Adobe Connect Blog

Yesterday, MarketingSherpa released a case study on our own webinar program that we have been running for Adobe Connect since 2008.  It reviews the evolution of the program while sharing lessons learned and methods that led to success.

From the case study, Webinar Marketing: Adobe revamps strategy and achieves a 500% lift in conversion to sale by MarketingSherpa:

SUMMARY: Webinars can be effective, yet challenging, content marketing.

So, we were intrigued when we learned even a webinar platform company faced challenges with using webinars for marketing. Adobe wanted to use webinars as guided product tours, which would have been difficult to present in a “one sheet brief,” as the senior product marketing manager described it.

Learn from the team’s impressive turnaround — a 500% increase in conversion to sale through its new webinar strategy — to see how you can improve your own webinar marketing. READ MORE.

In preparation for my interview with MarketingSherpa, I also prepared a case and a review of our program for this blog on why I think one-off webinar for lead generation are a waste. Here is the start of that review:

One-Off Webinars for Lead Generation are a Waste

A bold statement perhaps, but allow me to present my own case study and I bet you’ll end up agreeing with me.

Many a marketer, including myself just a few years ago, will spend a great amount of effort and budget on promoting and producing webinars about their product which are held sporadically throughout the year. More often than not these webinars are not part of an integrated strategic plan… READ ON

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Whether you are running a webinar to generate leads, educate your customers, launch a campaign to your sales team, train your workforce or share thought leadership, the greatest content in the world won’t matter if no one is listening.

You might think ‘they took the time to show up so they’re listening, right?’.  Not likely. If a webinar is approached in this manner, it’s more likely they are checking Facebook, emailing, daydreaming, eating a snack or drooling on their keyboard…

Unless you have mastered the art of virtual interaction!

Even though you can’t see all your webinar attendees’ faces, that doesn’t mean you can’t see their interaction or engagement level.  I have had the honor of working alongside some incredible Virtual Interaction Masters. These Masters are able to grab the attention of an audience before the webinar even begins and hold everyone in rapt attention for 60 minutes. Amazing!  Here are 9 of their secrets:

Use an interactive ‘Lobby’

- Using a ‘Lobby’ with interactive features where early birds can wait is a good time to get the audience touching their screen and using your platform before the event even starts. For details and ideas on how to create a ‘Lobby’, see my previous blog ‘Anyone there?’.

Provide an Open Chat pod with an Ice Breaker question

-  Whether you use a ‘Lobby’ or not, consider including an Open Chat in the webinar room prior to the start of the webinar.  Use it to ask a simple ice breaker question like ‘what is the weather where you are?’  or ‘where are you joining us from’?. The more simple and generic the question, the more likely your interaction level – think of this as a warm up.  It also helps set the tone and lets the audience know they are not alone in cyberspace.

Ask for everyone’s first name and recognize them

- This is a crafty way to set an interactive tone right from the start and also let your audience know you are a live person paying attention to them instead of a recorded voice.  Ask them to enter their first name in the Q&A and then welcome a few of the attendees by name.  It’s amazing how much more interaction you will get throughout the webinar if you try this simple technique right at the start. This is especially true if you are using a moderated Q&A where attendees cannot see other submitted questions– this lets them know they are not alone and you recognize their presence.

 Get to the content fast!

- Housekeeping items are a good way to drive people straight to their email and lose them before you even start.  Keep is short and provide any tips they need for using your platform as you go and when appropriate. You could also add a Note pod to your layout to display answers to frequently asked questions.

Answer questions and acknowledge comments as you go

- Not every speaker can do this and it takes some practice.  Once you are comfortable, keep an eye on the Q&A and answer relevant questions or recognize a comment as you go.  Now, I don’t mean that you should stop the presentation for a designated ‘Q&A moment’, which can ruin the flow– I mean that you should have a conversation with your audience.  For instance, if you are taking about widgets and John comments that widgets are great, verbally agree with him and keep on going. Or perhaps someone needs clarification on an acronym you just used. Watch your Q&A go nuts if you can master this!

Ask the audience about their experience, input or thoughts

- Everyone’s favorite topic is themselves.  If you can get them thinking about how your topic relates to them personally, they will be more likely to remember the content and engage their minds around what you’re presenting.  Ask them what their experience is in the area you are discussing, or ask them to share their insight or learning around the topic at hand. Using a Poll or Open Chat is a good way to collect this feedback and get them interacting with you.

Get the audience to interact with each other

- Think about dividing up your audience in some way and asking them to provide the pros and cons about something related to your presentation, or ask each group to brainstorm and provide input on separate topics. Then recognize some of the ideas and feedback you receive.  Using multiple Chat pods is a great way to set this up and, if you have it prepared on a separate layout ahead of time, it’s a seamless exercise you can fit into your presentation.

Plan an interaction every 5-7 minutes

- Studies show that webinar producers and virtual presenters should plan some sort of interaction every 5-7 minutes throughout a virtual presentation to keep the audience engaged, attentive and more likely to retain the content. This could be anything from using emoticons to polls, chat, Q&A or anything that gets them touching the screen to interact with your webinar platform.

Use the Engagement Meter

- If visual confirmation that your audience is attentive via their use of polls, chat, emoticons, and Q&A is not enough for you, try the Engagement Meter. This will give you a good understanding of the audience’s overall engagement level. You can even go back through your presentation at the end of the webinar and check to see at what points you lost your audience – this is a good tool to use as you work to improve your skills in this area.

For the most part, anything you can do during an in-person event, you can find a way to replicate virtually.  If you have other tips and ideas, please share.

Good luck on your journey to becoming a Virtual Interaction Master!

Written by: Shelby Britton

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Even the most detail-oriented and prepared webinar producer runs into emergencies from time to time.  The difference between saving the webinar during an emergency and watching the entire event implode completely is having a well thought out Emergency Plan.

Several of the most common emergencies can be either a small blip on the webinar radar (sometimes even going completely unnoticed by your audience) or they can quickly spread from a small flame to a blazing inferno, devouring the time and investment you spent on preparation and promotion.  Having an Emergency Plan in place before the emergency arises will make all the difference between a blip and total disaster.

Here are 8 elements from my own Emergency Plan, developed from hard-learned lessons, you might want to consider for your own plan:

- Always have a backup audio conference phone line

• In the case that you are using an audio conferencing line either as the only audio option or you are simulcasting, you will want a backup audio conferencing phone number from a different teleconferencing provider in case your main line provider has an outage during your webinar. This can happen before or during your webinar! Make sure your back up line has the same capacity as your main line and that you know how to use its features, such as muting participants. If your audio goes out, simply post the new audio conferencing information in a Note pod and have participants and speakers call back into the back up line.

- Ensure your speakers all have a phone headset as well as a computer headset/mic

• When planning to simulcast audio via teleconference and VoIP using universal integrated audio, I’ve seen two things happen – either the producer forgets to set up the integration ahead of time or the integration becomes unlinked to the room (usually due to gremlins running amok on the platform’s servers).  Linking or re-linking the universal audio integration takes at least 15 minutes once everyone is out of the room and the room is closed. So, if you’ve just logged in to your pre-conference and realize this has happened, you may not have time to kick everyone out, re-link it and wait. Therefore, simply have your speakers call into the phone line and turn on their computer mics – speaking into both at the same time will accomplish the simulcast.

- Confirm that your speakers all have a cell phone available

• While cell phones are not preferred, they can be invaluable as a backup phone for your speaker if he or she loses their phone service at their location. Just be sure their cell phone is silenced while it’s standing by. Some speakers will proactively call in with their cell phone and just put it on mute so they don’t have to waste time dialing in during the event if they find they need it.

- Ask your speakers to have a second computer available during the event

• It’s a best practice for your main speaker(s) to have two computers up and running and logged into the webinar room if possible. That way if their main computer crashes or freezes, they can just move over to the second computer and continue on as if nothing has happened.

- Remind your speaker(s) to have a hard copy of their slides available

• In the case that your speaker does not have two computers available, or their internet goes down and renders both computers unusable, a hard copy of their slides will allow them to continue giving the presentation by simply saying ‘next slide please’ when they need a slide change – this will cue the host or moderator to move the slides forward on behalf of the speaker. This has happened several times to some of my most experienced presenters and no one in the audience noticed anything except the addition of the audio cue ‘next slide please’.

- Prep your team and speakers on your emergency plan and ask them to remain calm

• Make sure your team and your speakers understand what the emergency plan is and what steps they should take, or you will take, in each scenario. If you have a Plan B, I always ask my speakers and team not to acknowledge the issue we are having if the issue is not impacting the audience. Many times the audience won’t even notice the issue as you seamlessly switch to Plan B behind the scenes. Why bring their attention to it if you don’t have to?

- Have a plan for emergency visual and audio communication with your audience

• If you run into an emergency that will cause a delay in visual or audio communication and the issue is obvious to your audience, have a plan. For instance, if your main audio line goes out and everyone has to call back in this will cause an interruption and delay. In this case I suggest bringing in a Note pod or Chat pod to visually communicate with your audience about what is happening and what steps they should take.  You could also have a game or a poll or a chat exercise planned for the audience to interact with while they wait for the webinar to continue. If audio is gone, visual interaction is important so they don’t feel alone and disconnected. If visual communication is gone, jump in with an audio announcement (anyone from the team can do this).  It only takes 3-5 seconds of silence and lack of interaction in a virtual setting to start losing your audience as they log off.

- Stop apologizing

• Finally, I ask my presenters not to apologize for any technical difficulties over and over and over.  It’s appropriate, if needed, to briefly acknowledge the issue, communicate any changes the audience needs to make, apologize and MOVE ON. There is no need to continuously bring up the technical problem again and again once everything has been resolved. The audience has forgotten about it. In addition, any members of the audience that arrive after the emergency has occurred will have no idea what you are talking about.  More importantly, you don’t want to remind everyone about the negative moment at the closing of your event during your wrap up – close out the webinar on a positive note and your audience will remember all the great content and not the blip.

Written by: Shelby Britton

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A blog posting by Roger Courville, The Virtual Presenter
Based on the book The Unbreakable Rules of Marketing: 9 1/2 Ways to Get People to Love You by Cathey Armillas

I could not help sharing Roger’s inspiration on webinar best practices that he received from the above mentioned book by Cathey Armillas. After reading the book The Unbreakable Rules of Marketing, Roger has applied these principles to webinars.

From his blog:

The webinar angle? Too often webinars and webcasts are used as publishing platforms which, while not wrong, often miss out on the opportunity to use them to “get people to love us.”

Visit his blog site to find out more about the following unbreakable rules as they relate to producing webinars that will get people to love you:

• Consistency beats ability
• Perception is reality
• Be creative or die
• The medium is not the message
• Work hard to keep it simple
• Give love to get love
• Emotions rule the world
• Go big or go home
• Everything is marketing
• Know the rules, and know when to break them

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Hopefully a warning bell is going off in your head right now. Unfortunately, I often run into speakers and webinar producers that treat large webinars with hundreds of attendees like a small internal company meeting.  I can’t blame them really. If your technology platform has lots of cool features, it’s tempting to use them all, and sometimes all at once – kind of like piling your ice cream sundae with every delicious topping available at the condiment counter. Unfortunately, that typically leads to a terrible stomach ache.

While you can get away with cool, and very appropriate, features like multiple live streaming webcams and screen sharing in your team meeting of 10 staffers, the 500 attendees in your webinar likely will not have the same pleasant experience.

Here are 6 tips on how to have an engaging and interactive webinar without hoarding bandwidth and frustrating your attendees.

-  Trade in the live webcam for a nice headshot of your speaker

• Streaming webcams are bandwidth hogs. Simply upload a jpg picture of your speaker into a Share pod. Besides, many speakers are camera shy or do not know how to perform for the ‘tv’ – some speakers tend to look down at their notes the majority of the time instead of into the camera or they like to move around the room (neither translates well on camera).

- Upload your PPT slide deck or PDF into the room instead of screen sharing

• Using a Share pod to upload your PPT or PDF into the room will reduce bandwidth stress and ensure everyone is on the same page as a delay with screen share can occur for some attendees.

- Consider using Q&A instead of Open Chat

• Using the moderated Q&A option reduces the volume of chat and therefore the bandwidth strain. In addition, open chat in large webinars can distract from the content both visually (with hundreds of chats flying by on the screen) and mentally (taking up mindshare). Not to mention that the audience will sometimes hijack your event and start having their own conversations with each other! However, open chat is a great interactive tool for gathering feedback, brainstorming or asking an open-ended question. For this, it is recommended you bring the Open Chat into the participant area and cover the Q&A until the exercise is over and then take it away.

- Disable raise hands option

• Unless you have a very specific reason for using this feature during your webinar, we recommend you disable this feature for the duration of your event. Several other emoticons will remain at your disposal throughout the event, such as agree or disagree.

- Close polls when you’re done

• Polling is a great interactive feature that is perfect for a webinar setting. To ensure your polls don’t continue eating up bandwidth when you are done collecting answers, be sure to close the poll as this will keep the poll(s) from continuing to use up bandwidth.

- Move the Attendee pod into the Presenter Only Area

• Use this backstage option to move the Attendee pod into the POA. This not only keeps the attendee list private while allowing the hosts and presenters to view and manage the Attendee pod, but also conserves bandwidth and cpu load.

As you prepare for your next webinar, keep your audience size in mind while you come up with creative ways to engage your audience in a bandwidth neutral way.

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Creating a fun and NOISY lobby for your webinar attendees to ‘sit’ in while they wait for your webinar to begin will reduce the panic and allow your attendees to relax and eagerly await your presentation.

First, create a unique layout that you’ll use as your webinar lobby when you open your room. Labeling it ‘Lobby’ makes it easy to find later. Then start adding fun and interesting elements to it.

Here are some ideas:

- Play music in your lobby

• Simply upload an MP3 into a Share pod just as you would do with a PPT. You’ll want to make sure it’s long enough (for example, if you typically open your webinar room to attendees 15 minutes prior to the event start time, you’ll want your music to be 15 minutes long – or just pay attention and press play again when the music runs out). Don’t forget to keep music royalty laws in mind – check with your legal department if you are unsure about what songs you can play.

- Upload a welcome slide(s)

• Use a Share pod to upload one slide with the title and associated image for your webinar or create a deck of rotating slides. Use Adobe Presenter to set a welcome lobby slide deck to rotate and loop continuously.  This deck could include the title side, a sponsor(s) slide, announcements, instructions, etc – the sky is the limit!

- Add instructions on how to join the audio portion of the conference

• Using a simple Note pod to let attendees know how they can join the audio portion of your webinar should do the trick.

- Include a Q&A pod

• A Q&A pod will allow attendees to submit technical questions as needed while they get ready for the event to begin. Re-labeling it Technical Questions will help attendees understand where they can go to receive help (especially if you have a Chat pod open for another reason). Just remember to re-label it when you switch layouts if you have the Q&A pod in other layouts for a different purpose.

- Provide an open Chat pod

• A Chat pod that allows for free flowing conversation among the attendees is a great way to break the ice before the event beings, warm up the audience for interaction and let everyone know they are not alone in the virtual world. Kicking things off with a simple question like ‘what is the weather like where you are?’ or ‘tell us where you are joining us from’ is a nice way to get the audience started.

- Consider incorporating a custom pod or game

• There are several games and custom pods available on the Adobe Connect Extensions page that you can download for free and upload into your room using a Share pod. In particular, there is a countdown timer you might consider that visually indicates how much time is left before you begin. Keep bandwidth and expected audience size in mind before selecting this option.

- Display your company logo

• Upload your company logo (jpg or png) into a Share pod and place it somewhere on your layout. Or perhaps you’d like to display a sponsor or partner logo.

- Make the slides or handouts available for download

• Use a File Share pod to make your slides or a handout available for attendees to download prior to the event. This is useful for those attendees that would like to follow along with the speaker and take notes.

Be creative and have fun with your Lobby.  You will appreciate the experience as much as your attendees! I promise.

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There is no such thing as an instant webinar.

In the age of instant gratification and technology, I have run across many a webinar producer that has made the mistake of assuming their webinar technology platform will read their mind, set itself up according to their requirements, and instantly produce a flawless event to a virtual audience of hundreds or thousands.

This is a dangerous assumption.

A mission critical event to a large audience should never be left to the last minute. For example, a producer of a live in-person event will visit the physical event venue for a site inspection in advance of the event and then show up early for the event to make sure everything is correctly set up according to specifications before the event begins.

The same is true with a virtual event.

At a minimum a virtual event producer should spend time in the virtual room setting it up ahead of time, hold a rehearsal with all speakers, moderators and hosts, and, finally, build in a 30 minute pre-conference for speakers and hosts immediately prior to the event.

Take some time to avoid virtual event disasters.

8 Reasons to Prepare, ‘Site Inspect’ and Rehearse your Virtual Event

- Test audio integration

• There are many audio options for your webinar, including universal audio integration. You can simulcast both the phone audio conference and VoIP, use the phone only, or use VoIP only. The universal integration needs to be done well in advance of the event. For audio options and integration how-to tips, please see.

- Check the speaker’s audio quality

• There are many things that can reduce audio quality. Be sure to have all speakers use the exact same equipment during the rehearsal as they will use during the live event – this includes the computer and the actual phone or headset. Wireless is not recommended for either computer or phone and, of course, using a speakerphone is a big no-no.

- Ensure speaker understands how to use the platform

• If your speaker is new to the particular webinar platform technology you are using, take the time to give him a tutorial, even if he is experienced at webinars in general. Just like it’s always awkward to drive someone else’s car, it can be equally awkward finding all the right buttons to push in a webinar room that is unfamiliar.

- Upload and flip through all slides

• Uploading slides 15 minutes prior to your event is risky to say the least (especially if it’s a big file that may take some time to upload). Take the time to upload them during the rehearsal and flip through all of them to check for any misaligned text or images. Make any necessary changes to the deck and re-upload them before the pre-conference and re-check.

- Confirm all parties know how to get to your event

• The rehearsal will give all your speakers, hosts and moderators a chance to ‘find’ the location – locating their login info, practice logging in, download the presenter add-in, and overcome any other technical issues related to browsers, etc. The last thing you need on the day-of is a missing speaker!

- Review the flow of the event and room set up

• Prepare any polls, chats, quizzes or multiple slide decks you’ll be using ahead of time using the layout functionally and arrange the layouts in order of your agenda. This will ensure a smooth flow and avoid having to ‘fish’ for polls during the live event.

- Prep your backstage and familiarize all hosts, speakers and moderators with it

• Your Presenter Only Area is your private backstage area for hosts and presenters. This is a great place for the Attendee pod, a Presenter chat (so you can coordinate amongst yourselves without interrupting the event flow), the Presenter view of the Q&A pod and any notes or reminders you might have for your speakers or moderators. Remind your speakers to keep an eye on the backstage in case you need to communicate with them while they are presenting.

- Have an emergency plan and communicate it to all hosts, speakers and moderators

• Virtual events are subject to things going wrong just like physical events. Think through what you will do if… your audio conferencing provider experiences an outage… if your speaker’s computer crashes… if your speaker accidently hangs up on herself… if you lose your internet connection… etc, etc. And, yes, with 7 years of experience running upwards of 30 webinars a quarter, I have run into all of these and more!

So, don’t leave the details of producing your mission critical virtual event to the last 15 minutes, because treating webinars casually will get you into big trouble.

Good luck and may your next webinar run flawlessly!