Not all interactive web conferences are created equal. But with a little preparation and planning ahead of time, your video conference will be a huge success…every time.
1) Find an interactive web conferencing provider that’s Right for your needs
There are many different web conferencing providers, offering different services, features, prices, and extras.
Plan on at least eight weeks to choose and take a free trial of a potential provider. This will give you plenty of time to make a decision.
A good interactive web conferencing system should:
*Be easy to use
*Have the features you require and the ability to share presentations and documents
*Charge a flat monthly rate (so you won’t get dinged for running a trial test before your actual web conference or follow-up meetings)
2) Develop a really interesting, engaging agenda
This is probably the most important element to your interactive web conferencing success. If your material is boring, you’ll lose your guests – and potential sales.
Invite an industry expert, customer or partner to present or be interviewed at your web conference. This will stimulate more interest, drive participation and create synergy.
A well-known expert or guru can double or even triple your effectiveness.
Use pictures, diagrams, and live demonstrations from pre-loaded websites to keep the material fresh and entertaining.
Ask potential questions to encourage participation from your guests.
3) Be Careful When Choosing a date and time for your interactive web conference
Plan on hosting your web conference at least twice to accommodate different time zones and schedules.
Avoid Mondays or Fridays as these are peak conferencing days and attendance is also often lower.
Start at 15 minutes past the hour. Most meetings end on the hour and this gives your participants time to decompress before joining your meeting.
The best times are 10 am and 2 pm to make sure your guests are their desks and available before or after lunch.
Send a reminder of the contents and time of the webinar one week ahead of time. Send a “see you there” reminder the day before.
Choose an interactive web conferencing provider that allows you to send a private email invitation with an easy, direct link to your meeting.
4) Cap Your Participants at 10 to 25 So It’s Easier to Take Questions and Keep the Web conference More Interactive
An interactive web conference is a live video event and is supposed to be a back and forth communication between the presenter and audience. This is different from a Webcast, which broadcasts information in one direction only.
Your interactive web conference will be more successful if you keep the size small and more intimate. Participants will feel more at ease and comfortable about participating and asking questions if there isn’t hundreds of people watching.
5) Take Questions Via Chat During the Presentation
Some of your participants may be uncomfortable or unwilling to ask questions during the presentation.
A facilitator can take questions via live chat and then read them when the presenter stops to answer any questions.
6) Stick to your Agenda
If you are the moderator, be ready to start your interactive web conference 15 minutes ahead of time.
Start on time, and respect your participant’s schedules by ending on time as well.
It’s also a good idea to give more than one person a copy of the PowerPoint presentation, including a hard copy, in case of technical difficulties.
7) Run a Practice Interactive Web Conference before the actual presentation
Practice makes perfect. Web conferences aren’t difficult, but they are different from running a meeting or a conference call. Take a test run, especially if you’ve never run one before.
This gives you the opportunity to fine tune your material and catch any potential problems with the system.
Don’t forget to ask two people from sites that will be participating to help you by signing on and asking questions.
If you incorporate all seven of these traits, your interactive web conference will be a huge success. And your business will reap the rewards.
Posts Tagged ‘ Different Time Zones ’
Owing to the globalization of internet communication services, webinars have become one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted communication. Webinars can be organized for a variety of purposes such as promotion of products and services, education and training, research, and many more. Webinar planning is similar to the planning for a live seminar; however, there are some fine differences due to the virtual environment webinars are conducted in. Here is a step by step guide for the order to be followed for a successful webinar.
1. Goal
When making the webinar strategy, the first thing to decide is the goal of the webinar. Is it for the promotion of your companys product or service? Is it for the training and development of your employees or students? Or is it just to share a revolutionary development in your field? You need to be absolutely clear about the motto for organizing the webinar.
2. Schedule
In todays fast paced corporate environment, timing is everything. Schedule your webinar at a time when you expect maximum attendance. Usually people are relatively less occupied during early hours of the second half of the day; hence it can be the ideal time for organizing the webinar unless you are expecting audience from different time zones. Try to schedule the webinar in the mid of the week as people are usually quite busy during the opening and the closing of the week.
3. Promotion
Promoting your webinar is extremely critical for its success. You can use various methods such as e-mails, social ads, newsletters, blogs, etc, to promote your event. Word-of-mouth can work wonders for the promotion of your webinar; make sure your invites request your prospective audience to invite their colleagues or people who they know may be interested in the subject. Promotion should be one of the most highly prioritized phases of webinar planning.
4. People
The next stage of webinar planning is finding potential speakers as well desired audience. As the speakers are not physically present, it is very important to find potential speakers. Thanks to social media, you can use website like LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc, to find people who have prior experience in presenting similar webinars. For the desired audience, you may either follow the same pursuit, or can hire a professional lead generation agency.
5. Registration
Usually misconstrued to be the day of the webinar, registration is the time when you should start benefiting from the event. It is the ideal time for knowing the market that you are playing in. You can include surveys, polls, whitepapers, teasers, etc, in your registration process to get to know what your audience really wants, and at the same time giving them an overview about the nature of the webinar.
6. Content
Someone once said Content is king, this couldnt be more true than it is in the case of webinars. Since there will be no physical presence, the content has to be captivating to keep the audience interested in the webinar. You should use as many references as you can while preparing the content. Also, try to include as many facts and figures as you can, as such things make a great impact on the audience.
7. Coach
In-case you think that the speakers selected by you are not being able to convey the exact message that you want to send out, it is essential for you to coach them as per your expectations. In order to effectively train your speakers, you should know the inside of the subject you are organizing the webinar on.
8. Test
Titanic sank, and so can any webinar. There is no doubt that technology has paved way for the digital revolution we all are benefiting from, it cannot be relied upon completely as things can and do go wrong. Once you are done with all phases of your webinar strategy, you need to do a test run of the webinar using a real-time simulation of the actual webinar environment. This is very important to ensure technologies like audio and video conferencing are working all right.
For any reason if you find it difficult to organize the webinar completely on your own, it is advisable that you take the services of a professional webinar management company. These companies specialize in organizing webinars for a variety of businesses and are sure to prove fruitful for yours.
Jun
For some, there are threats everywhere. They fear the world is dangerous and, unless they stay in a constant state of vigilance, their lives will be at risk. In a small number of cases, this gets out of control and tips into paranoia and mental disorder. For the majority, it”s an exaggerated caution because they do not understand how modern technology works. They see how dangerous electricity can be and so are cautious when using powered equipment, particularly when that involves the use of “radiation”. Now there”s a word to get the conspiracy theorists into action. Yet, from a scientific point of view, you cannot escape the fact that television and computer screens give off electromagnetic radiation (EMR), handphones rely on microwave broadcasts, and then there”s light. In coherent form as a laser, it can potentially blind people. As it shines from the sun, we can see our way and, with appropriate protection from ultraviolet, live healthy lives.
The white light we “see” is in fact made up of all the colors blended together. Each color has a property of its own and you may have seen increasing publicity given to light as a treatment for skin problems like acne. When it”s projected from a TV or computer screen, you get both the EMR and light in the visible spectrum, often with a slightly bluish tinge. For the treatment of skin problems, blue and red are used. For the treatment of sleep disorders, blue and green are being used in a series of clinical trials. It”s perhaps slightly ironic, but those who felt an effect from television and computer screens were probably right, except that the effect seems to be beneficial if you want to change your sleeping times.
We know when to sleep because our internal clock is set to match the local daily cycle. If we move to different time zones so that morning is now night, this confuses us and we find it difficult to match local time for sleep. As a trial, a number of people were cut off from the world in rooms without windows or clocks. There was no way for them to tell how much time was passing. The research team kept them awake for fifty hours and then allowed sleep for eight. When awake, half were exposed to blue light, the other to green. All the participants were carefully monitored and it was found that both colors could reset the internal clocks. The only difference between the two groups was that dim blue and bright green lights were less effective. The relevant neurotransmitters and hormones responded more precisely to bright blue and dim green.
So, in all situations where the sleep problem is caused by the body”s circadian rhythms not being properly synchronised to local time, the use of light may well prove the best long-term solution. Although a drug like ambien can and does produce sleep “on demand”, there are always problems if you come to depend on a drug for any long-term solution. Ambien will always help you get needed rest, but the use of alternative methods is preferable. As counseling and therapy is expensive and often not covered by health insurance plans, the development of light treatment may come as a simple and cheap solution to sleep problems.
Teen chat rooms are a common form of computer addiction amongst our teenagers. There are many reasons why youngsters turn to this form of socialising, which can also be, potentially, very dangerous. Thankfully, with the massive media coverage outlining the dangers of chat rooms and meeting with strangers, many of our teenagers are now aware of the dangers involved. It is with these dangers in mind, that we as parents, must stress to our children and ensure they are aware of the possible dangers involved in meeting up with strangers.
As with other forms of computer addiction, teen chat rooms offer a degree of anonymity and the chat room addict can be who he or she wants to be. More often than not, chat room addicts start off with just a break from the routine of daily life. Studying, research, projects, assignments, etc. As time progresses and more chat room friends are added to the list, it becomes very hard to stay away from the computer. Different time zones mean staying up late or getting up early to meet with chat friends from other parts of the world.
Just one or two hours a day in the teen chat rooms is fine by any normal standards, but when the addict is spending the best part of the whole day in the chat rooms, that’s when it is time to start taking action and limiting the time spent at the computer. We, as parents, owe it to our children to take the necessary steps to reducing their time spent at the computer. From personal experience, it is not always possible to make your child understand that it is in his or her own best interest that you are doing what you are doing.
There must also be a hard and non-bending rule that personal information is not given out in teen chat rooms. It will be extremely difficult for the chat room addict, who is totally engrossed in the conversation, not to respond to an innocuous question such as “what is your last name?”, or “can I call you on the phone? What is your number?”. It is best to stick to your chat room name. Anything personal which is given away, innocently, in a chat room could result in them being identified. Again, this is knowledge gained from a personal experience. My teenager was once asked the name of his pet, he told them. It was the answer to his secret question. The account was stolen, the password changed, the address was found and his friends were sent abusive messages. Thankfully, nothing happened with the address. With regards to giving out a telephone number, you only have to go to Google, type in a telephone number and a name and address will be given, unless it is unlisted, of course.
Stay away from putting your photo as your avatar in teen chat rooms, it is best to put a photo of your pet, or better still, a picture of your favorite film star. Also, it is best not to give your exact location. For instance, the town you live in. It is much better to put the nearest large city as your location.
This article is not meant to alarm you. It is only intended to warn of the potential dangers that a chat room addict can face in teen chat rooms.
Remember, not everyone in teen chat rooms are teenagers!
Why do you need webinar software to be successful? Businesses and organizations today are finding that the use of webinar software can be extremely powerful, one reason for its rise in popularity is that most workplaces and businesses have become very dependent on their computers. For a lot of organizations, this is a great solution for meetings or seminars.
Many different sales organizations and marketing firms are using webinar software to increase sales. If you are thinking about using web conferencing software and services, there are certain considerations that you want to look into. You will want to find a company that offers packages which include both video and audio conferencing capabilities. It also should have the capacity to host a large group of people. Smaller programs may not have quite as many available options, but will still have basic capabilities.
One of the biggest features available is the use of desktop sharing.
This is a very effective method to demonstrate software to sales staff, businesses or potential customers. Many programs available now, integrate effortlessly with other applications, including instant message or e-mail.
The quality of the service provided to you is something else that should be taken in consideration. It is vitally important to be able to access the system 24 hours a day as this gives much more flexibility when considering different time zones. You will want to be able to hold your webinars at times which are convenient for anybody.
Videoconferencing is something else that has skyrocketed in popularity recently. Today’s computers are very capable of handling just about any type of video, and when you are doing presentations this can be highly effective.
Web conferencing without a doubt is going to be standard in the future for organizations and companies. All you have to do is find a good reliable firm to handle your needs, before you know it you will be hosting successful presentations.
Your business could certainly benefit from the use of webinar software. There are a number of providers, so it is important to consider each carefully before you choose one. You will need to find one that is reliable and meets your business needs.