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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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/using-numbers-for-effective-presentations-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/vendor-thoughts-on-cisco-web-conferencing-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/vendor-thoughts-on-cisco-web-conferencing-2007-03#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:15:15 +0000 Ken Molay http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36531 When Cisco made its announcement about purchasing WebEx on March 15, competing web conferencing software vendor iLinc rushed out a press release the following day, talking about the news from their perspective. This got me wondering what other vendors might have to say about theshakeup in the market. I decided to contact several of them in different niches of the industry and see what they felt like sharing.

I love happy use case stories about webinars, so I called up Tom and had a chat about his experiences. He graciously consented to letting me write up the interview for this column.

As Tom wrote on his blog, he had been flying around the country as a spokesperson and traveling sales/marketing specialist for Nextel as they sold BlackBerry devices for use in the real estate industry. While the on-site seminars worked well in terms of audience attendance and sales, the approach didn’t scale very well.

When RIM invited Tom to present on a webinar, he assumed that it would involve a lot of specialized setup and expensive technical production requirements. As with many people who haven’t tried producing a webinar, he didn’t realize that the basic requirements can be no more than some PowerPoint slides and a telephone! He was able to show up as a guest speaker from his own office, without fancy modifications to his computer or any production studio overhead.

He wasn’t sure how a virtual presentation would go over with a non-technical audience spread out around the country, but was pleasantly surprised to see that the realtors on the line were receptive to the format and asked many questions using the webinar software’s Q&A functionality. Tom says that the whole experience was "a whack-you-upside-the-head-with-a-baseball-bat revelation." This was a way to reach many more people with far less cost, planning, and inconvenience than his traditional live presentation format.

Tom moved on to work with other clients, driving their sales and marketing operations to stimulate growth. He now says that every new business venture or client case he is involved with gets a checklist item right up front… "What is the potential role of webinars in sales and customer service?"

He has been working since last year with a company whose name he has kept confidential, referring to its product as "SmartWare" just for reference purposes. I was a bit confused at first, as there is a SmartWare company on the web, but that is purely coincidence and shouldn’t be taken as his client’s real name. Tom has been following the success of their business operations on his blog in a series he calls "Real-Time Case Studies."

Tom has moved to a model where he does all sales presentations to prospective customers using webinar technology. He says that his two salespeople are able to handle a workload that would take five people to do in a traditional fly-and-drive mode where they visit each prospect for a live presentation. Tom estimates that if they were to switch to a live presentation model for sales that the extra internal costs in travel, meals, equipment, and staff would probably force them to double the product licensing fees they charge to customers.

He says that a typical sales webinar may be attended by just a few people or as many as 40. The audience can gather in one room or log on from their own computers and locations. Again, Tom wondered if online presentations would be effective as a sales tool. But he is completely convinced now. He says that they have an "astonishingly high" close rate and customers almost never ask for a followup live visit. They can literally close the deal and get the order remotely.

In addition to initial sales presentations, the company uses their web conferencing software for customer education and support as well. They run live application sharing to run the software on their own computers while the clients watch remotely to learn the proper way to install and configure it.

The success of webinars for sales and support has inspired Tom to look for additional ways to leverage the technology. For one thing, he would like to record his webinars for on-demand access and repeat use. The company has not yet built a library of past presentations for people seeking information. He also sees an excellent opportunity to introduce more community building among the company’s customers. Because the company sells to educational institutions that don’t compete with each other (at least in this particular application area), the customers tend to be mutually supportive. Tom sees web conferencing being used for group meetings where participants can share best practices and use-case walkthroughs, as well as helping each other with problem situations. He also wants to start using webinars as more of an initial public education and lead generation tool.

I asked Tom which vendor and web conferencing product they are using as well as the criteria they used during the selection process. He said that because one of the company’s initial presenters was familiar with WebEx, they just basically fell in to using that product without a formal comparison and selection period. They use Meeting Center right now, as they haven’t needed the more formal registration management and other features of Event Center for large inbound events.

I asked whether there were any frustrations and regrets so far and Tom had to think for a long time. He eventually said that there are occasional circumstances where an audience member will have difficulty logging in to the event or getting the connection established. But those are infrequent situations and they have always been able to overcome the initial problems. He said there hasn’t been anything that has made him second-guess his vendor decision.

Many people are tentative about trying out webinars because of doubts about their cost, technical difficulty, audience acceptance, or effectiveness. Just as Tom found out, testing the use of webinars in your business can be much easier and less expensive than most people think. And the results can have a tangible effect on your bottom line profitability and customer satisfaction. I urge you to take the plunge if you haven’t already tried them. If you are just getting started, my free educational presentation on March 8 will be perfect for you. It will give you an overview of what you need to think about from initial planning through delivery to followup. You can register at www.EffectiveWebinars.com and maybe even win a free hour of webinar consulting!

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With this in mind, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has decided to present an encore presentation of their free SEO And Legal Issues webinar. As indicated by the title, the webinar looks at the legal issues facing today’s SEO/SEM community. The subjects being discussed include copyright law, trademark law and libel law.

The webinar takes place on December 14, 2006 at 12:00pm ET (this Thursday) and interested parties are invited to register.

The initial SEO and Legal Issues webinar was conducted during October of this year and the demand was high enough SEMPO thought it prudent to deliver an encore presentation. The webinar lasts for one hour and the cost is free. For more information, visit the SEMPO site.

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Hi, we are looking to find a new vendor for webcasting services but we are looking for more than just the basic functionality of an 0N24. We’ve used Globix, Unisfair, LiveMeeting, & Webex in the past but I wanted to know your other opinions about vendors such as Bulldog Solutions. Is it worth the extra money? Do they have any competitors?

I think the issue is interesting enough to get its own post.

When you select a webinar technology vendor, you should expect some level of technical support as a given, as you would with any software application. But after that basic requirement, what can you expect in the way of extra services? Many vendors aren’t set up to assist their clients with marketing, event production, promotion, recording, and so on. Others offer extra-fee consulting services to cover some portion of these needs (the most common vendor services are for event production, such as creating registration pages and customizing your interface look and feel). Then there are resellers and service companies that provide added value services packaged around a particular technology.

I have written about two of the better known webinar service providers in this blog back in days gone by. It is a bit dangerous for me to speak for them, as I have no formal relationship with either, but here’s my take:

Bulldog Solutions concentrates on the lead generation aspect of a webinar campaign. They offer a great deal of assistance with event promotion, boosting attendance rates, follow-up, and so forth. I just took a look at their home page and I see that they have repositioned themselves as “a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue.” They have moved their mention of webinars into a more general paragraph stating that they will work with campaigns involving webinars, podcasts, white papers, physical events, and rich media.

I know that in the past, Bulldog has acted as a reseller of specific web conferencing technologies bundled as part of a total campaign management contract. Looking at their website, I see that they currently list technical requirements for using WebEx, Placeware (the old name for Microsoft Live Meeting), and Democast — which Bulldog apparently acquired and which I am unfamiliar with.

KRM Information Services assists a different part of the industry. They concentrate on helping clients deliver fee-based events such as lectures, educational sessions, and other “high value content” presentations. KRM works exclusively with WebEx as their conferencing technology and they put great emphasis on the telephone audio quality associated with an event. They maintain a sophisticated on-site telephone mixing and recording studio in their midwest offices and they provide on-air support and operators for events. They use a variety of technologies to create turnkey packages for handling payment processing and registration for an event, recording and editing at high quality, with DVD or CD file distribution, and so on.

Both KRM and Bulldog can certainly offer great value if your needs mesh with what they are set up to do best. They will run your webinar-based program from start to end and relieve you of a lot of pressure and time. Obviously you’re going to pay for the wide range of services offered and only you can determine whether the final numbers are cost effective for your particular situation. If you don’t need the end-to-end management they provide, you may feel overcharged.

I recently talked with Bob Hanson at Quantum Leap Marketing. You asked about alternatives to Bulldog Solutions, and this might be one company to check with. Quantum Leap covers many of the same areas of webinar marketing, promotion, and lead generation. I don’t have a pricing comparison.

After the full service campaign management companies, you get the dedicated webinar service providers. I’m really only familiar with three companies in this niche. One is my company, Webinar Success. Another is Corvent. The third is 1080 Group. 1080 Group seems to use a structured formal program for coaching “do it yourself” webinar producers. Webinar Success and Corvent use a model that allows a client to pick and choose the areas where they need specific help. For some companies, this means figuring out which technology vendor to go with and setting up some basic guidelines and best practices. For others, it means assistance with content production or refinement, speaker training, or on-air moderator services. I don’t know how Corvent sells their services. Webinar Success takes the approach of offering a la carte choices for any specific service desired. We can zip in, help you cover an area that needs help and remove some of your task burden, and then get out again quickly. My goal is to ensure that there is never a question about value for your services dollar.

You may also want to check out value-add resellers of specific technologies. These companies often provide some set of services in conjunction with the use of the underlying conferencing software. One example is Clarix, which sells Adobe Connect and offers services such as customization and software training. Another is CatwalkConference, which serves IBM Lotus web conferencing customers.

I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to give a blanket answer to “Is it worth the extra money?” It must be worth it to some companies, or these providers wouldn’t be able to stay in business! What you should be able to glean from this long response is that for any need you may be feeling, you can find a provider to help you with it. Prices definitely vary by a wide range, so it’s worth doing comparisons. And most importantly, make sure you are getting the type and amount of help you need. Everyone takes a slightly different approach to their services and you want to find the one that is going to fit comfortably with your requirements.

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).