When you are considering a purchase, who do you ask for your advice?

If your like me, you start with your friends. And you will probably seek out the ones who have some experience or passion related to your purchase. If I want to buy a guitar, I’d seek out a cousin who is a musician. If I want a new telephone system, I’d ask a half dozen of my friends that are consultants, managers and business owners  – the ones that make their living on the telephone..  Depending on the purchase, I would do more research online, on industry sites and forums, and visit your web site.  At this point, I’m ready to buy – for big-ticket items I’ve got a short list and will now call a company rep.

By now your starting to realize that in the early stages I may not spend much time on your site – in some cases I may not even visit it.  So as a marketer, you need to find a way to reach me through the mediums I am using.

Webcasts – audio and slides or video -  not only are good at educating the prospects you know about, but can be a compelling way to help your customers (my friends) and your evangelists (the ones commenting in user groups, message boards, and industry forums) share your story.

You can continue to deliver your webcasts live, but make sure you create an archive in bit-sized chunks and share it with the world – in your newsletter, on your site,  with user groups, on message boards.  Make it easy for your fans to share it too.  Its a great way to keep your name in the conversation and help your friends spread the word.

Tags: archives, conversations, live event recordings, Marketing, On-Demand, Promotion, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.

The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

Is it time to use Twitter as part of our webcast strategy?

Twitter has become a true social phenomena.  As the eMarketer chart below shows,  Twitter’s popularity continues to grow:

ComScore reported 4 million unique visitors in February 2009 while Nielson Online reported 7 million. Both services show the growth rate above 1000% year over year. Twitter is heavily used within tech and has surprisingly strong adoption by the older tech demographic.

So will this community (or more accurately, federation of communities) be interested in educational or informational-oriented webcasts? According to a MarketingProf’s survey of Twitter users,  both the statements “I find it exciting to learn new things from people” and “I value getting information in a timely manner” were rated 4.5+ on a 5 point scale.

I know companies that are using Twitter today as a promotional medium for video webcasts, and you can easily integrate Twitter into an event or webinar to replace or augment an integrated chat capability.  I have seen Twitter used  at conferences as a means for the panelists to engage with the audience and as a tool for submitting questions.

In the examples above Twitter is being used for promotion and engagement.  To fully tap into  the word-of-mouth power of Twitter,  we may want to re-think presentation formats – short form content that can be quickly accessed and shared (e.g. video) may be a better choice than traditional webinar technologies like WebEx.    I can see the day when we use our event recordings and create discrete “highlight” video segments that can be shared with our new Twitter followers so they can propagate the message!

So are you planning on using Twitter with your webinars? Can you see using it with a live event that is webcast?

Tags: LinkedIn, tweets, twitter, Webcasts.

I wanted to share this tip for those of you scripting your live webinars or on-demand presentations.

Make sure that you read that script out-loud!

Why?

Writing is for the eye, while your narration is for the ear.  Good writing and punctuation does not always sound very natural. By reading your script out loud, you will catch those phrases that just don’t roll off the tongue in a natural way, and can rewrite them so they are easier to speak.

Using this technique your presentation won’t sound canned, and will be easier to deliver too!

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TubeMogul is a service that enables you to upload your video once and distribute to the leading video sites. They then provide aggregated tracking statistics for your video.

TubeMogul recommends the following encoding options  if you want to widely distribute your video:

• File format: mp4 or mov
• Video codec: h.264
• Bit-rate: 700 kb/s – 1500 kb/s
• Resolution: 640×480
• Audio codec: mp3

For a detailed list by social media site, take a look at this format listing by social media website.

Tags: archives, event recordings, live event recordings, Social Media, Video.

So you have your webcast or webinar video archive recording ready, and you want to post it to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Metacafe, Revver,  and more. Here is the quick way to get the widest distribution possible.

Upload your video once to TubeMogul and let it distribute it to all the major video sharing sites for you. An account is free – just remember that you need to have an existing account on your targeted video destination sites.

View the TubeMogul tutorial on uploading and distributing your video here.

One problem you may encounter – every site has a different supported video length, so you will need to consider that before posting.

Tags: archives, event recordings, event replays, Promotion, Social Media, tubemogul.

When you are broadcasting a PowerPoint presentation during a web seminar it can be very distracting to have your mouse pointer (the little arrow) dancing across the screen as you or your presenter is speaking. The movement on the screen draws the audience’s attention from the presenter’s narration. It can even be confusing to the audience since their is no correlation between where the mouse is going and what the speaker is saying.

To prevent this from happening, after the Slide Show view has started, use this combination:

• To hide the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + H
• To restore the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + A

Here is another tip (when your in the Slide Show view):

When you really want the audience to focus on what you are saying, blank the PowerPoint screen:

To go black:

• Press the B key
• To restore press the B key again

To go white:

• Press the W key
• To restore, press the W key again

These tips and more can be found at David Paradi’s blog Think Outside the Slide.

Tags: PowerPoint, webinar.

We edit live webinars to produce event recordings that can be used for post-webinar marketing and training, and think alot about how to get the most out of these live events. Many of our customers will update specific slides or request that we edit out details like pricing that may change over time. Between judicious editing, recording new narration, and adding a moderator voice-over, we can really extend the life of these recordings.

However, there are a few simple things that would make our life easier, and would help any company that wants to extend the shelf-life of their content: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Editing, event replays, Microsoft PowerPoint, recording, reusability, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

I must admit that we have recorded webinars that used more than one of these presentation tricks. That can result in ‘Death by Webinar!’

Life After Death with PowerPoint By Don McMillan

Tags: effective presentations, funny, PowerPoint, Web Seminars.

The quote ‘Make it easy for people to talk about you’ says it all.

I had the opportunity last year to meet Andy Sernovitz when he spoke at the Silicon Valley AMA. (Coreography recorded this event for the SVAMA and you can view it online – jump to slide 78 in the index. Guy Kawasaki gives his typically entertaining presentation right after.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: event recordings, Marketing, Promotion, replays, word of mouth marketing.