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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. Remove PowerPoint template page and date fields. If you do any editing, the page numbers may change and the dates may no longer be accurate.  Now I understand that you may want to date the materials, but putting the date just on the title slide or alternatively on the directory page that launches the presentation gives you this information and reduces editing time if it needs to be changed.
2. Presenters should not reference slides by number. We will usually edit this out if we are re-arranging content, but this may not be possible depending on who is producing your recording. It is far better to reference a specific slide by title. We also run into situations where the speaker’s slide deck does not include all the slides used in the event, so their slide #1 is not slide #1 in the master deck. This proves confusing both for the live event and the event replay.
3. Do your key slides stand on their own?. This can be tougher to implement, but when you start to realize that the event recording is going to reach more people than the live event, it becomes worth your time to consider if your narration and key slides or group of slides can stand on there own. On the web attention span is short, and as editors it makes sense to provide your content in bite-sized chunks. This means we either use our judgment to edit and create the story, or lift key segments from your presentation. If you have made it easy to extract key points, we can both save time and money.

Do you have any tricks for making your web content re-usable? I’d love to hear them!

Regards,

Bill

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp8dugDbf4w

Life After Death with PowerPoint By Don McMillan

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