Category — Web Seminars

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.

More than once I’ve presented for the American Marketing Association on the subject of “Irreplaceable Webinars.”  The primary education of the presentation is that we as marketers think in terms of segmentation, and that should include thinking psychographically in terms of time and place – our audience gets information in different ways at different times.

Ergo, presenting virtually becomes an indispensable part of the communications mix.

Unlike teleseminars, web and/or video conferencing add multi-sensory (visual) components to live, distance communications.  And because the activity is snychronous, the power of dialogue explodes your opportunity to deliver influence ~ and what marketer, sales person, or trainer isn’t attempting to create a certain outcome?

Webinars/webcasts/web seminars don’t replace in-person meetings, seminars, and events.  But don’t get trapped into thinking that a recording is the same thing.

Dialogue + Distance = Uniquely Irreplaceable

As I’ve oft noted, every business model is unique…  in yesterday’s event we had audience members in the web seminar from public and private sectors, from small businesses to Fortune 50 companies, and with different audience types (internal sales or HR training vs. external product/customer training).

Problem:  trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all calculator to determine ROI would not have served anyone too well.

As promised, however, here are the two known online calculators we are aware of that compare online to offline.  They should help you jumpstart thinking about how to get to your own calculations of how moving training online will impact help your organization.

http://training.cuna.org/trainers/roi_calc.html
http://www.ewebuniversity.com/corporate/roi.asp

Isolate.  Quantify.  Monetize.  Calculate ROI.

Web seminars, webcasts, webinars…whatever you call ‘em, they’re projects.  Presenters and planners can find a lot of info on the web – for free – that fall into two categories:

• They offer rudimentary advice akin to telling a wedding planner to not forget inviting the guests
• Or worse, they hype webinars as the most revolutionary thing since the printing press, including how the leads will flow in, how trainees will worship you, meeting planners are going to be out of business, and speakers will start magically making money

Fact: they’re an invaluable part of the communcations mix.  Irreplaceable.  If they’re not in your bag o’ tricks, you’re missing out.

And that’s why we at 1080 Group are committed to teaching the real goods.  Microsoft Word doesn’t teach you how to write.  And a web conferencing tool doesn’t teach you how to manage projects.

Web Seminar Planner’s Toolkit.  Out soon.

The 1080 Group world headquarters is a tiny office we rent (most of the crew work from home offices), so my jumping-up-and-down-for-joy was noticed by no-one.

I was cruising Guy Kawasaki’s cool Alltop site when I bumped into The Event Manager Blog espousing for terrestrial events what we’ve been saying for years about web events:   they’re projects.

And this post entitled 85+ Tools to Manage Projects saves me a lot of research and writing…check it out.  I’d add Project KickStart to the list as one I’ve used and like.

BTW, the fact that webinars/webcasts are projects is why we at 1080 Group see the need for independent content… it’s not just about operating software any more than planning a wedding is just about booking a church.  You need a rock solid, 360-degree perspective and performance from your planner, your promoter, and your presenter…  3 x 360 =  you guessed it.

(Web) events are indeed projects.

P.S.  Keep your eyes out.  1080 Group’s Web Seminar Planner’s Toolkit, the retail version, is coming soon.

I heard recently (though I don’t remember where) that the average B2B lead takes 21 days to follow up on.  That’s obvious death.

Instead of counting on the telephone for post-event oomph, consider investing that telephone-dialing effort into pre-event reminders (in lieu of one or more email reminder).

One, it’ll boost your attendance rate. Even if only a portion of calls connect with a live person, a tight script from a real human being is not only warm touch there are two advantages. There’s a proven advantage of using multiple media to deliver a benefit-laden message, and these days a voicemail may well get cut through life noise better than another email.

Two, you can use the event reminder as a soft-entry into a conversation. “Hi Pradeep, this is Suzi from Acme Widget Launching calling to confirm we’ve got you registered for tomorrow’s webinar, ‘How to Launch Widgets on a Shoestring.’ Just out of curiosity, are there any questions I can pass along to the presentation team that you’d love to make sure they cover?”

Cut through the noise with voicemail reminders for your web-based event.

Microsoft Word doesn’t make you a writer. Web conferencing software doesn’t make you a web seminar wizard. Because technology gets more user friendly and templatized over time, it brings it within ever-closer reach of lower and lower tech people.

By another analogy, though, now that you can record digital quality sound and press a great sounding audio recording to a CD doesn’t mean you’re a great musician either.

Producing great web seminar requires presentations and content worth watching, promoters who can reach audiences with compelling messages, and producers who can pull it all together in a usable manner.

Web seminars are art. Become an artist.

Think about any given place where the spoken word is part of communicating, and think about the word associated with it:  event, seminar, meeting, broadcast, speech, collaboration, talk radio.

Just like the word ‘seminar’ comes from a root of ‘teaching,’ web seminars are typically environments where information is imparted.  The reason we like this representation is because a few things are implied.

One, it’s a ‘few to many’ environment.  There may be only one presenter, but like an in-person seminar at a tradeshow or association luncheon, a seminar often accommodates a panel of presenters, often with a facilitator.

Two, the content is structured toward a particular outcome, but often there is a high degree of interactivity.  Unlike a pure broadcast, this may be the opportunity to participate in forms of feedback such as ‘virtual hand raising.’

Finally, a key benefit to any given audience member of the presentation material is often eclipsed by the personalized response they receive when they get a chance to ask a question of a presenter or panelist.

A web seminar is a real-time connection for a group of people, albeit they can be remotely distributed.

Early on, a webcast was a broadcast over the web…with equally little interactivity.  Many webcast technology vendors now provide limited forms of interactivity, but pure, real-time interactivity isn’t quite the same as what web conferencing makes possible due to differences in how the technologies works.

Webinar, of course, is the words ‘web seminar’ in a contracted form.  It’s usage has become broad, but this old timer has two cautions.  Webinar is trademarked, and it’s changed hands a few times in terms of ownership.   Hypothetically the owner of the trademark could make a lot of lives really stinky if they wanted to throw their legal weight around.  I think that it’s like recognizing early on that while every one knows what a ‘Band-Aid’ is, the wise bandage maker will avoid building someone else’s brand and find their own moniker.

Sidebar for Promoters:  Unfortunately for search marketers the words ‘web seminar’ don’t get searched on much relative to ‘webcast’ and ‘webinar.’  Mix in the confusion that ‘webcast’ means ‘audio transmission’ in a variety of ways, including on-demand content such as investor relations calls and podcasts (‘iPod-casts), you can either take your chances on ‘webinar,’ live with webcast confusion, or plan to just use them all interchangeably so as to optimize your website.

You decide. 

Many web seminar invitations inevitably go to somebody’s equivalent of anonymous@hotmail.com, which means that often they end up in in-boxes that are checked infrequently. 

This means that as lead times have gotten shorter, there is a greater chance that infrequent anon checkers get your invitation too late – either too close to the event date to act upon it, or just plain too late.

Make sure the ‘register’ link in your invitation redirects to the web seminar archive.

In the world of connectivity, one digit out of place in a conference call number, PIN number, or login URL can spell disaster for many…and therefore your event.

When copying instructions such as a conference call number and PIN or a web conferencing URL, lower your risk by not typing except as necessary.

Copy/paste, don’t re-type.