Our new video webcast solution makes it easy to deliver a conference or seminar on the web and take questions from the audience.  Where you want to encourage drive-by viewing, visitors can access the player anonymously. Then they can choose to submit questions via Twitter or through the private question feature shown below:

To simplify management, questions can be automatically routed to one or more email addresses where they can be vetted and simply forwarded to the on-stage moderator.

It really doesn’t get simpler than that!

Next up, how to take private questions from your live audience.

Tags: LinkedIn.

We have been very busy improving our existing services and adding new capabilities, and I wanted to give you a glimpse of what is coming.  Below is a sneak-peak of our new live video webcast player. It  supports both Flash and Silverlight Video,  and is configurable to suit both internal corporate webcasts as well as public events like seminars and conferences.

Event or Seminar Live Webcast

The configuration shown here is well suited for a conference – with Twitter feeds, sharing links ,as well as Sponsor and site links for a blog or event calendar.  Not only is this a good player for viewing and interacting with the live event, but those pulled in via sharing links can find  your main event site too.  In essence you have a video-enabled landing page!

A special thanks to all those who helped us with usability testing!  Your input and feedback made all the difference!

We will be sharing more information on this player as well as our other solution enhancements over the coming weeks.

Tags: LinkedIn, Product & Solutions.

My View of the SVAMA Panel

I had a very enjoyable evening last night as a panelist on the SVAMA’s “Integrating Video Into Your Marketing” event.

There was an enthusiastic and attentive audience as Jeff Severtson delivered his presentation that showcased how Adobe uses video in its marketing. Then the panel took questions from the audience and we had a good discussion, particularly since we brought a variety of perspectives – large company versus agency, in-house versus out-sourced.  It was interesting to see on how many points we were in agreement as well.

One slide Jeff shared was particularly eye-opening; he highlighted what you should expect to spend on your video production, and commented that most of Adobe’s productions were in the high-end of the sweet spot.

All of our event and webcast productions fall into the Low Budget to Sweet Spot while we consistently maintain broadcast-news quality production values. How do we do this?  We leverage your existing presentations and events and capture the knowledge and enthusiasm of your in-house experts. This reduces content development costs (in essence they are already funded in another program or budget, so we do not need to create new scripts and story boards) and spokesperson costs. And nothing is more authentic than your own employees sharing their knowledge. With your webcast video in-hand, you can turn this into shorter clips that you can use across all your marketing channels and share via social media.

Of course, there is room for both approaches in your marketing, but its good to know that not all your video has to be expensive to be good!

Tags: LinkedIn.

If you are in San Jose – San Francisco Bay Area come join us in Sunnyvale February 10th for  ‘Integrating Video into your Marketing Plan‘. We are excited to have been invited by the SVAMA to participate in the panel discussion. Other panelists include representatives from Adobe, AdobeTV and Oracle. This is a very high-powered panel of marketing and production experts, and we should have a fun and far-ranging discussion of both how to create video and use it effectively.

Check out this invitation video created by our moderator, Jeff Severtson:

This event is being held at Detati Communications, which has a beautiful facility for shooting photos or video. Come check it out. For more details, and to register online, visit http://www.svama.org/site/event_details/91.

See you there!

Bill

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In addition to our commercial work webcasting live conferences, we also record the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association’s panel events for on-demand viewing.

The SVAMA makes these archives available to the public from their website (pictured below). You can view the event clips on YouTube by clicking here or on the website image.

Tags: Conference Recording.

Need to promote your web seminars?

Now you can promote them for free through a LinkedIn Group and your web seminar will automatically be added to the webinar search engine Webinar Today.

The Webinar Today search engine has already indexed over 1 million pages, primarily at industry hubs and selected webinar service providers.  To continue to grow the depth and quality of our listings we need the participation of individual businesses that produce their own web seminars.

Marketing and event managers can simply post their own webinars at the Webinar Today LinkedIn Group.  They will then be added to the search engine.

There is no charge for any of this – just think of us when your  business needs require a live video webcast production team, or you want help incorporating video into your next web seminar.

To recap, simply join our LinkedIn Group and create a new discussion using the event title as the subject and add a short description. Make sure to include the link to the webinar landing page. (That link gets added to our search engine so it should include a description of the event, not just a registration form.) That’s all there is to it!

Linked In Group to Promote Your Webinar Free

Webinar Today Search Engine

If you have any questions, just post them at the LinkedIn Group or in the comments below.

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Increasingly all our events are ending up online in one form or another.   Here is a good article by John Foster that discusses your copyright obligations.  John is a lawyer specializing in music licensing and discusses how to get permission to use copyrighted music.

For our part, we always use royalty-free music in our webcasts and recordings, but that is not always the case for our client presentations.

So in a nutshell:

• Search ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC to see if anyone holds the copyright. These organizations represent over 95% of all songs ever written, including foreign songs. You can search by song title or performer.
• Then follow the instructions at the site and pay your license fee. Fees for a copyright song range from $80 to $6,450 per event.

For more details, please read John Foster’s article or consult your own lawyer!

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It’s not easy to keep the names and affiliations of a large panel of speakers straight.  Not only is this confusing to your local audience, it can prevent them from asking directed questions to specific members of your panel.

When Coreography webcasts an event, we place the current speakers name and title on the live video (called lower thirds). But unless we send our program feed to the main projector, this does not help the local audience.

So what can you do?

If its a group panel discussion seated behind a table, consider using name placards in front of each speaker’s microphone.  This takes a little pre-planning to execute, but should eliminate your local audience’s confusion.

Tags: event recordings, event video, video recording tips, video webcasts.