Tips for Running a Successful Web Seminar

With travel budgets tight and the need for lead generation more pressing than ever, I expect that this year we'll see more interest in Web seminars than ever before.

In the late 90's, I worked for one of the first Web conferencing companies, so I have over a decade's experience seeing what works and what doesn't in Web seminars.

Here are tips I've picked up over the years. Feel free to comment and add your own.

1. Inform, Don't Sell (Well, Don't Sell Too Much).

People attend Web seminars to learn something: news about market trends, tips for using a software program, best practices for their profession—something that's genuinely useful. They might assume that you're going to do some selling in the course of your presentation, but if you lay on the sales pitch too heavily, you'll turn off your audience. And they'll show it by hanging and disconnecting from the session.

If you're presenting genuinely interesting information is a compelling way, you'll lose only a few audience members in the course of a 30-60 minute presentation. If you're dropping audience members every few minutes, it's time for you to go back and rethink what you're presenting and how.

2. To Inform, Present New Information That's Not Readily Accessible.

This is where guest speakers come in. Opening your Web seminar with a 20-minute presentation by an analyst or expert sharing new research is a great way to drive up registrations and keep your audience engaged.

The other advantage to guest speakers is that they often have their own mail lists and promotional materials, which can dramatically bolster the size of your audience.

3. Keep the Format Lively and Varied.

Studies show that audience members begin to lose interest in a presentation after hearing only one voice talk for seven minutes, so never let one person talk for more than five or six minutes straight. Be sure to have at least two people in the seminar, even if one is a moderator who only introduces the main speaker, then interjects comments and questions from time to time.

Some of my most highly rated seminars followed the format of a radio talk show: a conversational tone, real back-and-forth dialog, a little humor. (After all, what would you want to listen to for 45 minutes in your office? A dry presentation of a script or two people really engaged in conversation?)

Here's a format that's worked well for several of my clients:

• 1-2 minute introduction and overview by moderator
  
• 20-30 minute presentation by guest speaker with comments and interjections by moderator or another speaker
  
• 10-15 minute product and service overview by sponsoring company; if the company is promoting software, a live demo is worth a thousands words of narration
  
• 5-15 minutes open Q&A with audience members
  
• 1 minute close by moderator; if the seminar is part of a series, point audience members to a Web page listing other events
  

4. Give Audience Members a Chance to Ask Questions.

Whether they type questions into a Q&A feature of your Web conferencing software or ask questions at the end, do give audience members a chance to ask questions, express doubts, and dive deeper into the subject matter.

5. Give Audience Members Extra Time to Get the Software Started.

Inevitably you'll have audience members racing to join your event after getting out of a meeting or coming back from lunch. Some of them won't have downloaded or tried out the seminar software ahead of time. Give them a few minutes to get through the download and start-up process. Greet your audience a few minutes before the event, and then every minute or so let them know that you're going to start a few minutes after the hour to give everyone a chance to join the event.

6. Always Let Audience Members Know They've Come to the Right Place, and Where to Go for More Information.

You don't want audience members wondering if they've come to the right place when they connect to your seminar. Fifteen minutes before the seminar starts, post a welcoming slide identifying the title and time of the event, along with contact information for technical support or questions.

In the final moments of the seminar, display a slide or Web page offering phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs where people can get more information or contact the presenters.

7. Avoid Interruptions.

Always mute the audience's phone lines during the main presentation. Otherwise, you'll have some audience members conducting side conversations in their offices, ignoring your requests to mute their lines, and turning your carefully planned event into a cacophonous jumble. That ping-ping-ping sound is the phone system letting you know that other audience members have lost patience and are hanging up.

So keep the audience phone lines quiet until the Q&A session, and do everything possible to keep attention focused on the presentation itself.

By the way, be wary of those free conference call services. I've found them to be unreliable. One of them—a popular, free service used by many IT companies—disconnected our main guest speaker, just as he was beginning his presentation. It took him several minutes to rejoin the seminar. The other speakers and I were able to cover for him, but it was nerve-wracking (and potentially a waste of a speaking fee).

8. Rehearse. A Lot.

I can't stress this enough. I recommend at least three complete run-throughs of any seminar. In the course of rehearsals, you'll discover that the flow of your presentation can be improved, that some material is redundant, and that other material is cryptic. Especially if you have two or more speakers, you'll want to rehearse transitions from one section to another.

I ran a Web seminar series for a client last summer. We had different guest speakers every week for several weeks in a row. (We had just launched the company, and we wanted to make a splash.) We rehearsed daily, sometimes twice daily. Everyone agreed that these rehearsals dramatically improved the quality of our presentations. They also gave us an opportunity to get to know our new business partners and to better understand how they presented their offerings to customers.

That's my list. What's on yours? Post a comment, and let me know.

Green IT: Now More than Ever

"Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. . . . We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. . . . All this we can do. All this we will do."

— President Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

In yesterday's historic inaugural speech, President Obama set a new direction for America, or perhaps I should say he returned America to its true direction—a course where progress is achieved through responsibility, trust, compassion, creativity, and hard work.

Like many people, I was pleased to hear Obama's pledge to restore science to its rightful place. For the past eight years, the federal government has rejected science and its demonstrable truths for ideological talking points and purblind dreams of grandeur. One of the areas where the administration's suppression of science has been most publicized and most perilous is global warming. The administration has stalled on policy and questioned what no longer bears questioning.

If you would like a vivid reminder of just how compelling the evidence is, how fraught the dangers to human society and natural habits, and how galling governmental inaction has been, I strongly recommend a short, highly readable book written a few years ago by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert: Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

The title might strike you as alarmist, but by the time you're done reading this book, I suspect you'll be alarmed—and frustrated, too, by our country's inaction.

As the phrase "field notes" suggests, Kolbert reports on research being conducted in the field: in Alaska, Greenland, England, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And the findings of this research are damning:

• The earth is now warmer than it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
  
• Since 1979, the perennial sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by roughly 250 million acres, an area roughly "the size of New York, Georgia, and Texas combined." The loss of this ice reduces the earth's ability to reflect sunlight; instead of reflecting light, the exposed seas absorb sunlight's energy, further heating the planet and melting more ice.
  
• After studying satellite data, James Hansen, a NASA official, has warned that if greenhouse gases aren't controlled, the Greenland ice sheet could melt, potentially, in time, raising sea levels 23 feet.
  
• Nineteen biologists from around the world studied the effect of global warming on eleven hundred species of plants and animals. If the species proved to be mobile, 15 percent of them would be "committed to extinction." If the species were stationary, the extinction rate rose to 37 percent.
  
• Heavy rainfall is expected to intensify in some of the most densely populated areas on the planet, such as the Mississippi Delta and the Thames basin. By 2080, England will likely be experiencing so-called century floods every few years.
  

The data goes on and on. The consensus among the scientific community is, for all intents and purposes, universal. The earth is heating up, the heating process has acquired a momentum of its own and will continue for decades, even if we were to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases immediately. But we're not curtailing them, and the Bush Administration had no interest in doing so.

I recently read the Harmon translation of Kafka's The Castle, and the evasiveness and circularity of Bush administration officials in their interview with Kolbert reminded me of scenes out of Kafka, minus the droll humor.

"[Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs] Dobriansky began by assuring me that despite how it might appear, the Bush administration took the issue of climate change 'very seriously.' . . . At one point, I asked the undersecretary if there were any circumstances under which the administration would accede to mandatory caps on emissions. 'Our approach has been predicated on: we act, we learn, we act again,' she said. In response to a question about how urgent the problem of stabilizing emission was, she replied, 'We act, we learn, we act again,' and in response to a question about what would constitute a 'dangerous' level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, she said, 'Forgive me, I'm going to repeat myself: we act, we learn, we act again.'"

I take it back: I've been unfair to Kafka's characters. Their evasions are far richer and more subtle than anything offered by Dobriansky and other Bush-era flacks.

But here's the thing: what are you doing about global warming in your business? Don't fall into the trap of "I read, I groan, I read again." Take action. Make green IT and green practices part of your strategic plan this year.

And if you need motivation—if you want a good jolt of pursued-by-a-grizzly-bear variety adrenalin for your and your staff—buy and read Kolbert's excellent book. It's available from Amazon, Powell's, and probably your local independent bookseller, as well.

Questions Worth Asking at the Beginning of the Year

Strategic Planning

1. Has my company identified 6-10 major objectives for the year and identified 3-6 supporting milestones for each objective? (For more about this, click here.)
   
2. Has this list of objectives and milestones been broadly communicated throughout the company?
3. Are directors and managers using this information to drive their departmental planning and budgets?

Product and Services Development

1. Has my company identified the user experiences that our products and services should provide?
2. Have these experiences formed the basis for development of products, including the identification of features and benefits?
3. Does my company have a process in place for assessing customer experiences and ensuring they meet our goals?

Strategic Communications and Customer Management

1. Does my company have up-to-date messaging guidelines available for all relevant parties, including not only executives, marketers, and sales people, but also all the other employees who might be interacting with customers and the public through forums and other social media?
2. Does my company have a systematic approach for monitoring social media interactions and responding promptly to situations that arise in these ad hoc communications channels?
3. Does my company have IT systems in place to integrate outbound communications with CRM and other internal IT systems?