ignoring the content and focusing on your phrasing. And if they tell you they noticed a speech habit, don't get defensive. You will be certain they are wrong. They aren't.

Again

 

Technorati Tags: presenter training,speaker training,presentation tips,filler words,webinar,web seminar,online presentations,web presentation,webcast,webcasting

End Of Year Webinar Software Updates

In the past week I have received notifications of significant updates to web conferencing software from Digital Samba, ON24, and Webinato. Looks like the vendors are hitting end of year development goals! My Fall/Winter busy season is extending farther into December than usual, so I have not had time to do in-depth examination of the updates, but I'll try to add them to my list for better coverage soon.

As a brief overview, here are some of the announcements.

Digital Samba announced version 4.3.9 of their OnSync web conferencing platform. They point to more than 70 new features, improvements, and fixes. A lot of their focus is directed at making the software more customizable and useful for "white label" rebranding as a product offering from telecommunication companies and content service providers. So some of their improvements are targeted at integration with phone conferencing.

One of the major updates is a new statistics dashboard giving administrators greater visual access to information on usage (both current and historical). They also enabled an option for automatically recording sessions without manual intervention.

I just did a lookup online and discovered that there are OnSync release numbers even later than this announcement, so it looks like their developers are working faster than their marketing team can keep up with!

[UPDATE DEC 18: A new press release just announced version 4.4.1 with additional enhancements. They are busy!]

----------------------

ON24 announced a similar wide-ranging set of improvements to their Webcast Elite product line, which is used for their customer webinars. They called attention to new designs and graphics to provide a modern and consistent viewing experience across all supported platforms and devices. Updates to their Presentation Manager XD (PMXD) are supposed to allow greater control and easier tools for presenters to deliver content and manage attendee questions. And the ON24 Analytics Dashboard gets improvements in design, reporting, and navigation of data from live and on-demand presentations.

I'm really interested in exploring this release, since I previously felt that the ON24 presentation tools were lagging behind the wonderful attendee viewing experience. Hopefully this brings both sides of the equation into better balance.

----------------------

Webinato is the new name being used for customer-facing operations and the web conferencing product from omNovia. The old omNovia Technologies name will fade into the background for formal business dealings only. They have updated product design and graphics for registration, administration, and live conferencing with the goal of being more modern and more consistent across desktop and mobile devices and platforms.

I was impressed that the company let current users retain their existing room look and feel for a while to update instructions and screen shots or retrain presenters. Rooms can be updated to the new design by account administrators or left to the end of the month for automatic conversion.

 

Technorati Tags: Digital Samba,OnSync,ON24,Webinato,omNovia,Webcast Elite,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,online meeting,web meetings

Ten Years Of Webinar Tips

Ten years ago today - December 9, 2005 - I published my first post on The Webinar Blog, opening with these words:

… And another blog joins the ever-increasing pantheon of information on the Web.

I thought it might be fun to take a stroll down memory lane to check in on a decade's worth of developments.

Early post subjects from that first month of blogging included:

• Experienced in-room presenters often have trouble adapting to the specialized needs of web presentation.
• Polls need to be framed in better context to stimulate more engagement and participation.
• Attendance vs. registration continues to decline. How can we encourage more registration and more attendance?
• PowerPoint slides need design improvements to be effective. Many resources are available to learn techniques.

Hmmm, some things never go out of style!

January 2006: I introduce www.webinarnews.info - A portal to current press releases, news stories, and published articles pertaining to the webinar industry. That page still exists, updated by hand each and every day. If you haven't been looking at it, you really should. I do the filtering for you.

March 2006: I mention that Raindance, Placeware, and Centra have all been acquired by larger companies. "Could WebEx be a target? They are attractive from the name value equity and their large corporate customer list alone. Not that I've heard even a whispered rumor, mind you... This is sheer speculation on my part." Cisco buys WebEx exactly one year later.

May 2006: I announce WebEventSearch.com - a site where webinar hosts can list upcoming events and potential attendees can search to find webinars serving their interests. I shut it down a little over a year later, having learned some harsh lessons. Over the years I will cover similar announcements for webinar listing and search services such as EventSpan, Finervista, FreeWebinarDirectory, Insight24, Showdango, Webinar Base, Webinar Bucket, Webinar-Directory, Webinar Hero, WebinarListings, and WebinarWeekly. It's a tough business.

July 2006: I publish a sneak peek at the beta version of a new product from Citrix called GoToWebinar.

July 2008: My blog is chosen by Guy Kawasaki and his team for inclusion on the Alltop information portal.

February 2009: I run the first of several posts over the years detailing problems with reliance on Adobe Flash as a support platform for webinars. The industry is still trying to find something more ubiquitous, reliable, and interoperational for all users. Hopes are being placed on HTML5 and WebRTC.

January 2010: One of the most popular posts: "How Much Do Webinars Cost?"

October 2010: I introduce a way to report and check reports on webinar service interruptions, regardless of vendor. www.webinardowntime.com is still active and available today.

August 2011: I cover the end of Microsoft Live Meeting, previously Placeware.

January 2012: Another of my most popular posts (now used in a school curriculum). "Copyrights And Fair Use In Presentations"

March 2012: I start a series of posts on "Stock Photography Sites" and usage tips.

August 2014: I get to post about being in business for 10 years!

September 2014: The Webinar Blog is included in The Top 50 Web Conferencing Blogs of 2014 from GetVoIP.com

January 2015: I put a lot of research into trying to clear up Wikipedia's incorrect information on "Web Conferencing History - The Early Years"

April 2015: I report on a rumor that Citrix might get rid of its web collaboration products. I say "My personal take on the question of sale vs. spinoff is that it would make more sense to spin off Citrix Online into its own independent company." In November, they announce the spinoff.

This blog has been, and continues to be, a labor of love, I have made more than a thousand posts, visited half a million times according to TypePad statistics. I have tried to bring you breaking news, reviews of products, insights into vendors large and small, and lots and lots of free tips and best practices. I invite you to browse through the category of "Tips" in the right-hand categories selector and click through the 31 pages of entries (use the tiny arrow icon at the bottom of the page). There's a lot of useful information there.

And if you know someone who produces, markets, supports, or presents on webinars… Why not forward them a link and encourage them to explore the content for themselves?

I look forward to another ten years of writing for you. Thanks for reading!

--Ken

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,online meeting,web meetings,web collaboration,online collaboration,presentation tips

Demand Generation: Webinars, Pens, And Personas

If you saw "The Wolf of Wall Street" you probably remember the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio demands of his sales team, "Sell me this pen!" A couple of them fumble around, then one hot shot grabs the pen and challenges DiCaprio to write his name.

"I don't have a pen."

"Exactly. Supply and demand."

It's a cute scene, and they call back to it at the end of the film, when DiCaprio is teaching sales techniques in seminars using the same "Sell me this pen" challenge. The problem is that it's 100% wrong.

According to Jordan Belfort (the real person DiCaprio portrays in the movie), a good salesperson asks questions to learn about the prospect. You don't sell based on what YOU think is important, you sell based on what THEY think is important.

What the salesperson in the movie actually demonstrates is clever marketing. In most marketing situations, you don't have the luxury of asking your prospects questions and learning anything about them as individuals. You need to blindly present ideas that drive their demand for your offerings.

How do you determine what ideas are likely to be persuasive when you can't ask questions? One technique is to define personas that act as proxies for prospects. If you understand the needs, interests, and priorities of the persona, you can market to real prospects who fit the same general profile.

I'll be going into detail on this subject next week in a free webinar sponsored by BrightTALK. On Tuesday, December 8, I will discuss power and pitfalls of persona-based presentations as applied to demand generation webinars. The starting time is 1pm US Eastern and I asked them to hold us to 45 minutes in order to give you time to prep for your next meeting on the subsequent hour.

Back to the scene and what we can learn from it... The salesman has created a very basic persona that describes the kind of person who would be interested in the pens being offered.

"Persona Description: A person with a pressing need to write something and no writing implement available."

The moment he is able to fit DiCaprio into that definition ("Write your name on that napkin") he knows how to generate demand for his offering. "I have what you need. I have it here, now, convenient and instantly available. You can't accomplish your goal without it."

The marketing is done. Surprisingly, the movie doesn't even touch on the sales process, which would include pricing, overcoming objections, terms and conditions, delivery options, and so on. But that's not our concern as demand generators. We want to find common persuasion points we can use with personas that represent as many sales prospects as possible.

Surprisingly, most marketers define personas incorrectly for achieving this goal. Join me on Tuesday and learn what they do wrong!

Technorati Tags: BrightTALK,demand generation,marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,online marketing