Category — Presentation Planning

If you’re curious about how to promote and deliver engaging webinars, this short survey is for you.

Why?

The research we’re conducting will be turned into a practical set of best practices…and you’ll have a chance get a pre-release copy of the report.  It should only take you a few minutes to complete.

On behalf of 1080 Group and our co-sponsor, QLM, thanks in advance.

You can find the survey here:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MSTVDYX

1080 Group has partnered with my friend Bob Hanson at QLM Marketing to conduct an independent study on the success factors for webinars.

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

Imagine you’re an event planner…the traditional, terrestrial kind.

Would you consider hosting a trade show booth, networking luncheon, cocktail reception, or seminar at a hotel somewhere without considering all the details, tangible and intangible, that are part of the experience?  Would you invite people to a “great presentation” but not tell them where to park or how to find the restroom?

Nope.

Don’t do it for a web seminar either.

Design the user experience every click of the way from the first thing they see when they get an invite to the last follow up afterward.

Then test it.

Walk in their shoes.

A friend of mine has an automobile that, despite being only a year and half old, has been in the shop an unacceptable number of times.  We just expect things like that to work (it’s not an old clunker, after all), but the reality is that life has a way of dealing a bum card sometimes.

We buy automobile insurance, too, for similar reasons.  But only because we plan for the unplannable.

When presenting virtually, you need to be prepared for the unexpected, too.  Even the most reliable platforms aren’t perfect.  It’s software, and it’s reality.

Don’t let the occasional bump in the road dissuade you from the immense benefit of connecting virtually.  In fact, with even the tiniest prep, you can be ready.

Have a printed copy of your slides

Over a decade I’ve seen presenters lose connectivity from downtown San Francisco because a backhoe cut through the fiber out in the street, had them lose power because of a hurricane, seen them come to a grinding halt because some news thing happened and everybody in the company ran to the web to watch news streams.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you’ll be happy for the old fashioned paper variety.

Plan with your peers

Just because YOU have a problem doesn’t mean that your fellow presenters or event moderator do.  Plan in advance how you’ll work off each others’ verbal clues.  Don’t waste everybody’s time complaining about technology.  Have them push your slides until you’re in the driver’s seat again.  Oh, and did I say have a printed backup?

Mentally switch to audio-only mode

VoIP is great, but it makes everybody’s computer the single point of failure.  Love it or leave it the POTS (plain old telephone system) is one of the most reliable things on the planet.  In a worst-case scenario, mentally switch to delivering your presentation verbally, making sure to describe things as you would in any other instance when you were on the phone with someone.  The picture on the slide might tell the story better than words alone, but that doesn’t mean you have to be dead in the water.

Life happens, including during web seminars.  Don’t get caught with your pants down.

In a recent webinar I was touching on the value of tapping into the audience’s own motivations to have your best shot at getting them to respond to an invitation, and Roger H. asked a good next-level question:

“What do you find most beneficial, formal surveys or Q&As with the future audience?”

Fair question, Roger, but I’m not sure I’d call one better or best, I’d call them different.

Formal surveys are good for a few things.  One, it’s easier to quantify data, cross-tabulate one response set against another for deeper insight, etc.  For instance, you might ask yourself “of those respondents who expressed X on question 3, how did they answer question 6?”  As with anything, formal surveys come with some tradeoffs.  They might take longer to develop.  You will likely only have a fraction of those invited respond, meaning you’ll need to be inviting enough to generate a sample size that’s statistically relevant.  And you’ll have to balance between length (”I’d love to have answers to ALL these questions”) and what you’re going to need to do to get responses (would YOU want to fill out a survey that would take you 30 minutes?).

That said, there’s one other key challenge:  being able to ‘read between the lines’ and respond on the fly.

That’s where a few conversations with your future audience can be gold.  Someone might tell you something over the phone that they’d not put in a survey.  Or you might be able to infer meaning from their tone of voice.  In addition to being able to ‘read between the lines,’ your dialogue very often will lead you to learn things you didn’t even think to ask in a more formal survey.  Often this leads to you asking additional questions to explore something else.

Conversations are also good when you want to explore something less tangible.  For instance, imagine that you know that your product/service has a positive impact on clients’ process but you know clients often have different policies and procedures and processes.  Creating a formal survey that roots out the insight that you can use is difficult at best.  The tradeoff with conversations, however, is that they take time, let alone if you want to have a number of them.

Without knowing more specifically what Roger does and how he does it, I’d probably suggest a combination of tactics.  Some initial conversations would likely deliver insights that would help create a more effective formal survey, but I wouldn’t stop there.  In-event polls or end-of-event surveys are awesome tools for dialing in the relevance of your content, too.  Consider asking a question or two that would specifically assist you with dialing in your invitation messaging to those things that your audience is most likely to take action on.

Remember that what you think is important is (mostly) irrelevant.  Your audience will take action when they perceive your webinar is relevant to them.

The industry has come a long way.  When I started we coded registration pages from scratch in HTML and pushed reminder emails manually.

Fast forward more than a decade – the pain of much of the project management of producing a web seminar has been eliminated by conferencing service providers integrating those tasks into their wares.

But at least one thing as suffered:  the presentation of benefits.

A rule of thumb for the question of “how many registrants will show up to my webinar” has long been “a third” or “a third to half.”  There are a lot of factors that go into that, and that’s another blog post another day.

The problem with automation, however, is that most often promoters don’t take one extra, valuable step:  including in the reminder email some copy that reminds registrants of why they signed up in the first place.

My exhortation:  take one extra step.  Take the content you put on your registration page, or at least the bullet points below the “Attend this webinar to learn:” and copy it into the reminder email(s) that will hit your registrants’ inboxes.

Here are a couple reasons:

1.  Just because they registered three weeks ago doesn’t mean they are fully in touch with the motivation that got them to register when they get the “don’t forget this webinar at 10am tomorrow” email.

2.  Hopefully your event title is descriptive and compelling, but if that’s all you wanted and needed, you wouldn’t have written additional copy for your registration page.

3.  If anybody pushes the “forward” button (often a desire of marketers!), the person receiving the email will have more to motivate them.

Go beyond “what” in your reminder emails.  Remind them “why.”

What’s the second biggest presentation mistake at a web seminar?

4-minute on-demand here

How’s that for a short blog post? 

Short.  8-minute on-demand mini-webinar.

Here.

Would love your feedback.  Thx!

One of the top concerns of webinar presenters is “what if my audience is multitasking?”

Here’s the reality:  they ARE multitasking.  In your webinars and, oh by the way, in your in-person events too.

There are many techniques for being more engaging when you present at a webinar.  But this post is to encourage you to think about another idea:  encouraging the multitasking.

When in a face-to-face environment, any given audience member can chat with the person sitting next to them.  The risk of mass-outcry is small.

In a webinar, you can usually turn off the ‘everybody chat with everybody’ feature, thereby limiting the chance that someone pipes up about your competition or says something that catches you off guard.  This used to control perceived risk.

But no more.

Whether we like it or not, using some form of backchannel chat is not only here (a la Twitter), but it’s going to stay.

So make it part of your gameplan.

Encouraging backchannel chat has a few advantages:

1.  You can keep an eye on it.  If you establish the Twitter hashtag or other locale, it gives you a chance to see and respond.  Arguably this is better than being unaware of the audience whispers.

2.  You’ll present yourself as a thought leader.  Social media’s a hot topic, probably a bit hyped.  You don’t have to be an expert to appear knowledgeable.

3.  You’ll learn from it.  Love it or hate it, people will say things on the web that they’d never say to your face.  Professionals learn from this.  Throw out the kooks, and learn from the rest.

4.  Your audience will be engaged.  Active participants are much more likely to remember your key messages than passive participants.  As the old press adage goes, “there’s no such thing as bad press,” and if you agree with that, encouraging discussion can only help.

What I’m not saying is that this won’t require some new webinar presenting skills.  You’re going to need to learn new ways to keep an eye on your audience while presenting.  And it’s going to require a little courage, but you can do it, I’m sure.

Embrace the changing face of communications.  Embrace the backchannel.

The great news is that Effective Virtual Meetings:  Seven Ways to Boost Your Virtual Meeting IQ is that it was interactive and there were a ton of questions.  The bad news is that when there are 500 people in the audience, you can’t get to them all.

Following is one that came in that I didn’t get to during the presentation:

Shanon A. writes:  “When creating a presentation is less really more? Just notes and more verbal talking with your audience?”

I’m quite sure there isn’t a perfect way to create a presentation just like there’s no formula for a perfect song.  It’s a communication medium, and I’ll be the first to grant that it’s got to work for you.

The opportunity in a web-based meeting or presentation is to add another modality – sight – to the communication.  This can be done synchronously along with what used to only be a conference call, and that can be powerful.

That said, I hate blanket statements like ‘always’ and ‘never.’  Seth Godin, for instance never uses ANY words in a presentation – it’s all images.

Different audiences and different presentation purposes often call for different approaches.  The question is “what do you need to communicate to whom and what is the best way for you to do that?”  And that very well might mean some times you have a conference call with a handout of notes.

To extend the song analogy, pick a genius whose work you like (Paul McCartney? Miles Davis? Richard Wagner?) and start learning from them and the sources they learn from.

(Great question, BTW!)