Category — Observation Deck

The answer:  check out this 3-minute on-demand presentation.

I’m at a conference and don’t have time to blog about this, but Brainshark has JUST released a new white paper.

I’ll write about it later, but in the meantime, you can grab it here.

93% of communication is non-verbal, right?

You’ve seen and heard this for decades from many, many management and presentation gurus you’ve been subjected to.

Well, long ago I researched it and found that those ideas came with some pretty heavy strings attached. And the common usage of the numbers were candidates for snopes.com.

And I’m not alone.

In recent months I’ve been pleased to see a chorus of voices raised shouting, “Wait!  It’s a nice number, but it’s used out of context 97.3% of the time!”

(Okay, I made that last number up, but you can quote me if you want)

What joy, then, when I saw Olivia Mitchell’s retweet (@oliviamitchell) of Colin McLean’s (@presentationwks) blog post with a link to a brief interview with Doc M. himself.

Sorry, you’ll have to find different numbers now, but I hope you get 100% better sleep.

You know what’s cool?  Watching people improve.

As a dude with a teacher’s heart, there’s nothing I love more than helping someone have an AHA! moment, and as a professional I spend a lot of time teaching people who may not have studied my webinars and presentations as much as I have.  They say nice things, which I appreciate, but…

…when the compliment comes from a fellow pro, it’s particularly uplifting.

As I predicted in my New Year’s Day post, this year has certainly seen an increase in self-proclaimed pundits.  It’s like people on Twitter calling themselves gurus.  You can’t swing a dead feline without…

So let me return the favor.

Ken Molay is the real deal.  He does production work (that I don’t do) with a keen sense of professionalism, but he also teaches and coaches.  In that sense he’s my competitor.

But here are the truths I rest on:

The web conferencing/seminar industry is a trend, not a fad.  I just finished a study about the use of web conferencing for training in Australia/New Zealand and another on best practices in online presentation skills.  Most people have barely touched webinars, and few feel like they got this stuff down.  Learning to effectively communicate virtually is a skill folks will be learning for a long time.

It’s a big world.  If there’s room for thousands of traditional motivational speakers and PowerPoint pundits, there is room for Ken and me to work together in a sense of “co-opetition.”

Finally, Ken’s good for this industry.  Most people don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s not wrong…it’s just the stage of the market.

Ken’s comments about The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook were fair, even down to the typos (we discovered too late that Blurb’s software is quite buggy has a mind of it’s own – and typos NOT in the manuscript showed up in the final).

So, thank you Ken.  Here’s to you and Webinar Success continuing to rock…for you, for the world of virtual presentations, and the benefit of webinar audiences everywhere who sit through one less crappy presentation.

One of my duties when at PlaceWare, Microsoft, and then as a VP at Corvent was to forecast demand for services.  This need led to exhaustive analysis of the use of web seminars over many years, including how many events we’d produced every week of every year for years running. 

What I found was that web seminars have seasons that are parallel to the face-to-face events business.  Fall and spring are busy, and the dead of summer and winter are slower.

My question for you is this:  what are your plans for the slow season?

Life cycles are good… we plan, we plant, we water, we harvest, we rest.  It doesn’t mean that we get nothing done in August or January (in the northern hemisphere), but the tasks are different.

Here are a few ideas for taking advantage of a slower season to take your web seminars to the next level:

Plan interconnected programs. Ever go to a movie and see a trailer (advertisement!) for another movie?  If you do it with integrity, you can share with one web seminar audience about other upcoming events.

Rewrite some copy.  Great copywriting is painfully time consuming for most of us.  Invites, landing page copy, confirmation/reminder emails, and post-event surveys often need some touch up but don’t get it during the frenzy of “harvest season.”

Host some “lunch and learns.” Bring in a subject matter expert like a sales engineer to a customer-focused hands-on session or three.  They take a lot less to promote, they can be very live like a radio call-in show, and with heavy use of desktop sharing may take very little PowerPoint production.  Customers still have to do business, and goodwill is huge (trust me – I architechted a monstrously successful program based on this).

If you’re like most, you’ll have peaks and valleys that will constitute your own seasonality.  Take a peek at some of the “nice to haves” way down there on your to-do list and ask, “What one thing could I do that would have an impact on many seasons to come?”

-R

P.S.  Two things, since you asked:  one, the snowman is from last winter when Portland, Oregon had its greatest snowfall in 40 years…the hat says “LiveMeeting,” a relic from my pleasant days there.  Two, my downtime plan…work on the book that succeeds The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook.

As an active Twitter community member, I’m an amused observer of the various ways people (”tweeps”) approach the quality vs. quantity question.

Some say, “There’s no way you can connect with thousands, so why follow that many?”

Others, “More is better.”

Me?  “Both.”

There’s a fundamental marketing exercise that most Twitter participants aren’t thinking about – many of which are even marketers.  It’s called…

Segmentation.

Marketers of web seminars are always concerned about the size of the audience, and a VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) is “how do I drive attendance?”  To do this, you need to reach people, even a lot of them.  But focusing only on quantity is a very 1.0 approach (and if you give away free guitars, you’ll get a LOT of attendees).  You need a way to figure out which are qualified prospects and how to separate them so you can communicate differently to them.

The reason I don’t focus ONLY on a small group of tweeps in Twitter is for the same reason that marketers segment their lists…I don’t want to communicate only with a small group (you don’t know when someone will bubble up out of the broader group – and it happens regularly on Twitter), but I DO want to FOCUS primarily on a smaller group.

I use Tweetdeck to create a sub-group of about 200 people out of the ~5800 I’m connected with on Twitter.  I follow almost everyone back, and I’m not drawn to the ego trip of unfollowing 5600 so it looks like I follow 20 and have 5600 more following me.  It’s too easy to do the same thing AND have an ear to the ground with a broader audience.

Final proof point:

I once followed back a gal whose profile screamed “housewife and mom.”  When I did, though, she sent me a message saying that she was a happy escapee from the corporate world and knew all about online presentations and elearning.  And guess what… in NETWORKING that’s called someone who most definitely knows someone else I might want to know given my line of work.

So this post isn’t to disparage anyone else’s strategy, but it is to encourage putting aside ego trips, using tools, and practicing a simple, powerful thing marketers have been doing for a long time:  segmentation.  It’s not ‘quantity versus quality,’ it’s managing ‘quantity and quality.’

Thoughts?  What’s your strategy?

I didn’t know Quinn Driscoll, but my business partner Scott did quite well.

Quinn was Scott’s son.

Word completely fail in a moment like this, when a 13 year old young man suddenly collapses and dies.  My heart bursts for my longtime friend and business partner.

Let me tell you about Quinn by what I know about his father.

His father loved being his father.  Coaching, exploring, learning.  Scott’s an involved dad, a precious commodity we can all learn from.

His father has a generous heart.  He gives his time, he gives his money.

His father is a visionary.  He understands the implications of circumstances, statistics, trends.

His father is an encourager.  He loves coaching kids’ ball teams, realizing he has a rare chance to be a strong male role model in the lives of many kids who may not have that.

And his father is a friend.  He has given me encouragement, vision, and a belief in myself one values more highly than money.

I’ve little doubt that Quinn would have been all this and more, standing on the strong shoulders of his dad.

Peace~

-R

Ten years ago, nobody knew what web conferencing was.  The closest proxy for them to associate with was video, which over a 56K modem sucked.  Just saying.

Now broadband adoption, easy-to-use tools that boneheads like me can use, and cheap cameras put everybody in the video biz (remember what hard-drive recordings did for musicians in the late 80’s/early 90’s). 

When I look at a chart like this, I’m thinking three things:

1.  Makes sense.  Marketers want to go where the people go.

2.  “Webcasts” get lumped in w/podcasts, which is missing a key distinction that web seminars bring to the table (along w/social): live  human-to-human dialogue.  POWERFUL for influence.

3.  Prognosis is good for this jumpstarting many, many new people to have interest in the world of presenting online.  When I speak live the polls show that people attending their FIRST webinar is still well into double digits.

The good news:  this is solid growth in many categories.  And given the source of the study, no doubt delineating the power of live dialogue wasn’t part of the questions they were asking respondents.

The best news:  I like presenting virtually because I can kiss my kids goodnight and sleep in my own bed.  And I can interact with 500 people in ways you can’t do in person.

You?

This post is at once a history lesson, a cultural observation, and a practical.  (Of course, if you hate stories as part of learning, you’ll hate me as a teacher and can save some time by changing the channel now   Let me help with something random.)

First, the history lesson.

Many web conferencing tools have a “meet now” function that will take you directly into a meeting, bypassing the need to schedule and log in.  The very first function of that type was invented at PlaceWare (later acquired by Microsoft and becoming LiveMeeting), and the product manager who invented it was an industry old timer named Scott Driscoll.  Oh, and he happens to be my partner at 1080 Group.  Nice.

Second, the cultural observation.

Early adopters of web conferencing were marketing, sales, and training departments for reasons I’ll spare you here.  Therefore conferencing marketers placed ads in marketing pubs, rented lists from training sites, tried to influence-the-influencer in various thought leaders of those fields, all that.  Years ago when PlaceWare put ads on the radio and CNN, the sales team complained the leads were unqualified (and I imagine Webex’s crew did too).  But the broad, SMB market isn’t affordably reached when you’re selling a solution for hundreds of dollars instead of thousands or tens of thousands…

So the application story is a continuation of the previous thought…

My dad calls me.  Computer problem.  Never mind that I’m not a hardcore geek, but I “work in the computer industry.”  While on the phone, I fire up GoToMeeting (instantly) and ‘look over his shoulder’ while he shows me the problem (and we fix it).

He quips, “Hey, I’ve heard of them on the radio!”

Now his nutrition business doesn’t need conferencing, but thousands of others do, and they’re not on a list from Web Digest for Marketers or Chief Learning Officer.  Those radio ads are reaching a whole new group of businesses.

More importantly, the use-case envisioned by Scott comes full circle.  Adoption will occur when we reduce clicks to make using this stuff happen at the speed of thought.  An inbound sales call becomes a presentation.  An outbound call goes from telephone chat to full collaboration.  Ad hoc conversations, part of our every day life in the terrestrial world, now can have that visual component just as easily, even when we’re virtual.

Explode your productivity.  Get hip to “meet now.”

Time to be proud!  And very thankful.

I have learned that a whitepaper that I wrote for Citrix Online (the GoToMeeting/Webinar wizards) was voted “Best Download of 2008″ by the readers of TrainingZone UK.

If you want to read Five Keys to Getting Started with Online Training, please support Citrix and Training Zone by grabbing it here.

Innumerable thanks to Beth, Kineon, Eric, Clare, Todd, Kelley, Kristin, Rhonda, God, my wife and kids, my mom, the 1080 Group crew, Stevie Wonder, …