A new and improved online request form for operator-assisted services! How does this benefit you (and the ReadyTalk Events Team a bit too?)

• Requesting a Gold or Platinum Webinar package? Or operator-assisted audio?  Now there is a single  form for all your Event Services needs
• A step-by-step and user-friendly process that lets you know what information we need for your upcoming event
• Easier navigation and increased accessibility so that finding the form is…easy

Need some reminders on what qualifies for an operator-assisted service?  Visit our products and services section.

Let’s talk specifics – specifically events: virtual, live, or even a hybrid of the two. Marketing departments are beginning to make significant changes in how they use events to market their products or services. With options in technology, budget and social innovations, there are numerous ways to produce (and market) events and conferences.  As marketers, we know how crucial the planning piece is, so if our strategy is outdated, our initiatives fall short and goals are not met. It is critical to be aware of the tactics that will be most effective in generating leads while being cost efficient. What is the best way to capture your target audience? Craft the right message and find the right venue to do so.

Recent industry research shows virtual events are cost-savers in a number of ways (time, reduced travel, logistics, etc.); however, they are starting to be used in conjunction with live events and tradeshows, rather than a replacement. Consider these benefits:

• Ability to attract larger audiences: virtual events can cover more people in more time zones
• Expansive content AND niche content:  Audiences at an event can be targeted and/or broad. The virtual piece enables the them to choose from multiple content tracks that might not all be accommodated at the physical event alone
• Access to keynote speakers: high-demand speakers can skip the travel and pre-record their presentations for the conference
• Monitoring attendee engagement: the ability to track audience activity (chat, downloads, survey questions) and time spent in each area make for enhanced, targeted follow-up; data that funneled into CRM systems for faster sales outreach
• On-Demand Archives: those that were unable to attend a particular session or had multiples that overlapped can now access any presentation that was recorded

If the landscape of events is evolving and you’re still stuck in your ways from years past (of producing or marketing to), you’re missing out on a big chunk of the pie. Join us for an upcoming webinar on January 25 to learn more about the current state of virtual events from both producer and attendee perspectives. Steve Nesich, Principal of MarketStrike, will discuss how these different event types are currently being used and measured. What you’ll learn may surprise you. See what’s working, what isn’t, and how this could impact your company’s marketing and sales strategy and performance for 2012 and beyond.

What have you seen to be successful in your event marketing strategy? Or what would you warn others against? How do you feel about combining both the live and virtual aspects? Share your feedback and questions below and we’ll ask Steve to address them during the webinar.

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.

• 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.

In the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of attention around Adobe’s decision to use HTML 5 for mobile applications and games rather than use Flash. This announcement has led to speculation on what this means for web conferencing vendors that use Flash. You can read Ken Molay’s thoughts on it, Is This The Death Knell For Flash-Based Web Conferencing?

At ReadyTalk, we’ve designed our service to support both Flash and Non-Flash computer environments.

Flash will be around for a long time
While Adobe is no longer using Flash for mobile devices, ReadyTalk expects Flash to be around for a long time on the desktop. Flash is currently installed on 98 percent of computers, making it the best option for easily accessing your Web conference.

For ReadyTalk, Flash allows participants to join a conference in under 10 seconds, so meetings start on-time and without hassle.

We have an Alternative Now
ReadyTalk understands the importance for everyone to be able to get into a webinar or online meeting. We currently offer alternatives to our Flash client that allows those without Flash to still join the meeting.  Whether Flash is around for 10 months or 10 years, ReadyTalk customers and their participants, will be able to start and join web conferences across many platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) and browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

ReadyTalk will continue to innovate on our audio and web conferencing services.  We will continue to support Flash as long as it delivers a great user experience.  Our mission is to create “WOW” for our customers through Service and Technology, and with that, you have our commitment to make sure that our service remains easy to use and accessible to all customers and participants.

What are your concerns surrounding Adobe’s announcement?

Scott King is the senior vice president of sales and marketing and a co-founder of ReadyTalk. When he’s not working, you can find Scott spending time with his family, running, or enjoying a nice glass of wine.

Sometimes application and desktop sharing may appear slow and blocky in the participant view of a web meeting. We have made significant advancements in the way we deliver this content to eliminate this blocky effect for participants. Instead of painting the screen in segments as the information becomes available, we now paint the screen all at once. Your participants will see the information you are showing instantaneously with  no blocky effect. This enhancement greatly improves your sales demos, webinars, or trainings where sharing rich desktop content is vital to the overall presentation.

Have you noticed these enhancements as a participant on a ReadyTalk web meeting? We encourage you to test it out for yourselves and let us know how it looks in the comments.

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.

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.

Like most companies, at ReadyTalk, we have a lot of meetings. We even have the dreaded “meeting about an upcoming meeting.”

A typical meeting in the marketing department means that most of the participants are in a conference room but one or two people are usually working from home; and there’s always a launch plan being discussed and it’s usually an Excel file.

Obviously, we use ReadyTalk’s web conferencing service to share the document and make changes. Even though we are all around a conference table with a projector in the room sometimes it’s just more convenient to participate on your own laptop. Because it’s an internal meeting and it’s not a structured meeting, we never decide whose access code we’re using until we’re all on the call. Once we decide, everyone jumps out to our website and logs in that way – it doesn’t take long but it’s always a distraction.

Not anymore.

Yesterday, the ReadyTalk Quick Launcher was released. It has a lot of great features, but my favorite is “Join a Meeting.” It makes joining a meeting so fast! Here’s how:

Right click on Quick Launcher icon in the task bar and select Join Web Meeting:

Enter the access code of the meeting you want to join:

And that’s it; you’re automatically connected to your meeting.

Internally, we’ve been using this feature for weeks while Quick Launcher was in Beta. It’s so easy to use and makes it simple to get an ad-hoc meeting going quickly. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can learn more in yesterday’s blog post. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, download it today.

If you’ve already downloaded Quick Launcher, we’d love to hear what you think.

• Start an On-Demand Meeting with a single click. The Quick Launcher stores your account credentials eliminating the need to type in any numbers or codes.

• View a list of Scheduled Meetings in Conference Center and choose the meeting you’d like to start.

• Skip all audio prompts with the Start Audio Meeting feature. The Quick Launcher will dial you and immediately connect you to your Audio Meeting. It remembers the last 10 numbers you dialed so you can quickly select connect to your cell phone, desk phone or conference phone. Check the option to “Launch web controls on connect” to open up the web meeting controls for managing your audio meeting or for running an On-Demand Web and Audio Meeting.

• Instantly create an email invite with Invite Others. All the login information is included giving your participants a quick and easy way to join your ReadyTalk meetings.

• Join a Web Meeting faster when you’re colleague hosts a ReadyTalk meeting. Simply enter the 7 digit access code of the On-Demand meeting you’d like to join and the Quick Launcher will drop you right into the meeting, bypassing the registration process.

The Quick Launcher can be opened by double clicking on the optional desktop icon, left or right clicking on the tray ico. The goal of this tool is to be available for you anytime you need it, but to not be in the way when you don’t.

The ReadyTalk Quick Launcher is available today free of charge and can be downloaded for Mac or Windows here: http://www.readytalk.com/support-training/downloads. If you have any questions about the Quick Launcher or are having any issues downloading please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166. As always, if you have feedback, feature enhancements, or questions give us a call at any time or leave them 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.

While we knew that marketers and trainers were tired of the hassle of getting webinar data into their CRM system, we were surprised by the great turnout at yesterday’s webinar on the value of integration. If you had a chance to join us, we hope you found the event worthwhile!

Many thanks to Helena Brito from Mandiant, Jill Myers from OverDrive, and Pat Buchanan and Dave Kornegay from SchoolDude.com for speaking on the event. Each of them shared fantastic insight into how the integration has made a difference in their business and responded to questions from our audience during a lively panel discussion.

Because we had so many great questions, we couldn’t get to them all during the live event. In fact, we had such a high volume of questions that answering them all would make this blog post painful to read.

So, here is my take on the top 5 and you can access a full transcript of the Q&A here. You can also sign-up for a demo and learn more about ReadyTalk for Salesforce here.

1 – Q. How does sales use webinar information to close more deals? Did you face any resistance to adoption within your sales organizations?

A.  By having access to webinar data directly from the Lead or Contact record, sales can instantly see which topics their prospect is interested in and tailor their message to speak to the prospect’s specific use case or pain point. And, because attendance data is captured in Salesforce immediately after an event, sales can strike while the iron is hot and capitalize on opportunities rather than delaying follow up until marketing can do the manual work to get the data into the CRM.

Each of our panelists shared that ReadyTalk for Salesforce has been very well-received by their sales organizations because it:

• Gives them timely and convenient visibility into valuable webinar data right from the Lead and Contact record
• Makes it easy for them to invite prospects and customers to webinars and online trainings directly from the Lead or Contact record

In fact, Helena from Mandiant shared this feedback from one of her account executives during the webinar:

“Awareness of participation in events by potential customers allows me to enter the conversation with relevance and value, thereby earning their attention.”

2 – Q. When I look at a customer record will I be able to see a history of their webinar interaction directly associated with their customer profile?

A. Yes, ReadyTalk for Salesforce attempts to match each participant with a Lead or Contact record in Salesforce based on email address. From the related Lead or Contact record, you can see all of that person’s meeting activity and drill down to the Meeting Member record for full details.

3 – Q. Is there a diagram or goal funnel (visualization) to see drilled down results quickly at a high level?  Will we be able to see a report generated from an event?

• Send a custom email invite for a ReadyTalk Audio, Web, or Audio/Web meeting
• Start an On-Demand meeting with 1 click
• Store your ReadyTalk Account credentials

To download the ReadyTalk Scheduler for Outlook please visit: http://www.readytalk.com/support-training/downloads. As always, if you have a question or support issue, please call 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.