Remember when conference calls were a big deal? Multiple lines and access codes, oh my! And then web conferencing joined the ranks. Individuals and companies alike began to incorporate a new piece of technology into their meetings. Desktop and application sharing became the norm. A tool that allowed remote participation. A new form of training, demos, and collaboration that was cost effective and efficient.

Then we were introduced to…POLLING! And the webinar world rejoiced.  And this is just one of many in a feature set that we think has demonstrated the continual evolution of conferencing. But, even now you do business differently than you did just a few years ago. Has your conferencing software kept up the pace? Here’s how we’re contributing:

• All-in-One platform: A product that fits every meeting scenario, regardless of size or need. Internal training tool? Check. Large scale, fully supported web event? Check. Sales team demos, marketing webinars, remote office collaboration? Yes. One tool, one provider, endless uses.
• Social Media Integration: Now you’re able to seamlessly share your registration links and recorded content with your social networks like Twitter & Facebook right from your conference center interface. No separate logins required. A one stop shop to create, edit, and disseminate your content in a timely matter.
• Abundant Feature Set: From a Flash based platform, to a one-of-a-kind embeddable media player and unique campaign URL creation for trackable ROI on each event, the available feature list makes for an unmatched experience for both you and your meeting participants.

Later this month we’ll be covering this conferencing timeline and discussing it’s continual enhancements. Be sure to register for the webinar to learn about the new trends in the industry and ask yourself if your tool is keeping up with your business.

Effective promotion can make or break your webinar. In a world where webinars are becoming an increasingly popular marketing vehicle, audiences are being bombarded with email invitations. These invites may get caught in spam filters, deleted out of habit or simply lost in the shuffle of an already-overflowing inbox. To drive registrants (and leads), you’ve got to think outside the box.

Social media offers a whole new frontier for webinar promotion. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn provide an easy and budget-friendly way to get the word out about your upcoming live event or even your on-demand recording.

If you haven’t already started using social media to market your webinars, here are a few places to begin:

1. Blog about the topic of your upcoming event and point to the registration page.
2. Tweet, tweet, and tweet again about your event. Because Twitter posts are fleeting, you need repetition to get the message out.
3. Post webinar details and a registration link on your organization’s Facebook page.
4. Create LinkedIn groups that will attract members who are interested in your topic, then promote appropriate webinars to them.
5. Tap into the social networks of your speakers by asking them to blog, tweet, post, etc. about the event.
6. Create a Twitter hashtag for your event and include it in email invites, reminders, etc. to engage your audience before, during and after the webinar.
7. Expand the life span of your content by embedding the conference recording on your blog and on Facebook and promoting it on Twitter.

ReadyTalk is about to launch some cool new tools that automate social media promotion for webinars. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can post details about a scheduled web conference to Facebook or tweet them to your followers on Twitter. You can also quickly embed the webinar recording on Facebook and promote it on Twitter. Get a sneak peek at these features and lots of other enhancements in Web Meeting 6 Preview.

Interested in hearing more on social media promotion plus tips for webinar planning? Join webinar marketing experts Alli Libb of the American Marketing Association, Jessica Walker from Gallup and Paul Barron from Networld Alliance on Tuesday March 23rd at 2:30pm Eastern. Register today for this can’t-miss event!

Now, it’s your turn. Share how you currently market (or want to market) your webinars through social media so we can figure out which social media features to build next …

A guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal– providing local online advertising for professional service firms.

Did you know you can have a personalized high-converting soft-sales campaign that is completely automatic? That’s right—you can make money on auto pilot!

In this post we’ll show you how to reel the customer in with semi-personalized message and then upsell them over a period of time with auto responder messages.

Here’s how the system functions.

There are several types of content that can be used here to “soften up” the customer:

• eBooks (can be used to educated and sell, or sometimes can even be what is sold as the solution)
• Automated emails (usually the primary upsell method after the potential customer is sucked into the system through a landing page). These emails should seem personal and should be sent out at regular intervals. Some variations might have an additional “exclusive” email series as the sold solution.

Of course, the goal of these ebooks or emails is to do some light education around a thorny problem, then show how the product for sale is perfect solution to the problem just described.

Here’s the model for using this method spelled out. First, you need to establish pain, then you create rapport, after that move on to framing the issue. Now, you’re ready to provide the solution. This is completely different than the direct sales model of sell, sell, sell:

• Establish pain: People won’t buy unless they are in pain. At Blitz, we do this right from the start by showing how the prospect doesn’t show up in search results when people are actively looking for the very service they offer. Jealousy also plays into this, since they can see what competitors are doing. Some of the tools we are building appear to be rank checkers, but are really pain generation tools—they point out what is wrong with your site.
• Creating rapport: Rapport is a fancy way of saying identification and comfort being around you, which is a low level of trust. The casual, conversational tone and revealing of semi-personal details and emotions humanizes the seller. They still wield an iron fist, but it’s covered with a velvet glove. In other words, they’re still trying to sell you, but are doing it an apparently gentle way. People buy from their friends, people they like. Do you feel empathy for the seller while reading? Good—his techniques are working on you. Often times the email series or ebooks will be written from the first person and appear to be from the CEO himself, sent apparently from his own email address. It’s a nice personal touch, and one that is fairly easy to mimic (if you want to adopt this strategy for yourself).
• Framing the issue: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The recent Borrell Research report on local framed the high churn issue among local resellers as one of insufficient PPC management software. Therefore, the solution is more PPC software, provided by Clickable, who just so happens to be the sponsor of the report (imagine that). A recent piece by a software company takes 30 pages to basically say one thing—that email autoresponders are the key to selling, since it’s automated, warms up the prospect over many touches, and allows them to respond when they are interested (not when you want to sell them). There, in one sentence and I’ve perhaps saved you 57 pages of reading. But look at how clever that formula is.
• Providing the solution: Now that he has you all worked up– you’ve intensely felt the pain of not having enough revenue, you identify with him as a friend, and he’s described the problem in a way most favorable to his solution– he mentions the answer. At first in passing and then more strongly as you get to the last few pages. Of course, he’s been talking about his product the whole time, you just didn’t realize how this trap was being set. He’s got you right where he wants you. And he didn’t have to spend a millisecond of his own personal time to get you there, the whole thing was automated. You perhaps watched a 2 minute video of him talking to you– like a good friend would chat with you. He’s been talking about your needs and you feel like you kind of know him. Time to buy!

And he, meaning the system, will continue to send out automated emails until you cry “mercy” and sign up for his software. Meanwhile, he’s sitting back, letting the automation software run, and the sales come rolling in.

But after reading through all the material, consider how you feel emotionally (I’d like to buy this software and I like this guy) versus what you’ve actually learned about what type of industry the product addresses (what specific steps and techniques can you implement?). If you’ve gone to a Baptist church, you may know what I’m talking about—call to action at the end, where people come up and confess. Probably not rationally-based, but one of emotion. The music is playing and you’re feeling spiritual. Ever seen “Leap of Faith”, the Steve Martin movie where he plays a huckster preacher, faith healer, caster outer of demons, and revenue generator extraordinaire under the big tent?

There really is little difference—think about it.

The “smarter” people think they are, the more easily they will fall for these sales techniques, since they’re thinking with the left side of their brain (rational), while really this system hammers them on the right side (emotional). This is how you can sell to anyone, no matter how “logical” they are.

I am currently working on lead scoring here at ReadyTalk. The first step for me was to sit down with the sales team and decide on what constitutes a qualified lead. This in terms of demographic profile (title, industry, function) as well as behavioral attributes (visiting web page, attending a seminar or downloading a whitepaper).

Most of the literature I read about lead scoring has you assume that at a certain lead score, a potential buyer is ready to be called upon. On the surface, this seemed relatively simple to me. Add up the behavior score and add it to the demographic score and voila you have a magical number that decides whether a customer gets a call from your salesperson.

Is this necessarily true? If a prospect never truly raises their hand should they be called? For example, if I attribute 1 point for every web page visited and 5 points for every white paper downloaded, should I be wasting time on the person who likes to browse our community section and read our content but has no interest in purchasing our service. My point is while these behavioral actions are good indicators they are not the best. A stronger indicator would be a raised hand in the form of a info request or demo request.

What I am struggling with is are there any actions besides “hand raising” that should trigger a phone call. If so, what are those actions? This is where an open conversation with the sales team can be immensely helpful. Also, knowing that lead scoring is an on-going project that is constantly adjusted with feedback from the sales team.

ReadyTalk is located just a quarter mile from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) which has been an interesting experience. From a marketing point-of-view, it has supplied some great web conferencing campaign opportunities. We offered Denver businesses free web conferencing and audio conferencing so they could telecommute while the DNC kept them out of their offices. There were also over 15,000 journalists in town that covered the event. We joked about running through downtown holding a large ReadyTalk Web Conferencing banner to get on television. Our joke was actually another company’s plan.

While out on the 16^th Street Mall, I saw some of the following:

• People carrying signs directing and leading crowds to a restaurant
• Companies handing out free t-shirts with political campaigns on the front and their logo on the back
• A donkey and elephant riding around on Segways advertising a news station

These are not the tactics that they taught when I went to marketing school. Word-of-mouth buzz and grassroots campaigning are the latest craze and we saw that out in full force during the DNC. Combine it with technology (blogs, social media sites, email blasts) and you have campaigns that maximize return on investment because of the relatively low cost of these mediums.

It was exciting to see social media tactics on display all over our city this week. It further solidifies the relevancy and efficacy of these tactics.