Adobe announced today that Adobe Connect 9 will be available soon for users around the world. It’s still the same Adobe Connect product that you may love, but the company is integrating more of their technologies into the newest version of Connect.

The major new feature in Connect 9 is the ability to create branded landing pages for those wanting to join a conference. The new tools also extend to creating micro-sites for event promotion and registration. No more will you have to RSVP events through a third-party application.

Connect 9 also comes with Adobe SiteCatalyst integration. This allows those who host conference calls to “measure the success of their webinars and marketing or outreach campaigns.” It’s the same technology that powers Web analytics on a massive scale for some major brands so you can expect a solid experience.

Hosts can also view real-time feedback through a new pod called the Engagement Dashboard. It’s available for those running a webinar or virtual classroom. Since a major part of Connect is being able to send messages during the conference, the Engagement Dashboard will keep track of it all.

One of the more unique things about Adobe Connect is that it allows people to join webinars wherever they may be over a wide range of mobile devices. That’s why Adobe is announcing Adobe Connect Mobile version 2 today as well. The mobile version now has better support for managing a meeting, sharing documents and annotating on whiteboards.

Adobe Connect Mobile also includes better support for virtual classrooms. This means that the mobile version can now use breakout rooms, raise-hand functionality and more options for sharing. In the spirit of sharing, Adobe has also removed the need for at least one computer to tie the conference together. People can now hold webinars between mobile devices. Imagine the future of digital schools – taking lessons on your smartphone from a teacher on a tablet.

The great thing about Adobe Connect is that you can try it free for 30 days. If you feel like getting your Adobe Flash-powered conferencing on, you can try it out here. While Connect 9 is not out just yet, trying out Connect 8 should give you a feel for the application.

Announced on the Excel blog today, the house that Windows built will be hosting a free webinar called, “Simplifying your data in Excel.” The webinar will last 15-minutes and cover a variety of topics that should help newcomers and experts alike in getting the most out of the program.

The topics on hand in tomorrow’s webinar are: Using Conditional Formatting, Adding Sparklines, Better charts for presentations, and a new tool to learn Excel. If you can’t make the webinar, Microsoft will add the video to the blog post after they wrap up the webinar.

The blog post includes a handy list of references that the webinar will cover. You can get ahead of the game by checking out the articles and videos now to prepare yourself for the big day tomorrow. Some of the references include a video demo for Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 training videos.

The webinar will take place tomorrow morning at 9:15 a.m. PDT/12:15 p.m. EST. You can bookmark the webinar location now for easy remembrance. As an aside, you will need to install and run the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight to view the webinar.

On the Inside AdWords blog, the company announced that they would be holding a webinar tomorrow at 10 a.m. What will this webinar entail? It aims to teach businesses how to better connect with customers via Google+.

The topics that will be covered in the presentation by Google+ experts include setting up a Google+ Page for your business, best practices and great example cases for using Google+, promoting your Google+ page and improving the performance of your online marketing with the +1 feature.

A recent study pegged the social networking site at having a population that was mostly male. Only 33 percent of Google+ users were female according to the study. The site is obviously still growing, but businesses may want to jump on board now that the population has diversified. Besides, somebody has to knock H&M from the top spot of the most followed brands.

Google+ is expected to reach 400 million users by the end of 2012. Jumping on board now would set businesses up for what is looking to be one of the fastest growing social networking sites this year.

If you want to sign up for the webinar and learn more about Google+ for businesses, you can do so here.

If you want to learn how to use Simple Workflow either with new applications or existing applications, Amazon is offering a brief seminar on Tuesday, March 13th. It will be held between 10 and 11am consisting of a 40 minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A session.

Here’s a little about what Amazon promises with the service and functionality of the product:

Using Amazon SWF to manage workflows within your application is easy. The Amazon SWF service acts as the coordination hub for all of the different components of your application:

*Maintaining application state

*Controlling which tasks each of your application hosts will be assigned to execute

To use Amazon SWF you simply:

*Use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon SWF APIs to specify the names of workflows.

*Monitor the status and progress of workflow executions and their associated tasks in the AWS Management Console.

Here are Service Highlights according to Amazon:

Simple – Amazon SWF replaces the complexity of custom-coded workflow solutions and process automation software with a fully managed web service. This eliminates the need for developers to manage the infrastructure plumbing of process automation so they can focus their energy on the unique functionality of their application.

Flexible – Amazon SWF lets you write your application components and coordination logic in any programming language and run them in the cloud or on-premises.

If You Are Interested:

It sounds like this could be a real time saver for a lot of developers. Hopefully it doesn’t put anybody out of work. The best thing is that Amazon will do most of this work for free. You can get started right away with Simple Workflow or you can wait to take the webinar in mid March and learn more about it first.

I thought it might be a nice idea to expand on the tidbits in the article for the benefit of interested readers. Dana spent a lot of time talking about the ways in which the camera can make you look foolish in a webcast, and it’s all true. If you really want to present a polished and professional image to your audience, you need some specialized training and a fair amount of practice in camera techniques. These are quite different from stage presentation tips. How many times per minute should you blink? How do you keep yourself properly framed in the shot? What do you do with your hands? How do you work with a script or notes when speaking to the audience? What types of clothing work for the camera and which ones give you problems (hint… narrow stripes are a no-no!).

Having a checklist of camera tricks isn’t enough either. Just as with any other kind of learned skill, it takes practice to get comfortable. At first you will find it difficult to concentrate on all the technical pointers and on your content (which still takes priority, in case you thought I was dismissing it in favor of technique). It’s like learning to drive a stick shift… You can spend so much time worrying about balancing the clutch and gas that you forget where you are trying to get to.

But as Dana illustrates in her examples, video is not your only potential source of embarrassment. You can run into trouble by not thinking through what your audience may be able to see or hear during your web conference. Even though you know that you should turn off the sound on your computer, it’s easy to overlook in the last minute rush to get everything ready for the start of your session. I use a checklist to make sure I’m not overlooking simple and obvious things. In the same way that a pilot manually checks off the same items he has gone through on thousands of previous flights, I check that my second phone line is disconnected, that my instant messenger is disabled, that my cell phone is turned off, that my email is shut down, and so on. I also make sure I know exactly which steps I need to do in order to get my audio and web recording going. Is my audio line set up to mute the audience and allow all the speakers to be heard?

One of my favorite embarrassing things to see on a web conference is when the presenter shares his or her desktop to show off a software demo and the display background is set to a silly or personal picture. Or there are icons all over the desktop for computer games. You can be blind to the way your computer screen looks because you see it every day. But think about the impression it gives to your business audience. Clean up those spare icons… You can move them to a folder and then pull them back to the desktop after your presentation.

This is going to get way too long, so I’ll just summarize my main tips by saying that you should take nothing for granted, think about what the audience will see and hear, practice and test everything ahead of time, and make a checklist to ensure you don’t overlook anything.

Oh… And don’t forget the value in getting professional assistance if you need it!

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"This webinar will cover consumer’s search and shopping trends during the Holiday season including online/offline purchase behaviors, search volume trends, the combined impact of search and display on consumer engagement and spend. The webinar will conclude with search best practices for the Holiday season"

What to expect in the webinar:

Users move between paid and algo listings:

• 66%of clicks are from consumers clicking marketers’ listings multiple times.
• 37% of conversions come from consumers clicking more than one of marketer’s listings, natural or paid.
• 12.6% of conversions credited to natural search results were actually preceded by clicks on a marketer’s paid listings, more than twice as many as occur in converse scenario.

Campaigns managed holistically – where keywords used in sponsored search also rank well in algo – deliver superior performance:

• 39% lift in revenue.
• 31% lift in perception of campaign.

Some best practices tips for marketers:

• Apply seasonal modifiers to keywords.
• Plan ahead and use scheduling for short term promotions and include special messaging in title and descriptions.
• Create robust gift guides to encourage cross shopping to different categories and drive traffic to that gift guide.

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

As the webinar is interactive anyone with YSM questions, queries, suggestions, criticisms or just an opinion, can post them here. We will forward them to the people at Yahoo! who will then answer all your queries.

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“Among these is an upcoming, free, one-hour webinar that will cover:

• Consumer search and shopping trends during the holiday season
• Online vs. offline purchasing behaviors
• Daily and weekly trends in search volume
• How the combination of search and display ads affects consumer engagement and spend
• Search advertising best practices for the holiday season

This webinar will be presented twice:

• Tuesday, October 30 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time
• Wednesday, October 31 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time"

To register for either webinar, please visit Yahoo! Seminars and follow the instructions.

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It’s always tricky to answer a question like this in the abstract. I don’t have any samples of past webinars they have put on, or invitations they sent out, or anything else to use as a basis for giving directed feedback. So we’ll have to fall back on some basic best practices.

My guess is that the primary problem here is the trap that most companies fall into when creating and promoting webinars. Actually, it’s the trap that most people fall into when giving live presentations or even speaking with others in private conversations. What is that trap? I’ll tell you in a minute. But first, a short question…

Have you ever had a friend or family member who likes to tell you about their dreams? I don’t mean their hopes and aspirations — I mean each morning they announce, "I had the craziest dream last night. First I was riding a purple dinosaur across a desert, except it wasn’t really a desert, it was kind of like that sugar they use in cotton candy machines…"

At about this point, just as they are getting really wound up and excited about the imagery, you start nodding off. Or plotting how to call your own cell phone so you can escape. Or calculating the number of years you’d get for justifiable homicide.

Webinars take time, money, and energy to produce. You do it because you have something important you want to impart. And because you believe that you are going to benefit by having people attend.

Have you spotted the trap yet? In both cases, the person doing the talking is thinking about their own experiences and objectives rather than those of the audience. Look back at my first paragraph. Notice that my commenter said "I want to train them, I want to get their attention, I want to motivate them." I, I, ay ay ay!

There is nothing wrong with having a goal and objective for yourself. You should. But when it comes to getting your audience involved, you need to turn the thought process around. What does your audience care about? What do they feel they need? What benefits are you offering them?

I titled this post "Increasing Your Webinar Attendance Rates." That gave you a clear and compelling promise of a benefit to you for taking the time to read it. There was a huge amount of power in that simple phrase. Notice I didn’t mention anything about how brilliant I am or how I have facts and years of experience at my disposal, or how much success I have had in the past.

So tip #1 is to go back and scan your webinar titles and descriptions to see if they are establishing a clear and emphatic benefit to your audience that makes it worth their while to attend… Remember, it has to be obvious and explicit — not implied.

Tip #2 is an embellishment on this idea that makes benefits even stronger for your audience. Give them a stake in the content. Bring them into the conversation before the webinar ever starts. It is remarkably easy to do this. Ask them a question in your registration confirmation email (or even better, right on the registration page). "What is the number one problem you have in attracting new customers?" or "What is the single most confusing thing about our Xycomeginy 2000 turnip twaddler?"

Promise that you will make a special point to address these concerns in your presentation. Now people have a reason to attend… You have told them that the content directly addresses what they care about. It’s not just some canned presentation that might or might not be useful to them. If your registration software is powerful enough, you could echo back their question as a field inside the registration confirmation email they get. "Thanks for your question: [xxx] Make sure to attend to hear what we have to say about this and other questions from resellers like yourself."

Tip #3 is to cut down on the amount of content you try to cover within a single event. Instead of a 60-minute event that covers details about the product portfolio and selling tips and commission structures and your support infrastructure and rewards programs, try crafting a series of 30 minute webinars (15-20 minutes of presentation and the rest for Q&A) or a set of 5-10 minute recordings, each on a single topic point. People like having a single, clear focus for their attention. Some 19 years ago, during the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush (Sr.) focused the country’s attention on a single, clear topic point when he said "Read my lips. No new taxes." Suddenly all the clutter of many different political issues was reduced to one bold topic point that some people credit with swaying the election in his favor.

Tip #4 is to get a recording of your event posted and available for viewing as quickly as possible after the live session is over. Send both a thank you email to attendees and a "sorry we missed you" to non-attendees with a link to the recording. If your content was valuable, attendees will forward the link to their coworkers. Non-attendees have another chance to see the content. But the effectiveness of sending out the link goes down incredibly rapidly with time. Same day is best. Next day is acceptable. Next week is almost useless. If it will take time for the recording to be processed and posted, pre-set a URL where you will put it. Let people know immediately that this is where they should look. Then post a message on the destination page telling people to check back for the recording. Remember that recording attendees are just as valuable as live event attendees.

Tip #5 may sound condescending and trite, but it is a very real concern. Deliver a quality seminar. If you have given these webinars in the past and people found them to be unprofessional, they won’t come back for more. If you need to, hire outside services to punch up your slides. Get speaker training for your presenter. Make sure you are fully rehearsed and comfortable in the presentation content. Use a professional moderator to handle technical aspects and to give a smooth, professional feel to the event. If you know an event went poorly in the past and you are hitting the same small audience, you may need to advertise (as a benefit, not an apology!) that you have made exciting new strides in the quality of the materials and presenters. Then deliver on that promise. Few webinar speakers truly care enough to put in the preparation time necessary to do a first class presentation job. When you hear one who does, it makes an impression!

That should give you a few starting points for examining your web events and making them more effective at getting people to register and attend. Good luck!

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Unisfair is a California company that sells software enabling a virtual re-creation of a live conference. An event organizer rents a virtual "hall" from Unisfair. The hall consists of auditorium space, exhibitor booths, a media library, professional networking lounges, and a decorated lobby for visitors to enter. The organizer can then sell booth space to exhibitors, charge for sponsorship and signage, charge a registration fee to attendees,and so on. It’s very much like a live show, but everything takes place on the computer.

Participating exhibitors can create a complete booth layout, choosing their colors, signage, demo spaces, and available documentation for visitors. But instead of paying for electric drops, plant rental, garbage pickup, carpeting, and setup/tear-down labor, they create their space using software wizards. They can assign salespeople, marketing reps, engineers, and executives to "booth duty" from each person’s office. As visitors arrive, they engage in chat sessions with the right people to address their questions. If they happen to show up after hours (when the exhibit hall is "closed") they can browse through the company’s documentation or leave a message for later follow-up.

That’s all very cool and an interesting take on business collaboration in a familiar context that echoes a real world experience. But this column concentrates on web conferencing and webinars… What’s the connection?

Any good public conference is going to feature speakers talking about subjects that the audience wants to hear about. In an online environment, the analogy is a webinar. So the audience can enter the public auditorium and listen to speakers at their scheduled times – with reminders for upcoming presentations broadcast throughout the event "hall" to prompt attendees to stop in. A large conference might organize presentations into topic-specific tracks, with several different presentations going on simultaneously. Of course the advantage to the online version is that each presentation can be recorded and made available very quickly for people who want to catch a subject they missed during its live presentation.

When I talked to Brent Arslaner, the Vice President of Marketing at Unisfair, he told me that another big advantage to giving presentations online is that speakers can pre-record the bulk of their presentation to avoid live session jitters. They can then run the recording of their speech as if they were live, answering audience questions through chat as they go and switching over to a live Q&A session at the end of the canned portion.

I took a look at the webcasting portion of the software and I got a kick out of the big-screen theater motif they used to frame the available presentations. The presentation functionality is fairly simple, by design. You can upload a PowerPoint slide deck, advance through the slides, and chat through text messaging with audience members. The audience can see pictures and biographies of the speakers. Brent says that the software supports PowerPoint animations and slide transitions, although I didn’t have a chance to test the implementation myself.

There is no support for live annotation ("whiteboarding") over slides, there is no desktop/application sharing, and there is no support for interactive audience polling. What you do get is field-tested capacity for very large audiences. Brent said they had run a real-world event with 6000 simultaneous participants.

While we’re talking about figures and statistics, Brent also impressed me with some studies Unisfair had run on audience behavior patterns. He says they found that customer virtual events tended to average 3000 registrants and 1500 attendees, with the average visit lasting for 2.45 hours. That long attendance span surprised me. Brent allowed that people may leave the event up and running in a browser window, checking back to see when the next presentation of interest is scheduled to start.

Unisfair provides complete event production assistance, including hall design, exhibitor assistance, promotion and marketing, and production and recording of webcasts used in the auditorium. They also provide reports on attendee behaviors and they can put together lead scoring based on a client’s indicators of "significant" activities. The majority of business to date has come from the publishing industry, with the big magazines putting on trade shows and conferences in the subject area of their publications.

But Unisfair introduced a new product offering last week designed to serve the needs of single enterprise customers. Virtual events in this space might encompass user conferences, partner shows, or educational summits, as well as general lead generation. I tried out a virtual event that Tibco had put together as an enterprise conference and I liked the way that it felt more interesting and "seductive" than simply posting a list of available webinars and marketing documents on a web page.

This is a fun and potentially lucrative application of some established functionality in a new and appealing context. The business world can use more of these unique ways to make remote collaboration more friendly and familiar. Kudos to Unisfair.

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Television does it with their countdown shows and websites do it with lists: "AFI’s 100 Greatest American Movies" or "VH1′s 100 Greatest Kid Stars."

And Darcy offers evidence that he spends too much time in supermarket checkout aisles by demonstrating that popular mass market magazines use the trick on their covers all the time.

The idea of an enumerated list of pointers seems to appeal to us as audiences. We know that there is a finite limit to the information we’ll be receiving and that it has been structured and organized, giving us hope that it will be more informative and useful. We also seem to enjoy the challenge of guessing what might be on the list and comparing our ideas with those of the presenter.

Why not give this a try the next time you need to promote a webinar? Instead of a title like "Xycomeginy Software Release 5.0 – New Features," you could make it sing by combining an audience perspective with a list: "8 Ways The New Xycomeginy Release Benefits You."

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