James Pitaro

Want to start your own web video channel for internal or corporate communications?

Here are some good points from someone who knows a little bit about video – James Pitaro, vice president of media at Yahoo!.  In his post The Do’s And Don’ts Of Creating Original Video‘  he shares lessons learned at Yahoo!.

Although the Yahoo! focus is building online audiences that can be monetized, these are still good points for B2B companies. I particularly related to the observation about ‘Being Fast’ and getting your content out in a timely manner.

Read the The Do’s And Don’ts Of Creating Original Video here.

Tags: corporate tv, tv, Video, web tv, web video.

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.

When planning and delivering your webcast its critical to know how much Internet access bandwidth is available. When in the planning stage, we use this information to recommend the right solution for your event. We will test this before your event as well, and use that information to make sure we have set-up our streaming encoders optimally.

So how do you know how much bandwidth is available? Listen to this screencast to learn about the free tool Speedtest.net:





View the Speedtest.net screencast in its own window here.

Tags: bandwidth, event management, LinkedIn, Streaming, video quality, video webcasts, webcasting.

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.

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.

Want to get more registrants for your on-demand webinars and webcasts?  Try posting a video out-take to YouTube to improve its visibility and make it easy to share with partners.

First, you will want to reduce the length of your webinar by breaking it into chunks or by creating a highlight reel.  Look for statements that are controversial or compelling, and leave you wanting to learn more.

Editing your webinar length really is a requirement since you want this to be a teaser and fit into the viewing habits of visitors to these video sites.  During editing make sure you add a closing call to action that shows the URL for your landing page. Make that link short and simple since viewers will need to write it down and enter it into their browser.

Next you will want to give some thought to YouTube channel placement and tagging. I recommend that you check the tags your considering by searching for them before you publish – you want to make sure your placement is next to appropriate content for your audience.

Finally, use the embed code to place the video on your landing pages or other pages as a promotional teaser. Promote it with your partners for placement on their site, and use a source code in your registration link to track which partners are sending you registrants.

Bill

Tags: archives, event replays, Promotion, YouTube.