Are you involved in sales or marketing? Do you create, promote, or deliver webinars as a part of your process? Perfect! You fit the persona of someone who would benefit from a free webinar this Thursday, September 15. I will be speaking about the use (and misuse) of personas in sales and marketing webinars. The one-hour free session starts at 9am California / 12pm New York and you can register at this link: https://www.smmconnect.com/events/3261?gref=kenm If you haven’t used marketing personas before, I’ll explain the concept and why they are so useful. If you know about personas but could ..read more

Come, let’s engage in a little blue sky speculation. This is going to be one of my infrequent posts talking about financial considerations, so disclaimers are important: I have ZERO insider information or informants providing any facts or rumors that would contribute to anything mentioned here. This is just my own personal musings. I have no financial stake or investments in ON24, their competitors, or any companies mentioned in this post. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, should make any investment decisions based on anything I write. I’m not a financial analyst and I probably have no idea what ..read more

I’m going to write about ongoing lawsuits involving webinar software vendors. I should start with a disclaimer that I have ZERO legal training and no firsthand knowledge of the case specifics. I am an unbiased external observer interested in what’s going on in our industry. I should also point out that I have no fiscal or business relationship with the vendors mentioned in this article and no investments in any companies involved. ON24 is a long-established major player in the webinar/webcast space. Its history stretches back to 1998, starting with streaming news content over the web and morp ..read more

I am an old, white, cisgender male. A product of my culture, my upbringing, and my practical work/life experiences. Why start with an introduction like that? Because I am going to delve into a controversial topic and my identity is naturally going to color the way I think about it. I just finished a presentation training session with a wonderful client. We ran through some practice presentations and group feedback discussions. In this particular session, all the participants were female. One of them exhibited a common speaking habit… Frequent upward inflections at the ends of conceptual phras ..read more

2021 was another busy year for webinars as the pandemic plodded on and remote collaboration continued to be the norm. My busy season went later than usual, with webinars booked right up through Christmas week! But now we’re into the traditional slow season as companies concentrate on webinar planning for the new year. That gives me some much-appreciated down time, and also gives me the opportunity to bring back last year’s special winter offer for two months only. During January and February, I am offering a reduced rate flat-fee webinar review. Details are available at https://www.wsuccess.c ..read more

It’s time once again to revisit a controversial topic. Is the conventional wisdom about webcam presentations correct? Does having the presenters appear on camera enhance the experience? Whenever I write about this, I have to couch the subject in disclaimers. People get passionate about the subject and sometimes make arguments against things I haven’t said. DISCLAIMERS: 1) I’m talking about presentation-oriented web events. Not peer-level meetings or participatory discussions. 2) I’m talking about presenters sitting in front of a fixed computer webcam on their laptop or desktop. Not videograp ..read more

Are you a hardcore Camtasia user? I just put together a video explaining a way to use the morph feature of PowerPoint to make your video edits a little less jarring in Camtasia. You can find my video at https://youtu.be/YyzXzCloNv0 If your feed reader supports embedded video format, you should also see it immediately below this line:   I recognize that the technique I describe is overkill for most projects. It takes extra time and effort on every edit. But once you get things set up and go through the process a time or two, it turns into a fairly quick extra few steps. I find it particu ..read more

My car has OnStar driver assistance. I tap a button and a live representative comes on the line. I was driving the other day and asked them for directions to a restaurant. (Yes, this is a post about webinars. Stay with it.) The representative downloaded the directions into my car’s navigation system and I completed the drive with a delightful Ethiopian meal. I thought no more about it. EXCEPT… The company won’t stop sending me emails. “You recently contacted us. Please tell us how we did. Thinking about your overall experience, on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely would you be to recommend OnStar ..read more

Webex put up a blog post announcing support for attendee-selectable interpretation channels in online meetings. This is a good thing and increasingly crucial in reaching international audiences. One of the features I really like in the Webex implementation is a slider that lets each attendee balance the relative volume of the source speaker and the interpreter. That is great for checking presenter intonation and emphasis that can sometimes be lost in translation. It can potentially be useful for listeners who are somewhat comfortable in the source language, but want a little backup assistance ..read more

Engagement, engagement, ENGAGEMENT! It’s the buzzword darling of our industry right now. You can’t click on a link about webinars, webcasts, and virtual presenting without encountering a sentence urging you to find ways to better engage your audience. Want to know what they ALL get wrong about the concept? I’ll tell you within the first few minutes of my upcoming webinar next Tuesday, October 26. It’s free, courtesy of Adobe Connect and the American Marketing Association. We have an hour to go over practical guidelines and “tricks of the trade” that actually work and are easy to put into prac ..read more