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.