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.

Merriam-Webster conducted their annual update of their dictionary. Now on their 11th addition, Webster has added the word webinar to their pages.

According to John Morse,Merriam-Webster’s president and publisher, webinar is “one more example of the
significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language.”

We have always preferred the term web seminar at ReadyTalk but it looks like webinar is here to stay. Regardless, it is certainly a testament to the impact web conferencing (and webinars) has had upon our business culture over the last several years.

Technorati Tags: webinar, web seminar, web conferencing, Mirriam-Webster

I love these types of posts. Eran Livneh, over at the MarketCapture Blog, tells about how a webinar they conducted for one of their clients helped close some deals as well as bring new leads into the pipeline.

This is the power of the webinar in action. It is a great tool for any part of the sale process. As a lead generator, the webinar worked well for their client; over 30% of their attendees were new and qualified prospects. In the case of the salesperson who closed a deal as a result of the webinar, it was used as a nurturing piece that resulted in a sale.

Obviously, at ReadyTalk, we believe in webinars as critical sales and marketing tools. They are a cost efficient way to produce persistent content that your sales team will be able to use at any point in the sales process.

Check out all the ways our web conferencing service can help.

Technorati Tags: webinars, web seminars, web conferencing

Event management is a fairly common feature among web conferencing products. It encompasses functionality to let users set up events in advance, collect registrations, send login instructions and reminder emails and track attendance. This is in contrast to an ad hoc meeting which require no registration or advance notice.

Given that lots of vendors offer event management, is there anything that differentiates one product from another? At ReadyTalk, we were faced with that dilemma when designing our own event manager. From our research, we found out two things that would help us differentiate our product.

First, we found that quite a few companies required customers to use a different, higher priced product version or purchase a separate module if they wanted to make use of event management. We decided to make event management a core component of the basic web conferencing software. All customers have access to it and they can choose to use it for a structured meeting, or ignore it for an ad-hoc meeting as they wish.

Second, we saw in most product the lack of support for tracking promotional campaigns. For example, you might want to have banner ads on different websites, newsletter sponsorships and email blasts to various lists and you want to see which ones perform best so you can adjust your marketing spends in the future. The problem is that event management systems create a single registration page, with no ability to differentiate where people come from.

We decided to include a feature that lets marketers specify named campaigns or promotional channels and generate a unique registration URL for each one. You only have to manage the registration information and layout of your page once, but the system automatically clones it as many times as needed to give you individually traceable destination pages for use in each advertising location. The information feeds down to reports on registration and attendance, letting you track performance throughout your event’s lifecycle.

If you run marketing events, training sessions, customer updates, or other meetings that require registration and reporting, you should consider the costs and the features of your vendor’s event management implementation. If you want to see how we do it, you can always visit www.readytalk.com/events.

Technorati Tags: web events, events, web conferencing, webinars, web seminars

The other night Oprah had a webcast for her book of the month club. She was interviewing Eckhart Tolle for his new book called A New Earth. My wife had signed up for the webcast so I was helping her log on before the webcast started. My wife had tested her computer the day before from an e-mail that was sent to every registrant. There was a small download to install that would allow the webcast to run on your computer’s browser.

She was logged in and ready to go at 7pm MST. At first everything went smoothly and then about 20 minutes into it, my wife came upstairs and said the video was stuttering. Being a former web conferencing support tech, I went downstairs and did some speed tests to Chicago. Every server I hit in America was registering great speed except to the server in Chicago from which I could not even connect too.

I had never been on the receiving end of a poor quality webcast and it was quite frustrating to my wife. It is too bad because Oprah had a great chance to show of this exciting technology and it fizzled.

Technorati Tags: Oprah, Eckhart Tolle, webcast

Oops, looks like Opera broke the internet. Appe