Find out what your audience is thinking

Unlike a physical meeting, you can’t read the body language of your participants during a web event. You need to pay attention to the little things, like the breathing (or snoring) on the other end to gauge your audience’s interest. Better yet you can ensure your audience is engaged early by using the interactive features you have available within your web conferencing service – Q&A, chat, and polling. Polling your audience is especially helpful as it can help you tailor your presentation to their needs, provide a way for them to interact during the event, and gather information that will help you with lead qualification. During training sessions you can also check their understanding and re-direct your presentation if your audience isn’t clear on something.

Best practices to follow

ReadyTalk is preparing to launch its new service, Web Meeting 6, which features robust polling functionality (you can try it out in our preview environment, see more below) so I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve learned. I checked in with Ken Molay, President of Webinar Success recently to get some of his recommendations as we’ve been building out our new service:

• When polling your audience, plan to incorporate at least 2-3 polls throughout an hour-long webinar – not closer than 10 minutes apart.
• When developing your questions, start with your overall goal in mind then create your polls; make sure this is done prior to the meeting – if you’re creating your polls during the meeting you are not paying attention to your audience.
• Make each question simple and direct – avoid using jargon and acronyms.
• Be careful of too much “dead air” while gathering results.
• Participants generally like to see results so be sure to follow up with a discussion about what the results mean or why your audience should care.

Types of questions

In Web Meeting 6, we will support six different question/response types:

• Yes/No
• Free text – use this choice when you don’t know all the possible answers
• Multiple choice with single answer and multiple choice with multiple answers– use when there are a finite number of answers
• Ranking poll – to rate things in relation to other things
• Opinion polls – to assess a person’s feelings about something

Creating a poll is simple using ReadyTalk’s polling tool; press a button and you can create a poll, save it and insert it as a slide. Polls are persistent so if you use the same one often it will be there when you need it. And if you need it to show up later during your presentation, simply drag and drop to reorder your slides.

Polls versus surveys

Is there a difference between polls and surveys? Sure is. Polls are quick, flexible questions – often served one at a time; surveys are longer, more complex, and sometimes probing. Use polls during your event (don’t forget to share your results) and surveys at the end.

Check out our polling feature

If you’re an existing ReadyTalk customer, you can try out our polling feature using your current account information at http://www.readytalk.com/preview. If you don’t have an account, sign up for a free trial and you’ll get exclusive access to our Preview environment.

In the next few months the ReadyTalk Webinar Series will offer a three-part series on planning, meeting and sharing your web event. The second in the series will focus exclusively on engaging your audience during a meeting or event using polling and other similar strategies. Registered participants will receive a white paper outlining best practices so watch for more information coming soon.

Meanwhile, try out our new functionality and let me know what you think. I’d also be interested in hearing how you use polls to engage your audience.

ReadyTalk is preparing to roll out our next product launch, Web Meeting 6. But first, it’s time for a Preview. This afternoon, ReadyTalk Beta moves into Preview, bringing Web Meeting 6 one step closer to launch. Web Meeting 6, internally known as Native Client, has been in beta testing for several months. Thanks to continued feedback from our beta testers and the hard work of ReadyTalk engineers, we have been able to greatly improve the product before its release.

Our customers will be able to use Preview for scheduled meetings as well as on-demand meetings. Conference Center will be integrated with Web Meeting, so they can manage all pre- and post-meeting activities in the Preview environment.

Some of the new features you’ll find in Web Meeting 6:

• A redesigned and simple-to-use interface
• Flash-based participant entry to a meeting – this means your participants will be able to join your meeting even faster than before with no downloads required
• Enhanced polling with the ability to create six difference question/response types
• Application sharing with display resizing and rescaling
• A new ReadyTalk Control Bar puts all the chairperson conference controls at your fingertips without taking up valuable screen real estate
• Slide reordering can now be done with a simple drag and drop
• Audio participant name and number matching

Preview will be available on January 29; current customers can directly access Preview at http://www.readytalk.com/preview. Just use your current ReadyTalk access number and pass code and get started.

Not a ReadyTalk customer? Contact sales@readytalk.com and they’ll set you up with a free 30-day trial account that also includes exclusive access to the Preview environment.

Before we launch Web Meeting 6 we want as many customers as possible to experience a free preview and give us feedback. I will be announcing details of our Preview program in the next few weeks. Providing feedback is simple – tell us about your experience using the form at the end of your conference.

Preview gives customers an opportunity to test new functionality while helping us identify any minor kinks. Participating customers enjoy free web minutes while using the Preview environment in addition to experiencing new features.

Stay tuned for my weekly posts as I give you a detailed, sneak peek on the new features you’ll see, best practices on how to use them in your meetings and events, and keep you up-to-date on our progress during this pre-release time.

In the meantime, if you have any questions you can contact me directly at teresa.lawlor@readytalk.com or comment here.

Throughout recent years, the use of social media has skyrocketed (see: http://socialmediaatwork.com/social-media-statistics/). People everywhere are using twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, and the endless other social media sites to stay in touch with family and friends, promote businesses, find people, and discover new information. These tools are intriguing, yes, but the real question is whether they are useful for marketing, or just a sidetrack that will put you hours behind in your “to-do” list.

The decision of whether to harness Social Media Marketing’s potential, or turn away and stay safely unharmed by its vastness could ruin anybody. This is why I am going to uncover some of the benefits of using Social Media in these next few blogs.

Social Media has become the new “hip” technology. So much so, that when you used to get frustrated when your 80 year-old grandmother didn’t have a cell phone (or even know what it was), now you get mad at your grandmother for not staying up-to-date and getting a facebook. It seems like everybody has a facebook these days, and to turn away from such a progressive and popular technology is an unacceptable type of behavior in today’s social expectations.

Other then allowing you to conform socially, here are 10 more reasons why SMM will benefit you and your company:

1. Developing Relationships: Often times, huge corporate barriers are placed between businesses and their customers, and it is hard to develop a relationship with customers. Through social media, customers can express their ideas regarding your services, and you can monitor their satisfaction and develop relationships. A closer relationship is obtainable and it engages customers in your company and encourages them to participate.
2. Search Engine Optimization: By using social media and creating links to your pages you increase your visibility on the web.
3. Acquiring Secondary Traffic: You will have people that go looking for your site (customers), and people that will be channeled to your site through various connections and links. It is a good opportunity to promote your businesses to others, generate potential leads, and create an over all awareness of your company.
4. Promoting company goals and morals: You can use your social media site to outline goals your business has and develop morals so that customers see you in a good or appropriate light. If you a program where you donate money to charities, or if you are environmentally friendly, or focus on superb customer service, you can outline this to your viewers.
5. Promoting upcoming events: Using social media, you can invite people to webinars, fundraisers, or other various events your company is hosting. This is an easy way involve people in what you are doing and promote events.
6. It is Free. Although it may cost some time, it costs no money.
7. Complimentary Strategy: You do not have to give up existing marketing tools–SMM can be used along side regular marketing techniques as something that compliments/furthers your existing marketing strategy. You can continue using all the techniques you have been, but add in Social Media as a side note.
8. Recommendations: You involve customers and encourage word of mouth promotion. A happy customer blogging about the benefits of your service on facebook is one of the most powerful ways to promote your product. Social Media makes word-of-mouth promotion easier for satisfied customers.
9. Becoming More Personal: Add a face to your company. Social media will allow your company to be more “human-like” and approachable.
10. Learning Customer’s needs/preferences: Using social media, getting customer feedback is much quicker process then a lot of other methods. By monitoring activity you can judge what customers like, what they want, and whether they are any problems or they are satisfied.

Social Media can be a useful Marketing tool that costs nothing and breaks the barrier between customer-business relationships. They only major problem now, is learning how to utilize it for maximum benefits. In my next blogs, I will give effective ways that Social Media can be applied as a marketing strategy to promote your business, generate awareness, and develop relationships with customers.

What does “going green” mean? Does it mean saving all of your money for months on end to go out and buy solar panels, an electric car, or “off the grid” kitchen appliances (when all you really wanted was that special 60 inch flat screen TV)? Does it mean only taking a shower every 3 days instead of 2 twice daily? Does it mean only consuming locally produced food for the rest of you life, and thus never being able to eat those delicious peaches that only grow in Georgia?

All of these things do, in fact, contribute to conservation, but most of us tend to outweigh the environmental benefits with the personal sacrifice—I mean, it is understandable! When faced with the decision of: “hmmm should I eat the measly lettuce salad that came from the 2 foot by 2 foot garden in my back yard, or should I drive to a restaurant and eat their delicious steak imported from across the country?” Most of us know what the answer would be to that question; and the tree growing in our backyard would cringe at the answer. This is the problem with “going green” today and it applies to many businesses too. Saving our planet and boosting our environmentally friendly morals should not be looked on as a huge sacrifice that will devour our paychecks and inconveniences, but rather a process that will actually benefit us financially as well as saving time and effort. In my next blog, I will uncover how going green doesn’t have to be giving up an arm and a leg, but rather saving time, money and energy.

When thinking of ‘green initiatives’, individuals are usually one of the following:

1. confused
2. over zealous & uninformed
3. educated & participating

I would say that as a whole we are moving toward 3, however, there are plenty out there that still fall into the first two categories.

What does it mean to be “green”? Good question. I honestly had only an inkling of what the popular terminology actually entailed before I started working on a series of web seminars that we will be hosting over the following months speaking directly to this topic.

In many of today’s businesses, the trend has been the start up of a sustainable committee within the work place to help better educate not only the employees but also the consumers and shareholders. When an individual understands how they are contributing to the idea & reality of social responsibility either directly ( via corporate practices) or indirectly (personally buying a product or service of company xyz that has integrated green practices) then they are more likely to apply those practices outside the workplace as well. Additionally, from the consumer side, a company is apt to retain and gain new clientele because of their efforts in this area. Environmentally friendly practices carry a lot of weight these days and can be a beneficial PR tactic – as long as its not being taken out of context and there is relevant education available to those evaluating your services.

We will be kicking-off our ‘Green’ Series next month in hopes to bring some clarity to this catchfire topic. We’ll cover areas from cost-savings, to PR tactics, to simple practices that can have a lasting impact on your daily work activities. Even the smallest amount of knowledge can make a difference and put you ahead of the curve when it comes to being informed and not just jumping on the wagon.