We  added an additional metric to the playback recording report in Conference Center that displays the amount of time a participant watches a webinar recording.

So what does this new metric help you with?

Whether you’re using webinars for lead generation and qualification, online training and certification, or sales demonstrations, tracking how long a participant views your content can help with the following:

• Gaining more visibility into the effectiveness of your webinar
• Measure the level of audience engagement during your recordings and customize your follow-up based on how long they viewed it
• Better prioritize lead scoring and lead follow-up within your marketing automation platform

What are some other ways that you measure the effectiveness of your webinars and keep your audience engaged?

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the pre- and post-meeting details of our clients’ upcoming webinars. Prior to joining in ReadyTalk in 2011, Beth worked as an account manager for a mobile payments start-up and as a product manager for the prepaid gift card program at First Data. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, practice her cooking skills, and run.

• Upload and store up to 10 video clips to your access code.
• Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content.
• Record your meeting with video clip content included.

We think video clip playback is a great new feature that will enable you to create engaging and memorable presentations. We’ve seen it used in many successful situations from a professionally produced product commercial, to a short CEO update in an all company meeting. This feature improves the ROI of your professionally produced content by allowing you to re purpose it to a live audience and through the recordings you generate. The playback experience for participants and presenters is exceptional as there is very minimal buffering. This means that your participants will be seeing the videos you push to them in real time creating a seamless viewing experience.

For more information on this feature please or to find out how to get started please check out our How-To guide. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166 or leave your feedback in the comments below. 

Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.

With the release of ReadyTalk Mobile, your audience can quickly and easily join and fully participate in your webinar, training session or online meeting directly from their Apple iPad, allowing you to engage your audience on the go and allowing meeting participation to be truly remote.

Participants will be able to:

• Attend an online meeting, webinar or training session on the go – at no cost to the chairperson or the participant.
• Join meetings quickly by email invitation or entering the chairperson’s access code.
• View everything the presenter shares, including slides, applications, annotations and video clips.
• Interact with the presenter via live text chat.
• Respond to poll questions and view real-time results.
• Listen to integrated one-way audio* on the iPad or join via phone.
• Pinch-to-zoom for a closer look at the presented content.
• Swap between portrait and landscape screen orientation.
• Multi-task without missing a beat with notification alerts.

To learn more about this exciting release, head to our ReadyTalk Mobile for iPad section.   Want to get started participating in meetings immediately?  Download ReadyTalk Mobile for iPad from the App Store right now.

Brandon Hess works at ReadyTalk as a Product Marketing Manager.  Starting his initial career as a web designer, Brandon eventually decided that the web could design itself just fine and that his true interest was in marketing. Following his passion through the agency, startup and newspaper industries, he eventually found his way home inside the wonderful walls of ReadyTalk.  In his free time, he enjoys debating why Lord of the Rings is superior to Harry Potter, collecting all things Batman and answering questions about his height (6’8″ by the way).

Besides being easy-to-use and cost-effective, our integration with iReach by PR Newswire offers several benefits:

• Broader (but targeted!) promotion
  • Automatically promote your webinar on PRNewswire.com and make it findable by search & news engines
  • Ability to target the most relevant audiences when PR Newswire tags your releases for the right industries, subjects and geographies
  • Increase your website visibility
    • Drive more visitors  to your site by including back links in your release
  • Extend the ROI of your webinar
    • Your press release is hosted forever with PR Newswire, which includes a search-friendly permalink URL

ReadyTalk customers have access to two iReach packages at special introductory pricing:

• SearchReach: Promote your webinar online and within search engines for $99 per release (a $30 savings!)
• WebReach: Optimize your press release with an image and drive more traffic to your site for $249 per release (a $50 savings)

And, finally, how do you get started?

Log-in to Conference Center to schedule your upcoming webinar.  After filling in your meeting details in step 1, go to the ‘Promotion Tools’ section in step 2.

Click on ‘Send a Press Release’ and a new browser window will open to the ReadyTalk iReach^TM website.

Choose which option you would like to purchase on Step 1 (SearchReach or WebReach).

You will be taken to Step 2 to start creating the content and details of your press release.  For your convenience, the default meeting registration link will automatically be included in the press release body section, along with the following standard language (don’t worry, it’s editable!)

Please click on the following link to register for the upcoming webinar: Meeting Registration Link

Continue through the remaining steps (preview, pay, release!) to complete the process and promote your upcoming webinar to a broader (but targeted) audience.

A few tips:

• Remember to finish setting up your webinar in Conference Center (invitations, registration form, emails, survey, social media promotion, etc)
• Measure the effectiveness of using the iReach platform by creating a unique campaign url and include it in the press release body. **Remember, the default meeting registration link will be automatically populated, so make sure to swap it out!

Please share any feedback, and results, you have on your experience. We love hearing from our customers!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

But what happens if a participant leaves the webinar early, or if the chairperson doesn’t immediately end the meeting?  In the past, you may have missed the opportunity to get valuable feedback.  Now, you can include a link to the post-event survey in your follow-up email to anyone that attended the meeting, but didn’t fill out the survey.

Check out this new functionality:

• How to Include the Post-Meeting Survey Link in Post-Meeting Email
  • By default, the functionality is enabled and is only included in the Post-Meeting Email to Attendees who have not completed the survey. This will avoid duplicate responses from your participants.

• If the box is checked to include the post-meeting survey link, the text and button highlighted below for the post-meeting survey link will always display in the preview. However, if an attendee already completed the survey prior the post-meeting email being sent, the text and button will not be included.

• Do you want to include a custom survey link instead?
  • If you choose to send attendees to a custom survey link, the option to include a post-meeting survey link in the post-meeting email is automatically disabled and no longer available.

Edit Post-Meeting Survey Page

Edit Post-Meeting Email to Attendees

Simone, our in-house marketing demand generation manager recently interviewed Wayne Turmal, CEO of Great Web Meetings, how to take your webinar series to the next level.  What were some of the key takeaways?

• Careful execution is key. Plan, plan, PLAN!
• Be familiar with the various tools available for registration, audience engagement, ecommerce, etc. Each of these tools contribute greatly to enhancing your brand, and, of course, lead generation

Brandon, a product marketing manager like me, with a deep respect for all things Batman, kicked off a series on making your PowerPoint presentation more impactful. The most important goal of any PowerPoint presentation should be to get your key message across, in a visually attractive way. Here are some best practices:

• Use a relevant background image that is clean and speaks to your message
• Don’t over-inform: Keep your text simple and to-the-point

Did I mention it’s a series? Make sure to check back in soon for more!

Our resident training expert, Shawn, recently blogged about how to Engage your Audience, with one very important tip: Know your Stuff, and practice the mantra “Learn it, Live it, Love it!”

• Know your topic backwards and forwards….don’t let your audience stump you with outlying questions!
• Practice makes perfect: Talk about your material with peers, colleagues, friends….anyone that will listen!  And, when putting on a webinar, practice using the software!
• Have enthusiasm! Or at least fake it.  If you like your material that will naturally engage your audience.

Finally, a blog from Anita, the Director of Product Marketing, on how to use social media to promote your webinars, and more importantly, deliver results.  She recently joined Deb Evans of Social Geek Radio to talk about ReadyTalk’s social media tools, like our participant sharing capabilities and how to use our recording and playback tools to extend the ROI of your webinar.

What other best practices and tips can we discuss in our upcoming blogs? Share your ideas with us!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

Last week, I had a great chat on this topic with Deb Evans on Social Geek Radio and ReadyTalk’s own Beth Toeniskoetter blogged on Promoting Your Webinar Through Social Media.  To keep the conversation going, I wanted to share some of the ways ReadyTalk helps marketers start using social media to promote webinars as well as a recent success story.

Once you’ve scheduled a webinar, we make it super easy for you to promote it (along with a link to the registration page) to your connections, fans, and followers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

We also help you leverage the social networks of your audience to drive more leads. A single click adds social media sharing capabilities to your webinar registration page and event emails, so it’s convenient for your audience to help promote your event to their colleagues and peers.

And, after the event, we give you tools to help you continue to drive ROI from your webinar recording. With a few clicks, you can embed the recording on Facebook and your corporate website or blog and share a link to the playback with your Twitter followers.

We’ve found that all of these tools can have a real impact on results!  ReadyTalk customer Trada – experts on crowd-sourced online advertising – has incorporated social media into pre-, during- and post-webinar activities. Anna Sawyer, of Trada, recently blogged about their experience.

Are you using social media to promote webinars? If so, how has it impacted your webinar program?

I’m “jump out of my seat” excited to share with the 5 Marketing Forces that I’ve developed over the years and implemented in over 50 companies through Market Creation Group’s strategy process.

Here’s why you should be excited too!  During Friday’s webinar, you will:

1. Learn about the Five Forces of B2B marketing that provide you with a new lens to marketing success/successfully defend your budget and find the areas to invest more based on results
2. Learn how the volume and velocity of demand generation play in ensuring a successful transition to the sales team
3. Understand the right type of social media program you’ll need based on which marketing “force” is most needed
4. See a new way to have a webinar presented with interactive drawing/sketch work done in real-time

During this presentation, I will be unfolding how the 5 Marketing Forces (Awareness, Familiarity, Consideration, Purchase and Experience) are used to create a more focused marketing program based on what is working or what is not working within most marketing programs.  While we explore the 5 Marketing Forces, we’ll also discuss how well or not well your sales program is going and where marketing can put significantly more effort to best align with sales to drive more results.  Whether we look at the Volume/Velocity ratio of leads, the ways to identify your brand recognition and how it impacts demand generation needs, or you’re just fighting to the death for your budget and want to wow people into more funding, we’ve got some new stuff you’ll love to hear about!

I’m also going to take a good look at they types of social media programs you may want to have in place based on the weakest areas of your marketing program.

Now you can see why I’m super-excited about my February 3rd AMA webinar. Want to join me? Register now!

Marketers are always looking for the next best way to create buzz around their product and their brand with the right audience.  There are so many promotional outlets in which to market your content, especially on the internet; webinars tend to bubble to the top due to the likelihood of a lower investment and higher ROI.  Over the past few years, many companies have put significant effort into building their following through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  Each of these has a different flavor of audiences, including what topics are relevant and which will resonate. Despite the differences, these channels can be a great way to promote your upcoming webinar.

The first step is using social media to get the word out about your upcoming event. After coming up with a catchy title, interesting content, and engaging speakers, you have to get people to care…and then, register!  Posting your event to your company’s various networks gets you there, partly; but allowing your registrants to post to their networks snowballs your efforts even further.

The next step, and probably even more important than the first: tracking the effectiveness of each social media outlet! Which site gets you the most traction, the most bang for your buck?  And, even more so, do you have a few ‘power users’ that are consistently promoting your events, and bringing in a significant number of registrants? If so, you probably want to keep inviting these types of people to your events!

So the moral of the story? Keep up with social networking, yours and your followers…it pays off!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

• Upload pre-recorded video clips to your access code
• Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content
• Record your meeting with the pre-recorded video content included

To sign up for beta access to pre-recorded video playback please fill out this form. You will receive an email within 1 business day providing you with instructions on how to get started.

Currently the process for uploading and playing back your pre-recorded video clip is a 4 step process (see diagram below). For more information please be sure to view the recorded demo, the Quick Start Guide, and the Best Practices and Known Issues documentation to gain valuable tips and tricks on how to use pre-recorded video playback in your meetings. When this feature becomes generally available (first half of 2012), the process for uploading and playing back your videos in the live presentation will be very similar to uploading and inserting slides into the ReadyTalk Conference Controls.

We’d love to hear about your experience with pre-recorded video in the feedback form or in the comments below. Tell us how the feature is working, if you’re experiencing any issues, or if you have any specific feature requests. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166.

Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.