COMMENTS
Hi Mike,
Nice List.
Great disciplines.
Have you thought of having a location on your web site for previously recorded session that your audience can access when they need the info?
The Team I was on did this and it provided a great "Just in Time" educational tool for our constituency.
This "Virtual Juke Box" enable our community to download what they needed when they needed it not when our schedule matched up with thiers.
I believe it expanded our base of listeners dramatically.
Just managing 3 times zones in North America is a Challenge we had a Global Program and attracted some of our most active contributors and supporters who were on other continents.
Thoughts?
Thanks for the Great Topics and Content.
Jack - In a word, yes. We are already building content for our customers to access with best practices, including some webinars and other materials.
What is the best number of participants on a webinar?
I think webinars work well with almost any number of people, but usually you want a decent size (at least 20-25) so you get enough questions to make a Q&A interesting.
Hi Mike,
One way that can help add Vigor and Interest to a web cast is to have 4-5 FAQ's documented that you know from your experience are relevent to your topic.
What I have found is that most audience members are a bit shy and are too intimidated to ask a question.
Consequently what happens is your topic doesn't get explored as deeply as it could.
This happens a lot when you have "Experts" speaking to us "Beginners".
As a Beginner I may nedd to ask a question however I don't want to appear "Dumb". Meanwhile everyone else in the audience wants to know as well and is afraid to ask.
If you have a balance of beginner and advanced questions prepped in advnace it really helps your Presenter and the audience.
I have just witnessed to many good topics "Collapse" when there were no questions asked.
I believe it offers a service to your audience to anticpate their needs with "prepared" questions.
As a Presnter I think it shows great insight on the Hosts part to preperae and review those questions in advance so he or she is not surprised.
Where the real value comes in is making it conversational and authentic.
We would ask either in a Zoomerang Survey or in the invitation for questions.
That really helped us add authenticity, predictability and quality to the whole process.
Hi Mike,
Great list of tips. My company, ON24, works with a lot of companies to do webcasts and we do a lot ourselves. Some additional things to consider based on our experience are:
1) Most of your registrants for a webinar will typically come in the 10 days before, and even then, a majority on the day of the event.
2) The best time to send out a reminder email or marketing email is Monday. Don't know why - maybe they're thinking about what to do for the week?
3) If I can co-opt the term "long tail", if you assume that 70% of your audience attends live, the remainder of your audience will view the archive. What is interesting is that a significant number will be new registrants. Meaning, they never signed up for the live event to begin with!
4) Based on point three, send out an email immediately after the webinar/webcast to let people know when you plan to have the archive up. And once it's up, don't be afraid to send another email (you'll probably want to segment the emails for those who did attend the live and for those who didn't attend live)
5) Try to incorporate polls and surveys. Why? The more your audience participates, the more you know that they are a more "qualified" lead =)
With regard to ideal number of people on a webinar, it depends what your goal is. The programs we've done internally and those on our platform have ranged from 40 - thousands of people.
@Cece - I agree that recorded webinars are a great lead generation tool. Not sure what exactly you mean by 70% of your audience will attend live. My experience which I believe is pretty much an industry average is that your attendance rate is usually 40-50% (meaning less than half of the people that register will actually attend live). That's why a recording is critical - and the good news is that even those who register but don't attend are usually good leads.
Hi Mike, My bad, I was just picking "70%" as an example and wasn't meant to be a direct correlation to reality. We did a report in July that looked at registration/attendee rates. What we found is very close to you point:
• In 2006, when reviewing registrant to attendee conversion ratios, if 100 people register
for an event, 29.53% attended during the live webcast, while an additional 24.70% viewed the archive.
Hope this clarifies my original point.
Hi Mike,
Do you have any best practices to share for webinars that incorporate video?
@Rachel - From my experience, I would try not to do it. They generally do not look very good. Make sure to do lots of testing - I remember at a prior company our videos looked really different in the different web meeting applications. Some were horrible, some OK.
Hi Mike,
OUTSTANDING TOPIC!
Just wondering about something else that I didn't see covered.
What time of day do you suggest is best? Obviously you need to account for east coast / west coast...but is there any value with having them start on the hour versus something line 2:30?
Thanks for your thoughts and expertise!
Mike,
Great advice thanks...
I have a question though. I want to hold a high quality webinar. like a seminar for 30 minutes with some questions and answers at the end. I want to be able to record the webinar using my mac. also would like callers to have a choice to either watch or call in using a phone line. any good services you know of for mac?
@Dr Dan - The most reliable and least expensive solution I have found is GoToWebinar. For $99 a month or less, you can do a webinar for up to 1,000 people, and they call in for audio. They do not have web audio. You can also record it using thier software and it will save the file to your computer.
I am not 100% sure about mac compatibility (I'm not a mac guy) but it is web-browser based software and works with Firefox (you should use Firefox not Safari anyways).
Another option for recording is to use Camtasia from Techsmith. There is a 30 day free trial and the recording quality and edit-ability is good. I have had a lot of trouble editing the GoToWebinar recordings (they are in WMV format with a really weird codec that won't let me convert to flash).
Awesome thanks so much for the advice. I read some online that hated Gotowebinar because they said it wouldn't work a lot of the time, but I will check it out. Thanks again and I will post again once I test it out.
Dr Dan
www.MakeTheWorldYourStage.com