November 12th, 2009, LearningWare sent out a survey to a large database of (mostly) trainers–asking them basic questions about their experiences within webinars. Some of the results we got were expected, others were unexpected in scope, while others completely surprised us.

Let’s take a look at some selected results:

It’s not surprising that webinars have replaced in-person meetings. Not only is webinar technology growing–and it will naturally gain new adopters–but it’s also an economical, efficient choice in an economy where budgets are tight and companies are becoming more globalized.

This seems to support the reasons for using more webinars: attendees can be at their desks, saving money on travel, while bringing people together from around the world.

Respondents ranked the following issues (each issue ranked individually) on a scale from 1-3. A “1” meant that the issue was a MAJOR issue–where a “3” was not an issue at all. All of the items were at least minor issues–with little to no interaction, technical problems and boring presentations ranking as the most major issues.

But not knowing what attendees are doing–a “minor” issue–might be more critical than previously thought:

Here’s where results got interesting. While fewer people played computer games or visited social networking sites than expected, a whopping 80% checked their email during a webinar (not unexpected, but unexpectedly high), 65% worked on other projects and 67% muted the call to have other conversations. But perhaps most shocking: 51% left their desks and 35% went to the bathroom! So participants in a webinar were not even there.

The next statistic, then, is not surprising at all:

55% believe that webinar training is not as effective as classroom training. And boy, did this question ever get people talking. We included a section for elaboration, and here is what some survey takers said:

“It may be more efficient and the cost savings may result in additional training taking place over he span of a given year, but there is something lost in the interaction between facilitator and participant. Gauging participant interest and retention, along with maintaining their attention, is extremely difficult.”

“If used the right way. Interaction and design are key. Without interaction, you lose participants. Designing a webinar so participants stay engaged is challenging, but necessary.”

So what could make webinars better?

With a whopping 82% of people responding that more interaction would make a webinar better–the call to action is clear. But are people currently using the sparse interaction tools available to them?

Only 11% are using interactive tools in every webinar–with a whopping near-30% NEVER using interactive tools.

Summary
While we suspected that accountability and attention were lacking in webinars, we were surprised at the extent that our suspicions were correct. It’s clear that webinars are here to stay–as companies continue to globalize and do more on a smaller budget. It’s also clear that action needs to be taken to keep webinars engaging and make them as effective as a face-to-face meeting (all while people are sitting in front of one of the biggest sources of distraction: their computers).

© 2009 LearningWare, Inc

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In ancient Rome, most people walked to get from one place to another. The royalty, armies and a few rich entrepreneurs were privileged enough to have horses for transportation. To attend a meeting or event, businessmen traveled for days, sometimes weeks.

Fast-forward to now. People fly, drive and take trains to get from one place to another. They communicate through phones, email and the Internet. Employees, partners and customers are located around the world. Holding a convention or series of seminars at one location means exorbitant airfare, lodging and other travel and technological expenses.

Fortunately, many companies already know the value of using the Web and teleconferencing as an efficient way to effectively communicate, without the extreme price tags of global travel. Today, you can bridge the gap from a prospect to a qualified lead through the use of a Webinar, one of the most powerful, cost effective ways to communicate with both prospects and customers.

But even those who regularly use Webinars in their sales and marketing processes make common mistakes that limit the full potential of a successful campaign. Converting a Webinar registrant to a customer takes more than a powerful presentation on the day of event.

Mistake #1: The focus is only on the lowest-hanging fruit

The typical process for lead conversion goes something like this:

1. A promotion (typically electronic-based) is implemented to drive registration for an event (Webinar).
2. A subset of the registrants attends the event.
3. The sales team of the event organizer follows up with all attendees and those who ask to be contacted.

Believe it or not, that process actually drives acceptable results when viewed under a ROI microscope. However, there is a major flaw.

Let’s examine the numbers. Take an event with 200 registrants. The industry average is that only 33% of registrants show up to the event. In this “industry average” scenario, you are left with 66 people. Now we go through the event, and the sales team works on the most interested attendees to move toward the close. If you assume that 1 in 10 is ready to buy, expresses interest in your product, and so on… you are left with seven new customers.

Do the math, and seven new customers for the dollars spent on a typical Webinar seems a great return for most business-to-business companies. A closer look at the numbers, however, suggests otherwise: 193 potential customers are left on the table. What is the plan to cultivate them? Surprisingly, often there is no plan.

Solution: If someone takes the time to respond to your promotion, fill out a registration and give you their contact information—odds are they have a need that your company can potentially solve. Focus on the big picture, and lay out a longer-term strategy to address the needs and opportunities of all your registrants.

Mistake #2: Only the event is interactive

Marketers and sales professionals love Web events because they are personal and interactive. This is true. The larger truth, however, is that the event itself is only one element of what should constitute a comprehensive interactive experience. As in mistake #1, don’t put all your eggs in one basket (the event).

Most Webinars are educational in design. An online event that merely promotes your company is more like a commercial or a sales presentation. At a Webinar, registrants come to learn more about a problem or issue. As the instructor in this process, think of it as your responsibility to deliver the right information to your audience. Why not offer white papers and relevant case studies before the event so attendees are better informed?

Delivering a quality presentation is an obvious requirement, but think what your attendees may need to help them frame their business challenge in the context of your offer or solution before the event. And finding out what your registrants are looking for is simple. Just ask them when they register for your event.

More importantly, give it to them. Deliver focused information—case studies, customer examples, relevant articles based on the data collected so that the content can be personalized as much as possible.

Solution: Registrants are coming to you, raising their hand and asking for knowledge and help. Have a plan in place to engage and deliver to address their needs before the Webinar campaign gets started. You will find higher attendance, more satisfied participants and higher conversion rates if you execute properly.

Mistake #3: Considering management of Webinars an administrative task

The advice regarding Mistakes 1 and 2 can be followed only if one understands the importance of effective Webinar management.

Maximizing the opportunities of a Webinar can deliver immediate results from some among your audience, and long-term payoffs from those on whom you make the right impression.

Developing and managing a process and system to deliver, engage and convert your audience take resources from your marketing, sales and IS groups. As with any opportunity, the results depend on the investment that you make. What is a single customer worth to you?

As a cost-effective way to generate more leads, Webinars enable you to better qualify leads and give your sales team the important information they need to close more sales. Holding an online event can tap into and compliment your current marketing plan. It can even accelerate your sales cycle. Therefore, you can’t leave any details to the unknown.

So, before you even consider hosting a Webinar, understand this: the best Webinar is only a means to an end. No matter how good the presentation is, how smooth the speakers are or how wiz-bang the features are, the only thing that really matters is what comes out of the event.

You have to know what your goal is in order to measure your success. From there, you build the plan of attack to make it happen.

by Todd Davison, President of Bulldog Solutions

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WIth every webinar client we work with, as part of the process of developing an invitation strategy to recruit registrants, the question becomes “how many times do we reach out to them?”.  Clearly there is, and should be, a concern about touching the audience too much or too frequently.

The first part of answering this concern goes to assuring solid targeting of the audience and a clear understanding of its preferences.  Each industry’s prospective audience has a differing level of tolerance for the number of touchpoints.  An insurance audience, for instance, become much less enamored of more than 2 touchpoints than, say, a retail audience.

Secondly, the number and frequency of touchpoints is greatly influenced by the relevance of the topic.  Using the above example, if you are communicating to a life insurance audience about trends in health information systems, you can bet their patience will run out quickly!  On the other hand, if your topic is about multi-channel marketing, and your retail audience is concerned with e-commerce and merchandising, you’ll be afforded much more license in how you communicate with them.

The next part of answering the question of how many times, and how often, a prospective audience may be recruited for a webinar goes to the goal of the campaign itself.  Is the client’s desired outcome to be raised brand awareness, enhanced thought leadership or fresh demand generation?  If the former two, the best approach is a conservative one involving less number and less frequent touchpoints.  When the client desires lead generation specifically, a decision has to be made which balances the need for demonstrable outcomes and the potential for alienating the audience.  We’ve found that unsubscribe rates are easily controllable by making informed decisions about number and frequency at the outset of a recruitment effort, while being willing and flexible to adjust the invitation strategy if needed.

The overall approach with webinar audience recruitment is to begin efforts about 3 weeks prior to the planned event.  This time frame alone impacts the number of times a prospect can be touched.  Traditional rule of thumb for most marketing departments is two promotional emails within such a time period.  However, if a message is highly relevant and well-targeted, and HTML and plain text are interpolated throughout the recruitment effort, it is entirely appropriate and effective to touch the prospective audience more than twice and within a shorter period of time between touchpoints.  Our rule of thumb is to touch no more frequently than every 3 business days and to ALWAYS drop a brief, plain-text message within 48 hours of the event.

Posted by Bret Smith
Co-Founder and Principal
WebAttract, LLC

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Social media lets users build relationships of trust over time through viral videos, blogs and social networks (communities of common interests). In these networks, users get their information from one another, not from mainstream media, institutions, organizations or businesses. This eBook details how marketers can nurture these relationships through active, strategic participation and shows how Webinars (with their global reach) can be extremely effective in following up on newly forged relationships. Examples of the use of online events within social media include connecting you to your market immediately and directly, providing you with the ability to capture registration information, presenting benefits and features, interacting with polls and get direct feedback, answering specific questions, motivating stakeholders, and closing sales.

This eBook is 28 pages long and 1.5 MB in file size so I have placed it here for download: http://www.box.net/shared/ocjvqn877k

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Twitter is getting a lot of action today about a CNET article highlighting security concerns with Flash content running on web sites.

I’m not a security expert nor a Flash developer, so I won’t comment on the technical aspects of the warning. At first glance, it looks like web conferencing applications shouldn’t be a problem… The concern is for malicious Flash applications specifically built to be run on their own in a web browser and possibly camouflaged inside other things such as images.

But the “shot across the bow” comes near the end of the article where the interviewed security expert, Mike Bailey, says “users should disable Flash completely or use NoScript, a browser plug-in that blocks Flash and Java from untrusted sites.”

Flash is becoming a much more common base platform for web conferencing technologies. Vendors like it because they don’t have to make multiple versions for different operating systems and it can significantly speed and ease access times and operations compared to computer-installed applications (such as WebEx or Live Meeting client installs). Connect Pro, omNovia, ON24, VoxWire, and many others have made big investments in running their web conferencing packages as Flash applications.

The typical quote that all these vendors rely on is Adobe’s assertion that 98-99 percent of all Internet-connected computers already have the Flash Player installed and ready to use. But if companies start turning off access to Flash content as a standard security measure, web conferences are going to turn into tech support nightmares. If you rely on Flash and a presenter or attendee can’t run Flash, they are out of luck. There is no fallback workaround.

I’ve run into isolated instances of Flash-blocked webinar attendees in the past. This is particularly prevalent in high security locations such as medical and financial organizations. Their only solution is to move to another computer outside the security restrictions of their organization. And that doesn’t go over very well when you are trying to reach a business worker in the middle of her work day.

If IT departments decide to take the safe and easy route – just block all Flash so we don’t have to worry about it – there are a lot of web conference vendors and users who are going to be in a world of hurt. I’ll be keeping my eye on developments.

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog

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Virtual Edge Summit 2010 is the only event that focuses exclusively on providing education, training and solutions for planning and producing virtual events.  Over 2 days, dozens of experts will share their expertise with you, and be available for one-on-ones.

Virtual Edge Summit 2010 is designed for all virtual marketing and meeting professionals, as well as for those with expertise in producing physical events and in-person meetings that now need to expand into virtual solutions. The event also offers a rich program for digital, IT, and community support professionals. Attendees will meet other event, marketing and community experts from Cisco, IBM, SAP, Oracle and top virtual technology and service providers like InXpo, ON24, 6Connex, Stream57, George P. Johnson and Digitell.

The Virtual Edge Summit 2010 program focuses on the whole range of virtual event and meeting disciplines – from creation, planning, production, and follow-up. Attendees will hear from dozens of top experts on these topics:

• Virtual Event Production (Live, Mixed and Pre-corded),
• Event Marketing
  
• Webcasts/Webinars
• Virtual Platform Technologies, (Match platform capabilities to your needs)
• Lead Generation
• Virtual Communities
• Customer Retention
• Attendee / Partner Support (Ensure both get the most from a virtual event experience)
• New Virtual-Driven Business Models (trade shows, partner/customer training, corporate collaboration, customer update briefings, etc.)At Virtual Edge Summit 2010, you’ll get real hands-on help for taking the first step, or improving your current programs, with virtual events.
  

Attendees will receive:

• Best Practices techniques from successful virtual events
• Case studies on events, communities
• Meshing virtual and live events
• Dos and Dont’s for marketing virtual events
• Effective strategies to evangelize virtual events inside your business
• Plenty of audience interaction and Q&A

When: February 22-23, 2010

Where: At the Santa Clara Convention Center in California and virtually in browser based virtual environments offering 2D and 3D experiences.

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Brands like Kleenex, Dove, Hitachi, Kashi and Donovan are delivering their features and benefits through engaging stories about customers and employees.

Storytelling is the new differentiator.  Facts and figures, specifications and price all still matter, for certain. But it takes stories to connect with customers on an emotional level. The motivation to choose one brand over another – when the choices are endless – is triggered by emotion.

How can you build compelling stories into your marketing messages which develop new chapters and spin-offs that will, ultimately, humanize your brand in a variety of fresh ways?

* Create a compelling story line for your company: How to use what you know about your existing customers to develop storylines that give context and emotional impact to your product or service.
* Leverage story lines to link your customers with your brand based on shared common interests and experiences.
* Create more brand/customer “intersections”: use that common-ground knowledge along customers’ buying paths
* Engage with your customers more meaningfully: the storytelling process helps you engage and interact more with customers, making you more relevant to them, and offering a significant competitive edge.
* Leverage future “chapters”: once you craft your stories, you set your brand up for future chapters or spin-offs that hold to a consistent theme.   Storytelling allows you to evolve your brand with its customers.

Andrea Learned is the founder of Learned On Women and the co-author of Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy – and How to Increase Your Share of this Crucial Market. She is a leading marketing-to-women expert, speaker, writer and blogger who finds storytelling a key to … well, just about any marketing approach.

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