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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(Side note to the web team at InterCall… Why do you get a choice for the French language website when you click on Canada, but when you click on the country flag for France, you get an English-only website for "Europe"? Aren’t Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany also "Europe"? They get to use their national languages. And why is the popup text for Germany translated as "Deutschland" while all the other countries have their names represented in the English equivalents? Oh heck… Website design is a pain even when you are working in a single language!)

With that kind of emphasis on global conferencing you might wonder how InterCall assists clients with large multinational audiences. For answers, I talked to Tiffany Killcreas, who is a nice person with the longest business title I have ever run across. Ready for this? She is "Senior Manager – Product Management, Surround the Call Features and Vertical Markets." You’d need a fold-out business card for that!

Tiffany told me that InterCall has partnered with IAL Services to provide high quality interpretation and translation for conferences conducted in multiple languages. InterCall packages and prices the services, and contracts with IAL to carry out the labor. In this way the client doesn’t have to deal with separate sales groups, but gets the advantage of working with an experienced specialist. The two companies have been live testing their multilingual conference offerings for the past year and last month they made it a formally priced and publicized option for InterCall customers.

Maddalena Ragusin is Business Development Manager at IAL and she stepped me through their area of expertise and how they are working with InterCall. First I had to learn the nuances of terminology in this field. I would have called everything they do "translation," but they reserve that term for altering documents and electronic materials into another language. Translation can involve changes to content to account for cultural differences and local expectations (overcoming what I once labeled "North American egocentricity in the web conferencing biz.")

Translating PowerPoint presentations is easiest when they are created using the worst (but most common) technique. If the presenter merely dumps a bunch of sentences into bullet points, the translators can replace the text with no problem. But if the presentation includes text merged with graphic elements or if it makes use of PowerPoint animations, translation becomes more technically difficult. The translator not only needs to worry about getting the words right, but must preserve the formatting and functionality of the slide as a whole. Maddalena says that IAL’s experience with desktop publishing and concentration on web seminars helps them tame this demon.

Interpretation is the term used for repeating a speaker’s comments in another language to a live audience. It turns out that there are two ways to attack that task. Consecutive interpretation forces the speaker to say a phrase and then wait for the interpreter to repeat it in the second language before moving on to the next phrase. This back and forth choppiness removes much of the impact and effectiveness from a well planned presentation. The alternative is to use simultaneous interpretation. This is the classic version you see in movies and television coverage of United Nations meetings and other formal podium presentations, where the audience listens on a private line to the interpreter repeating the entire presentation at roughly the same time as the speaker delivers it. That’s the format used in InterCall’s support of formal web events such as investor relations calls or company-wide employee announcements and it requires specialized training and abilities from the interpretation staff, as well as the equipment and infrastructure to support the private audience channels.

Tiffany says that being able to offer professional simultaneous interpretation to their web conferencing clients is a big differentiator over others who only support consecutive interpretation or re-recording of an audio track to create an on-demand recording in another language. InterCall has the ability to create bridges and audio subconferences that allow people in many different countries to call in and listen on a local phone number in their native language. The interpreter listens to the speakers’ line and provides a running commentary in the alternate language.

Maddalena mentioned that they IAL supports not only the formal presentation, but live Q&A sessions as well. That got me interested in the mechanics of how they make it work when an operator can only administer and activate question lines in the main (primary language) conference. I ended up forcing a number of people to race around to answer my questions. The typical method would be to exhaust all questions and answers on the main primary language line first. Those would be interpreted for the other language lines in the same way as the rest of the conference. Then the operator would transfer in one of the alternate language lines along with their interpreter. As each question is asked in the secondary language, the interpreter repeats it in consecutive fashion to the speakers in their language and translates the answer back to the secondary language. Any other languages listening in continue to get their own simultaneous translations as usual. Trust me, it makes sense if you sit down with a piece of graph paper and a crayon.

I ended up by asking Tiffany about pricing for interpretation services.Simultaneous interpretation on a conference has a 60 minute minimum and costs $6.50 per minute. Unless the language is Japanese, in which case the cost is $8.00 per minute. I asked Maddalena why Japanese costs more and she told me it has always been that way in the interpretation business. Japanese has too different a sentence structure and too many additional linguistic shadings that can change the perception of the content. Professional Japanese language interpreters are in high demand as the specialists of this specialized field. I asked InterCall to confirm that these costs followed the standard practice of being charged per person per minute, so that I’d have to pay quite a bit for a large audience. Tiffany told me that in fact the prices are per minute per language for the entire conference, not per participant. So to get your one-hour conference call translated into German with a live specialist would only cost an extra $390. That’s a steal. I may start having my webinars translated into Lithuanian just for the sheer sport of it!

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About the Author

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).

The article starts off with a quick ‘n dirty definition of presence as “the technology that allows you to see when other people are online.” That’s actually selling the vision short. The engineers and designers working on grandiose plans for embedded presence in business applications see this as a way to get much more complete status information about your contact circle than simply whether a person is online.

In the technologists’ dream future, people will be able to set their status in a constantly changing flow to let others know whether and how to get in touch with them. You could set peer level groupings (such as family members, doctors, professional services people you are expecting to hear from, business colleagues, and strangers or unidentified callers). Then you could set your status level to indicate that you are open to receiving communications or in a do-not-disturb mode. If reachable, you could direct the person to the most appropriate channel… Cell phone, office phone, home phone, instant messenger, email, and so on.

The technological ability to implement this kind of functionality is the easy part (any technical implementation is easy for the person who doesn’t have to do it). The business/economic model that would support interest in promoting the capabilities seems evident as well. Think of what LinkedIn could do if they established themselves as the central repository of contact information tying in to contact peer groups and communication levels for business people. It’s a potential gold mine.

The really hard part of the equation to solve is the practical aspects of getting a large number of people to micromanage their status levels and constantly shifting preferences. My mind conjures up the obnoxious character that Tony Roberts played in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.” He was constantly interrupting his social and work flow to call his answering service to let them know where he was and how he could be reached. Ah, the glorious days of 1972 when we had answering services and manual call forwarding to local business numbers or pay phones!

All the above is just preamble to my main point, however. The Line56 article emphasizes the use of presence in facilitating ad-hoc collaboration. This is rightly used in most articles, presentations, and discussions as the obvious business example when people want to play up the benefits of integrated presence. But it got me thinking… Is there a place for presence in the world of formally scheduled webinars (such as educational or marketing broadcasts to a large audience)?

There is, and some webinar technology vendors are just starting to experiment with ways to leverage it. Of course we can start with the classic audience list, visible to presenters on their consoles. This is very basic presence and says who has joined the conference in listening mode. You can add to that status indicators such as mood indicators, “hand raising”, or other flags that audience members can change. Most of the big name vendors have some form of audience presence like this.

The next level of presence is a bit sneakier. It uses automatic status indicators that the audience doesn’t know they are generating. Several vendors have implemented feedback indicators that show whether a pushed slide or document has been received by audience members. This helps an attentive presenter pace his or her presentation to account for latency delays. Citrix’s GoToWebinar product takes this one step further by also indicating whether audience members are keeping focus on the presentation window and whether they are interacting with the console.

Brainshark deals exclusively with recorded webinars served up on demand to requesters. They made sure to build in an option for the webinar host to display a presence indicator so that an interested viewer has a way to interact with a live sales or support representative while watching the recorded content.

One area I haven’t seen presence well implemented is in assisting audience members during registration or login to an event. This is usually handled by a piece of small print included at the end of a lot of text in an invitation email or landing page information. “If you experience problems, please call or email us at .” People having difficulty with an interactive process have a hard time remembering where in the instruction set they might have seen such a note, and it completely pulls them out of their process.

This could be implemented in a much more sophisticated way if the technology vendor gave their clients the ability to establish an interactive presence indicator integrated right into the registration or login process. “Having trouble? Click here to speak with a live support rep. Or let us call you on your phone.” And so on. The indication of presence from the hosting company is comforting and valuable to the audience.

Ad hoc collaborative web meetings are not the only type of interactivity that can benefit from new applications of presence technology. Conferencing vendors would be well served by offering it as an option in scheduled one-to-many online seminars.

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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).

She explains that the self-serve nature of mobile media means people can listen to podcasts / videocasts when and where they want. They don’t need to be tied to a computer at a specific time.

Unfortunately, what Jackie overlooks is that the best webinars are interactive. This type of audience engagement is very difficult to achieve within a video or audio podcast format. So my suggestion is that you need to take a close look at your content and your intended audience. If your content is unidirectional, I would consider what Jackie suggests. However, I would only do so if your intended audience is iPod and/or podcast savvy. As we saw yesterday, not everyone is.

One other suggestion: why not do both? Run an interactive Webinar and then podcast it later for the time-shifters.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

Jackie Huba argues that companies should dump their webinars in favor of videocasts and podcasts. She writes, “the self-serve nature of mobile media means people can listen to podcasts/videocasts when and where they want, not tied to a computer at a specific time.”

That’s a good point, but in the context of the complex sale, I respectfully disagree. I use podcasts and they are no doubt more “buzz” worthy than webinars. Still, if your target audience lacks a portable MP3 player, they are tethered to their computer anyway right?

People want different information, in different ways, and at different times during their buying process. The choices they’ll make will depend on their role, their exact need, and the time frame they have to solve that need.

Key question: Do you truly understand your potential customers buying process?

Your way of selling and marketing must conform to the customer’s buying process, driven by a clear understanding of needs and the impact of those needs on both that company and its customers. Every potential customer will have a slightly different buying process.

I have found it helpful to look at the potential customer’s buying process on the basis of modalities it employs at each buying step. To that end, I’ve developed a model that hypothetically shows the correlation between steps in a prospect’s buying process and the sales effort together with tactics that might be of interest at each stage. (Click image to enlarge)

If you want help on mapping out your customers buying process, a great source is Kristin Zhivago’s book Rivers of Revenue. I cite her process on in my upcoming book. She gets it better than anyone I know.

Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”

Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.