So if you haven’t gotten your feet wet yet, you may want to pay attention to the webinars on Enhanced Campaigns that Google has been providing. We recently shared one that focused on Google Shopping and Enhanced Campaigns. A new one that Google has provided deals with Enhanced Campaigns on the Google Display Network:

This week, Google announced ad group mobile bid adjustments for Enhanced Campaigns.

Google says in the video description:

This webinar presents in-depth examples on how to use Remarketing with Google Analytics. With this tool, you can tap into valuable Google Analytics insights about your website visitors who show an interest in your products and services — for example, visitors who spend time viewing specific pages or who put items in their shopping cart. Once you’ve identified your audience, you can run ads across the Google Display Network (GDN) that are tailored to that audience. Take advantage of your existing Google Analytics tags and easily create and edit sophisticated lists using Google Analytics segmentation capabilities.

Frankly, you shouldn’t need Google to tell you that you need to be optimized for mobile these days, but there is still plenty to be learned.

In the first one (the one for advertisers), Google discusses mobilizing your site, maximizing mobile ads, and tracking/measuring them. The second one discusses why you should go mobile, provides tips for building a mobile site, talks about best practices and explains how to get started.

As a bonus, Google has also made the slides from the webinars available to download here (pdf).

You can bookmark this landing page and find them all there, including a schedule of upcoming webinars and links to recored ones, by category and product. Here’s the current schedule for upcoming webinars.

• March 13 at 10am PDT: 5 Tips to Start Marketing your Business with Video
• March 14 at 10am PDT: Introduction to the Google Display Network
• March 15 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising
• March 20 at 10am PDT: Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
• March 21 at 10am PDT: Reaching Your Goals with Google Analytics
• March 22 at 10am PDT: GoMo for Publishers
• March 27 at 10am PDT: Manage Large AdWords Campaigns with Less Effort
• March 28 at 10am PDT: 3 Tips to Get More out of your Video Advertising Campaigns

Here are some of the recorded webinars that are already posted:

The matter of the cancellation is pretty straightforward.  Without giving a reason for this change of plans, Google just announced that AdWords account messages about maintenance can be disregarded.  Maybe everyone plans to be out doing some Mother’s Day shopping, or perhaps the system is just looking extra-stable this month.

As for the webinar, it’ll be held on May 20th starting at 2 PM EST, and is supposed to last for one hour.  Registration‘s necessary in order to tune in.

Otherwise, the title of the webinar is "Uncovering Opportunities with Display Advertising," and topics that will be covered include "Google’s vision and recent innovations in display advertising," "[h]ow to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to optimizing your campaigns," and "[h]ow advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy."

Enjoy these unusual opportunities to get ahead.

If you want to watch it it’s free to members or it costs $129 straight up.

Facebook, for you noobs out there, is a social networking Web site that was originally created for college students but has been opened to anyone w/an email address and a pulse.

A few things I found really interesting:

• People put the greatest trust in friends when online. In fact, 83% of people trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product, while a lowly 30% trust a blogger’s review. The only question I have is why 17% of respondents have untrustworthy friends whose opinions they don’t respect.
• Email is for old people. And by old people, I mean those who were able to vote in the last election. As Jeremiah notes, as these young’uns move into the work force, they’ll be forced into using emails most likely, but they’ll also be likely to continue using Facebook and other social media sites.
• Social Media mores are still being written. Jeremiah mentioned that his policy is to accept every friend request, and he currently has over 2K (or was it 5K?) "friends" on Facebook. He later mentioned the recent story about famed blogger Robert Scoble being  temporarily suspended from Facebook for trying to take all of the emails of his Facebook friends and moving them over to Plaxo, another service. Jeremiah felt that he had broken the "social contract" by doing that. Others feel that he was just moving his contacts from one tool to another. Personally, I think if you allow everyone who asks to be your friend, you should expect this behavior.
• Facebook Pages are for products or companies. If you have a product or service, you might want to create a "page" for it (which is free) and then people can join and become your "fans."
• Facebook isn’t the end all and be all. While social media is probably here to stay in one manner or another, Facebook may or may not succeed. A strong, fluid strategy for social media sites is more important than putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket.

A lot of the content seemed to be more targeted to large companies as opposed to small businesses, but I still think there was a lot of interesting information. Whether watching the entire webinar is worth it to you depends on who your target audience is.

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Asking the clients about their usage won’t ever get us a large enough response rate to get valid totals. So let’s do a little group estimation amongst ourselves. I have put together a short (but difficult!) online survey. I’m asking each of the web conferencing technology vendors to go through and give best guesses and estimates of usage averages and totals that they see with their clients.

Click here to participate.

I will consolidate the results and make them available to everybody. The last page of the survey lets you enter your email address for a private response and I’ll also post key figures online. Of course, results will be cumulative only, and your responses won’t be identified by your name or company.

It is fine for multiple people in the same company to fill out the survey. I ask you to identify what company you work for and what client geography you are making estimates for.

That way, we can get some local expertise from the giants like Microsoft and WebEx by people who might know one geography but not their worldwide total. And I can do some averaging and internal validation by comparing responses from different people in the same company.

I know that many vendors don’t or can’t track exact client usage figures. Don’t let that stop you. Answer the statistics that you have a good feel for and skip the others. Informed guesses are okay. We know this won’t give us exact stats that will stand up in court, but a large canvassing of the industry will give us all a better picture of what is going on than we have now.

I have broken the statistic questions into three groups. Structured events, collaborative meetings, and on-demand recordings.

Take the survey today. And feel free to forward this to your colleagues who might have information and insights as well.

PS: I’m cross-posting this on Webinar Wire to hit the largest audience of vendors possible. Between these two blogs, I think just about every web conferencing vendor should see the note.

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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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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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