The ROC Concept

In a world where doing more with less has become a business survival mechanism, collaboration remains critical to success. Collaboration is now a daily requirement for organizations of all sizes as they extend the global reach of their products. The trend applies not only to Fortune 1000s but also to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), from single owners to operations with less than 500 people.

Face-to-face meetings are often seen as a critical part of the collaboration equation, historically requiring expensive travel within a global enterprise or to meet customers. But flying and commuting both generate costs that can add up quickly.

With the rapid adoption of social media by both consumers and businesses alike, more professionals are looking to technology to make connecting remotely more efficient. Companies seeking an edge in 2010 should get acquainted with the idea of “Return on Collaboration,” or ROC. ROC is essentially the benefit companies realize from giving employees the tools they need to collaborate efficiently and effectively.  Today’s collaboration technology includes Internet Protocol (IP-based) applications that provide presence information, share documents and presentations, allow immersive video conferencing, and, ultimately, enhance unified communications.

“Today more than ever before, organizations are putting a sharp focus on their abilities to maintain performance, while getting the highest yield possible out of their people and collaboration technology investments,” according to a recent Frost & Sullivan report.

That report also said that among companies that deployed collaboration tools, 72 percent reported better business performance.

Collaboration: A Daily Requirement

More efficient collaboration and more productive meetings will be critical points to monitor as companies decide how to connect their thinkers. Already, workers report spending 19 percent of their business days – eight hours of a 40-hour business week – in meetings, according to research by The Futures Company.

At our company, part of our charge is how to understand if the return on collaboration concept is real and attainable.  A recent implementation at a large software company was able to show real benefits from looking at collaboration as a whole system vs. separate pieces—and putting the user experience front and center.

This company’s employees around the world were adopting the technologies in a siloed fashion and were finding them increasingly cumbersome to use. Set-up took forever—registering to get an account, waiting for a booking confirmation, scheduling the conference and then copying and pasting to get everything in one place so the invitation could be e-mailed – all for a 15-minute meeting.

Not a good scenario for a company that was relying more and more on online conferences to meet customer implementation timeframes and other key demands. In addition, the company had growing concerns about the security of its patchwork conferencing system.

So they set a goal to standardize the way its employees, customers and partners collaborate—ensuring everyone would meet the same way in a branded, secure environment.  And they smartly understood that they needed an easy-to-use solution that its people would readily embrace so that various departments wouldn’t seek their own vendors for online conferencing purposes.

This company decided to create one system, manage it and support it.  A greater ROC—Return on Collaboration—is precisely what the company gained. Some top level metrics include:

>>Increased productivity by reduced average meeting time from 46 to 37 minutes
>>Faster start-up time for meetings—what used to take 7-10 minutes now takes a minute
>>Increased collaboration—from 80,000 meetings a month to 300,000
>>Across-the-board travel costs reduced by more than one third

As excerpted from the PGi whitepaper of the same name.  MORE TOMORROW.

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I have been recommending omNovia web conferencing quite a bit lately, as it fills many different usage needs with a nice combination of power and user-friendliness. I first reviewed the product in July of last year, with a follow-up shortly thereafter.

It’s now eight months since those writeups, so I think I can talk about omNovia again without being accused of undue favoritism or special favors (By the way, I don’t resell web conferencing licenses, I don’t accept advertising from web conferencing vendors, and I don’t engage in kickback deals with any vendors. If I say I like something, it’s because I like it.)

The company has been adding and refining features in a steady stream. They put their “Recast” recording feature into full development (mentioned at the end of my original article) and then added a way to play back a recorded session either on its own as a live event – including registration for new audience members, or as content included in a live event so that a presenter could introduce the subject or answer audience questions.

They also wrapped technology and services in a bundled offering called “StageToWeb” – designed to help producers integrate local in-room presentations with remote audience participation.

Another nice little feature addition of late is the ability for hosts and presenters to highlight audience questions and comments in different colors. Since the colors have no built-in meaning, you can choose your own interpretation and actions. I immediately saw it as valuable when you have a moderator reading audience questions in a live question and answer session. Each presenter could use colors to indicate “Don’t ask this one” and “Ask me this one”. Or if you have various people responsible for answering audience comments via chat, you could use color coding to assign comments to the appropriate helper.

I’m particularly pleased about the addition of payment processing as an option for omNovia customers. Now you can elect to sign up for this extra-cost option and include fee collection as a part of the signup and registration process for an event. omNovia is using PayPal as the payment processor of choice, so to collect money you must have a PayPal business or merchant account that is set up and verified for payment collection.

You link your PayPal account internally to your omNovia account as a one-time setup task (No programming involved… Just fill in the proper information fields). Then you can create any webinar as a payment-required event with its own pricing and discount codes. Pricing can be specified in US Dollars, Euros, or British Pounds. You can set up special discount codes, each with a reduction off the list price given as an absolute amount or as a percentage.

There is also a fancier integration for customers doing programming with omNovia’s APIs to integrate single sign on systems. You can set up different registration links and prices, for instance to offer one price to members coming from their logged-in account page and a different price for “outsiders.”

Payment is entered with standard credit card information, rather than using PayPal’s front end. So your registrants don’t see any PayPal logos and don’t need accounts. Payment goes directly into your own PayPal merchant account. There is no “collect and distribute” buffer through omNovia, who also does not see the entered financial information.

There are no built in facilities for processing refunds. You are on your own to deal with no-shows or dissatisfied viewers. [UPDATE March 30: Somebody has been reading my posts! You can now initiate a refund directly from the omNovia Event Manager console. Nice.]

The second big new enhancement is the ability to set up events with “Multi Channel Rooms.” Each room is associated with your choice of a supported language. As attendees log in, they are greeted with a choice of which language they would like to hear. You need to set up a presenter or interpreter associated with the audio stream in the subordinate channel room. That person would listen to the stream coming from the main room and then simultaneously translate it and speak into the second room’s audio line. Participants would hear the translated audio.

The system shows the same visual presentation content to all participants, so I could foresee a useful future enhancement (not planned or announced… are you listening, omNovia?) that would let a company create a translated version of their slides and show the translation in the second channel room. The subordinate rooms would be slaved to the master, so that when the presenter moved a slide forward in English, it would move the slides forward in the other rooms simultaneously. Wouldn’t that be nifty?

UDPATE MARCH 23: omNovia asked me to clarify that you aren’t actually managing two separate meeting rooms with separate logins. It’s all conducted in one virtual meeting room and the choice of language stream at login determines which audio and chat channel the user sees. Sorry for the confusion.

I really enjoy seeing continued development and innovation in web conferencing and I love reporting on feature additions, especially when they are relatively uncommon (each of these last two features have been introduced by other web conferencing vendors as well, but they are still very rare). If you are a vendor and are feeling jealous of this coverage, let me know what is new and innovative in your product!

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog

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The greatest value of a webinar, both long-term and immediate-term, is realized in the utilization of the registrant data you capture.

Join us this March 31st for an insightful look into how to capture, analyze and leverage registrant data during the registration and invitation processes to recruit a webinar audience. Then, we’ll examine how this process and methodology can feed a lead nurturing approach post-event, using email, voice and SaaS technology.

In this 50-minute live, informational and complimentary webinar we’ll drill down on the specifics of:

• Developing landing pages to motivate registrants to answer simple questions
• How to digest and utilize the intelligence you gather to adjust your email invitation strategy and drive optimal registration outcome
• The use of prospect intelligence to expand and refine your webinar presentation
• Extending the dialogue with registrants beyond the live event

Register today @ http://forms.salesfusion.com/af2?LinkID=CH00000001eR00000163AD&Selection=Webattract

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Many look at social media as another outlet to pump their marketing messages into, especially companies which have found that success in other channels of marketing such as SEO, PPC, e-mail, or traditional marketing outlets like TV, radio, or print have slowed or come to a virtual standstill. They read that Foursquare is the next “Internet darling” of social media and is being used and touted by early adopters.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace accounts, Twitter streams, blogs, YouTube channels, Digg submissions, Flickr accounts, Wikis, even rating and review sites are all social media marketing tactics you see commonly touted as efforts companies “should be doing.” Have you ever stopped to even ask why?

Why should your company have a Facebook fan page? Is it because everyone else does? Maybe your competition does?

That old saying, “if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” is just as true in social media. While it may seem cool and hip to be able to say you have all of these different social media accounts, are these the marketing tactics you need to be doing to be successful in social media?

Marketing Tactics without a Strategy is Like Doing Nothing at All

It’s a common practice to toss up a MySpace account or Facebook fan page because it’s free, easy, and everyone else is doing it. While businesses should secure accounts on social media sites for their company or brand names, don’t automatically jump in and devote massive amounts of time to one particular social media marketing tactic just because of the above three reasons.

Implementing social media marketing tactics for any reason without a sound strategy in place will ultimately lead to confusion, and then disappointment in your efforts in the social media space. It’s a lot like throwing darts blind. You’re throwing them without knowing what or where the bull’s-eye is. Once in a while you might hit the dartboard, and it would be a miracle if you hit the bull’s-eye.

Any ad agency, public relations company, or search marketing firm that comes to you and says “you need a Facebook fan page” without any reason other than “it’s new and you need it and we know how to put it together for you,” you might want to stop and ask yourself why you’re using this particular agency.

Social Media Strategy Involves Much More than a List of Marketing Tactics

Your agency might come to you with a laundry list of social media tactics they say you should employ as a “strategy.” Unfortunately, it isn’t a strategy. It’s just a list of marketing tactics they’ve become well-versed in and want to be paid for deploying for you.

Again, it comes back to answering the question “Why?” Why should we be doing this?

Social media strategies involve much more than just putting the accounts together and sending out a press release saying, “Hey, we’re now in XYZ social media site.” The members of these social media communities don’t care that you announce your presence. What they care about is if you give them valuable, quality content.

So what does a social media strategy involve? What should you be looking for? How do you avoid failure? These are just a few things you should consider before wildly deploying social media marketing tactics.

* Answering the “Why?”: Your social media strategy should fully answer why you’re using a particular tactic. Is it because your audience is there and interacting already? Is it because the potential for branding and exposure is there? Do the research.

* How to Deploy: How do you gain respect in social media? Do you go in guns blazing, or do you sit back and get a feel for what you’re about to embark on? Is it an approach of asking questions first and then offering advice? Do you want to ask for submissions from the audience or start by writing valuable content? Your strategy should fully answer these questions before you start.

* Defining Your Goals and Measuring: How do you know your efforts were successful? What is your company expecting as a return on your time and resources spent on your marketing efforts in social media. If there isn’t a clear set of goals to be measured for your efforts, how can you justify your tactics? Do you have clear ROI for your social media efforts?

* When to Re-evaluate?: Companies forget to define when they should re-evaluate their efforts. They get into the mode of “we’re doing this and we’ll just keep doing it because we have the budget to.” What if something isn’t working, and you aren’t meeting your goals? What if something else is working really well? Set points in your strategy for re-evaluation. Remember, nothing is ever set in stone when it comes to social media marketing.

By Liana Evans, Search Engine Watch

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I recently read a post on Dave Paradi’s blog about a conference that is banning the use of PowerPoint by their presenters.  While in my opinion this is sad (the decision, not Dave’s post!), I’m actually not surprised.

I’m no stranger to voicing my opinion about conference presentations.  A year ago I wrote an open letter begging conference hosts to stop killing the presentation visuals by forcing them into conference-branded templates.  Unfortunately, I don’t think it reached every conference host.

The reasoning behind the ban was only tangentially related to PowerPoint.  The conference hosts highlighted a few issues they wanted to put a stop to, and for the most part I think they’re quite valid:

1. Most conference presentations are thinly veiled product pitches or company overviews that offer no real value to the attendees
2. Most conference presentations are are simply re-purposed slides slightly tweaked (if at all) for the conference
3. Most conference presentations use little or no graphics
4. Many presenters fail to prepare (prepare to fail) for the presentation and end up reading directly off the bullet-point ridden slides

To combat this, the conference hosts have decided to ban PowerPoint all together, requesting that hosts use aids such as flipcharts and whiteboards.  If their presenters can’t design an effective PowerPoint presentation, how are they going to use flipcharts and whiteboards effectively?  They’ll simply end up putting their bullet points in writing!

All of these points are valid and plague presentations everywhere, not just conferences.  I agree that something has to be done. But folks, PowerPoint is NOT the problem.  PowerPoint is just a tool.  The conference hosts cited problems that exist due to poor presenters, not poor presentation software.  Banning PowerPoint won’t force presenters to prepare more effectively for their presentation.  True, it may remove their ability to utilize PowerPoint as a crutch, but I bet they’ll show up with index cards.  Trust me, they’ll find a way to deliver a poor presentation.  The problem is with the presenters themselves.

When used effectively, PowerPoint/Keynote (along with many other emerging presentation technologies like Prezi and Kineticast) can be wildly effective.  Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much any conference host can do to force their presenters to present effectively.  Certainly not by banning PowerPoint.  It’s a problem deeply rooted in years of poor presentation design.  We’ve seen so many poorly designed presentations that it’s become expected. I have no scientific numbers, but I’d bet you’d be surprised by how many people have never seen an effectively designed PowerPoint or Keynote presentation (although the coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynotes is changing that).

The only solution is widespread education and adoption of effective presentation design skills.  We need more presentation designers and educators to speak out and speak up.  We need more presenters like Steve Jobs, and more presentation gurus like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte who are traveling all over the world to change the presentation landscape.

What are your thoughts?  Can banning PowerPoint really make presentations and presenters more effective?

Posted by John Thomas, Presentation Advisors

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View this instructive graphic to understand the depth and breadth of our single-vendor solution for creating fresh new leads, raising brand awareness and enhancing thought leadership…simultaneously.

WebAttract’s wonderful new puzzle graphic illustrating End2End Solution for Webinar Demand Creation

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I always advocate preparing for a public webinar with as many backups and failsafe contingencies as you can manage. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will be completely wasted and you will feel faintly silly for going through the hassle (and possibly the expense) of setting up an extra computer, extra phone line, extra headset, printed copies of your presentation material, an emergency audio conference number, and preparation for having someone else advance your slides. But that 100^th time, you will feel like a hero for being able to continue with your webinar even in the face of something going wrong.

But even with the best planning and safeguards in place, you can still hit a catastrophic event that forces abandonment of your webinar or loss of access for a significant portion of your audience. I have had to cancel webinars due to fire alarms in the building and safety evacuations on September 11, 2001. Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger have both faced webcast breakdowns that prevented large numbers of potential participants from joining their events.

Last week it happened to Brainshark, a company that ironically enough stresses the value of creating recorded presentations in place of, or in addition to, live webinars. They were giving a live educational webinar for users of their technology. They wanted to encourage lots of interaction and teamwork in the audience, so they decided to use “breakout sessions” in their webinar. This is a feature found in a few of the biggest webinar technologies, allowing a host to segment attendees into smaller meeting groups where they can interact before all coming back to the full-attendee presentation. Brainshark was using Microsoft Office Live Meeting, which includes the functionality.

Even though they tested the functionality ahead of time, something went terribly wrong in the live event. Every attendee coming in to the session had presenter-level control of the slides! So people were moving slides forward and backward for the entire audience, making the presenter’s job almost impossible. Then when they tried to start the breakout groups, one of the subgroups found themselves locked out of their meeting room (Possibly because an early entrant with presenter-level control changed a setting… It’s hard to tell).

Many attendees abandoned the meeting as a lost cause. Others stayed, but the Brainshark organizers had to admit that it wasn’t the professional experience they wanted to provide, and they didn’t have a chance to deliver the educational value or the image of their company that they should have.

So they did the right thing. As quickly as they could, they wrote an email and sent it to all registrants for the event. I won’t attempt to reprint the entire communication in this post, but you can click here to read it.

What did Brainshark do right?

• They communicated quickly (within 90 minutes)
• They took responsibility
• They empathized with the audience’s experience
• They gave a brief explanation to satisfy curiosity without lingering on blame
• They emphasized the positive rather than the negative
• They said what they were doing to redeliver the promised value

Taking a fast, proactive position in this way can help alleviate a lot of pent-up frustration and anger. I saw one response email that came back to Brainshark. In part, it said:

“In spite of all the technical difficulties yesterday, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the webinar and I feel like I got a lot out of it.  Nobody likes feeling like they are wasting time, but I could see the value of the content, and I could see that technical issues were the main issue.

But hey, you and your team did a great job of keeping your cool and working together to make the most out of it… and I’m sure anyone else who was lucky enough to get into one of those breakaway sessions enjoyed it as much as I did.  I really got a lot out of the scriptwriting session and look forward to looking at the others once they are in Brainshark.”

Your audience can appreciate a cool and calm approach to disaster management and recovery. They appreciate being told what happened. They appreciate being told how they will be able to get the benefits they were promised. And mainly they appreciate being respected and valued enough to be kept in the loop.

My thanks to Brainshark and Irwin Hipsman, Brainshark Director of Customer Community, for letting me use their problematic session as a learning experience for others.

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog

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Creativity, interaction and personalization are key components of successful email-based webinar recruitment efforts. A personalized landing page for each respondent (PURL) as well as Variable Image Personalization (VIP) for each individual email are highly effective at driving up conversion rates.

Read more of my article on Bright Hub’s Sales & Marketing Channel @  http://www.brighthub.com/office/sales-marketing/articles/66769.aspx#ixzz0iqAiO9zF

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Meet Client Expectations with 3 Key Webinar Deliverables @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHUICP33W1Y

Webinars As An Effective Use of Social Media @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzEpprJuMWo

Steps In a Successful Webinar Planning Process @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr7AIYN-CXE

Engaging Registrants in Dialogue After the Webinar @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiTWXbwHJRA

Practiced Speakers Makes Perfect with Webinars @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wbjg4xB-g

Reputable Contact Data + Social Media = Optimal Webinar Registration @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsOjTxKlSGw

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Your mama raised you right. When someone helps you, you thank them. Good for you… That is the right thing to do in life. Now stop doing it in your webinars.

One of the most frequent questions I get as a consultant and speaker on the topic of better webinars is “How do I make my webinars more engaging for the audience? How do I make people pay attention? How do I make them interact?” The usual expectation is that I’ll say something about how many audience polls per hour to include, or how to use the whiteboard, chat, and other web conferencing features.

But I prefer to start from the simplest of premises: Approach everything you do from the perspective of your audience. Today’s lesson is this…

YOUR AUDIENCE DOESN’T CARE WHO SUPPORTED YOU!

I see webinars all the time where the speaker’s opening slide is a list of other people who worked on the research being presented, or were involved in carrying out a study, or are members of the department or group that put together the presentation. BOOORRRRIIINNGG!

Yes, you should acknowledge and thank those individuals. It’s the right thing to do. But do it on your own time. Send them a card. Buy some doughnuts for the team. But keep it out of your public presentation. For the simple fact exists that your audience does not care. The fact that those other individuals helped work on the project is the least interesting thing you could present from the audience’s perspective. You are basically giving your audience permission to stop paying attention while you take care of your own housekeeping and internal back-patting.

The same thing holds true at the end of your presentation. If you are the speaker, don’t bother thanking your moderator or webinar support team for their help in making the event go smoothly. Thank us afterwards. We appreciate the thought. But don’t weaken the impact of your presentation by distracting the audience so that the last thing they hear is unimportant banter. Close strong, with a summary of the benefit the audience has just received and a suggestion of how they should use this new information.

If you are the moderator or facilitator on an event and you have the final word to the audience, a very brief thank you to the speaker and audience members is usual and expected. Keep those short. Write them out. As you make each thank you, reiterate why the audience should feel grateful:

“Jim, thank you for sharing your insights and practical examples that we can put to use in our own businesses. And finally, thank you to each of you for taking time out of your day to improve your business skills and knowledge.”

One sentence each. Brief and done. Don’t let the power of your webinar be cannibalized by multiple repetitions of thank you’s and a general feeling of “Are we done now?”

By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success

Originally posted on The Webinar Blog

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