Apple sold over 15 million iPads in 2010, and demand for the iPad 2 appears to be even stronger.  IDC predicts that 44.6 million media tablets will ship in 2011, and Apple should continue to dominate in market share. In addition, Apple shipped over 15 million iPhones last year. Enterprises are gearing up to support executives and sales teams that are leaving their laptops at their desk and choosing both tablets and smart phones as their primary computing devices.

Unfortunately the Apple iOS devices do not support Flash. This is causing a problem for those who wish to access and view webinar replays and on-demand training content.  To make matters worse, these new devices are increasingly adopted in the executive suite.  These executives tend to view webinars and event replays on the weekend when they are away from a traditional PC and viewing in what Apple calls ‘lean-back’ mode.  (In fact, BrightTALK reports that forty percent of executives view webinar content in the evenings or on the weekend.)

What’s our solution? Coreography has been delivering its event replays in Flash, and now offers fall-back support to HTML 5 so that your recordings will play on mobile devices. The chart below shows you the breadth of devices this approach supports:

So if your using WebEx, GoToWebinar, Live Meeting, or another Flash-based solution, and need a webinar recording that your audience can actually view on any device, please give us a call. We can create recordings from your existing archives and capture high-quality, optimized recordings of your next webinar or webcast.

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Econsultancy has a very good article about how marketers can make it easier for consumers to make purchasing decision. You can see the parallel with your webinar invitations. After all, they are a mini-purchasing decision in themselves – your attendees are paying with their time. So if you keep these points in mind when crafting your invitation you will be headed in the right direction.

• Reduce options; The more choices available, the less likely any choice is made. If the purpose is to get viewers to your webinar, don’t muddy the water with other promotions or product information.
• Create urgency; Live webinars are a natural vehicle for building that sense of urgency – make sure to do so in your copy.
• Reduce risk; If your charging for your webinar, provide a money-back guarantee. If it’s free, address the risk that the content will not be worth the potential abuse of contact information – this is a bigger issue for smaller companies that may not have a reputable brand or market presence. They need to engender trust with their copy and remind people that you are not going to abuse the relationship. Remind your reader’s in plain language that you are trustworthy (and make sure you keep your promise):

We do not sell your personal information. We do not spam. We will not call you at dinner time. Privacy Policy

• Focus your message; Simplify your message and stay focused on one or two key points or audience takeaways. Write your copy from the reader’s perspective; ‘What’s In It For Me?’.
• Know your customer;  You cannot convert every site visitor and webinar attendee to a customer, so don’t try. Determine what your key strengths are and go after the best prospects for your product or service. This becomes even more important as social media channels drive greater webinar attendance. Your copy and promotion should actually self-qualify prospects so that you stay focused on the best prospects.

Read the original article at ‘How to turn consumer inaction into action: five tips‘.

Tags: event management, Marketing, Social Media, Web Seminars.

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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In June BtoB Online asked their webcast audience the question “How does your organization evaluate unstructured comments from customers?”

The results:

72%      We review each one manually
21%      We collect but don’t analyze it
6%        We use text mining tools
1%        We have an individual code the responses

Now you must interpret the results from any webinar poll understanding that the audience was not randomly selected and may not be statistically significant, but if this makes you think for a moment about how your using your viewer feedback than this is a good exercise!

The intelligent use of polls and surveys is an effective method for gathering feedback, but also for discovering your target audience needs and concerns. We have used polls effectively to uncover new or related applications for products and services.  So give those polls and surveys some thought, use them during during your webinar, and then listen to what your audience is really telling you.

Tags: customer feedback, Marketing, polls, surveys, Webcasts, webinars.

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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Richard Mayer

We recently wrote a post on Richard Mayer’s ‘Ten Multimedia Design Principals‘  citing his book Multimedia Learning.

I wanted to share another point from Mayer’s research that Cliff Atkinson drives home in his book Beyond Bullet Points called the Redundancy Effect.

Mayer’s research shows that reading text displayed on the screen actually lowers retention.

Mayer conducted experiments using two multimedia presentations. The first was your typical PowerPoint presentation that used bulleted text and the second had all text on the screen removed.

The result; viewers of the second presentation retained 28% more information and were able to apply 79% more creative solutions using that information than viewers of the first presentation.

Bottom line: Stop putting bullet points on your slides! If they need that detail, create speaker notes for download after the event.

Tags: Cliff Atkinson, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer.

Having trouble with your Adobe Connect audio or connection?

Here is a link to test your system:

Adobe Connect Meeting system test

If your problem is audio-related, we have found the simplest thing to do is dial the conference bridge number from your telephone. The VOIP service is not always reliable.

Hope this helps.

Tags: Adobe Connect, problems, Webcasts, webinars.

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.