ReadyTalk is excited to announce the availability of  ReadyTalk Mobile app  for Apple iPad, now available for free download on the App Store.

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).

At ReadyTalk, as you would hopefully expect, there are quite a few experts around our hallways that know how to put on the best webinar possible. We’ve had some great posts already in 2012, so I thought, time for a recap!  Take a look at some of the great tips we have already provided, and surely, there will more to come.

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.

Today we are excited to announce the beta of our pre-recorded video playback feature. Pre-recorded video playback gives your trainings, sales demos, and webinars a more engaging, personal feel by incorporating short video clips into the live presentation. Your meetings will never be the same and your participants will thank you for incorporating rich video content in your presentation. With pre-recorded video playback, you can:

• 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.

The world of conferencing continues to change. First, it was bringing small groups of employees across various office locations together on the phone, followed by the need for web conferencing to show others what you were working on.  Now, those groups are no longer small, or limited to your own organization.  The use of audio and web conferencing has grown to much more than a way to cut down on costs, but as a successful way to generate leads through webinars, or train users on your product.  The use cases seem endless, and maybe even complex.  But something that should not be a brainteaser? Pricing.

ReadyTalk understands that our customers want to concentrate on the subject of their meetings, or content of their webinars, instead of the possibility of the unpredictable costs of their audio and web conferencing use.  We want to provide the highest quality, service and reliability, as part of our pricing.  With that expectation in mind, we introduce our five new web and audio subscriptions:

• Web Meeting Pro (25, 150)
• Webinar (500, 1000, 3000)

What’s unique about these? High-quality audio, included with every package.

The Web Meeting Pro subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing and a bundle of included toll and toll-free domestic audio minutes, at a flat monthly fee.

The Webinar subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing AND unlimited Broadcast Audio, enabling participants to stream high-quality audio through their computer speakers. Again, for a flat monthly fee.

So how do you know which subscription is right for you, or your company?

Do you conduct a fair amount of smaller, internal meetings or  present projects to external clients and vendors where high-quality audio is critical?  Then the Web Meeting Pro options are right up your alley.

Are you managing larger webinars for lead generation, online training, etc, more than once a month?  The Webinar subscription options can give you the cost-effective solution you are looking for.

Interested in learning more?  Contact us today to find out more about our new subscription plans!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to event services and our 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.

In a previous life, I was the director of marketing at a small IT analyst firm in Boulder, CO. A large percentage of our leads came from webinars that highlighted our research studies and positioned our analysts as thought leaders. We also hosted dozens of webinars each year to help our technology vendor clients meet their own lead generation goals. On average, my small team of three was running two webinars a week in addition to handling all of the other marketing activities for the firm (PPC campaigns, email newsletters, PR, website, trade shows, partner marketing, report production, etc., etc., etc.).

As I look back, one of the things we dreaded most was wrapping up after each webinar – particularly the time-consuming task of getting registration and attendance data out of our webinar platform and into our CRM system. This painful process involved waiting for our webinar vendor to finalize the attendance report, downloading it as a .csv file, manually de-dupping the data and then uploading the clean data into our CRM. Depending on the size of the event, this work could take 2-3 hours – both numbing our minds and delaying time-sensitive sales follow-up. What a headache!

These memories were fresh in my mind when I joined the ReadyTalk product marketing team and learned that my first assignment was to define an integration between ReadyTalk and salesforce.com. Now, two years (and countless customer conversations) later, I’m excited to be heading to Dreamforce to launch ReadyTalk for Salesforce.

Designed to help marketers and trainers skip the tedious spreadsheet work, ReadyTalk for Salesforce streamlines once-manual processes by automatically capturing registration and attendance data in salesforce.com. The application even makes it easy to create new Lead records for registrants and attendees not found in salesforce.com.



As an added benefit, ReadyTalk for Salesforce increases access to important webinar and training programs by allowing sales and others in the organization to:

• See a summary of which sessions their prospects and customers are involved
• Quickly send webinar or training invitations right from the Lead or Contact record

So far, we’ve had great feedback on the application from our early access testers.. If you want to see it in action for yourself, register for an upcoming live demo or come see us at Dreamforce next week (Booth #1021). Ready to get started? Install the free ReadyTalk for Salesforce application from the AppExchange now.

Here’s to marketers and trainers spending their time doing what they do best instead of manually schlepping data back and forth between systems that can’t talk to one another!

As Director of Product Marketing, Anita is focused on talking to customers about their needs and translating these into priorities for the ReadyTalk product roadmap. Before joining ReadyTalk, she gained first-hand experience with the challenges of running a webinar program while serving as director of marketing at an IT analyst firm. When she’s not thinking about conferencing, she likes to do yoga and spend time with her dogs.