Webcast audio: Avoiding Murphy's Law

A few months ago, after a particularly rough webcasting week, I sent an email to one of the leading bloggers who covers the webcast field, Ken Molay. Ken writes in a couple webinar blogs, here and here.

Here's the original email I sent to Ken, asking for his opinion on a nagging problem that has affected every webcast production veteran at least once or twice:

My group produces about 60 webcasts each year. No matter how many redundancies we build into our processes, there’s always the fear in the back of my mind that a phone line will get dropped. I’m always afraid that we’ll lose either one of the presenters’ lines (bad enough, especially if they’re speaking when the line is dropped) or the audio streaming line, in which case the audience loses audio to everyone.

A year ago, after two major snafus and several other minor ones with a certain large teleconferencing vendor who I won’t name, we fired them and switched to a different company. The new company has been rock solid…until yesterday. They dropped the streaming line yesterday, so our audience had their audio interrupted for about 5 minutes until we could get the webcast vendor reconnected.

One of my colleagues in a different division of our company had a similar thing happen to him earlier this week. Different telecon provider, same end result.

After a problem occurs, there’s usually little or no resolution. The audio vendor often says "It wasn’t within our control because the failure occurred outside our phone network." Of course there’s no way for us to easily prove otherwise. Even if we could prove otherwise, fault isn’t the issue, it’s reliability. It seems like dropped audio can happen to anyone, regardless of the telecon vendor. I have yet to see or hear about a company that never drops calls.

I’d love to hear any suggestions you have (or your blog readers have) for error-proofing webinar audio. How do you prevent dropped audio?

You can read Ken's response here, where he also brings in Christopher Dean to weigh in on the topic.

Since then, I haven't had a teleconference provider drop a call, but I've seen a couple other interesting and unpleasant situations:

• Last week, the teleconference provider messed up all of our dial-in numbers and passcodes. It took one of my team members a good hour to straighten everything out at the last minute, right before everyone was about to dial in.
  
  
• About three weeks ago, we suddenly lost audio during the last minute of a webcast. It dropped at about 2:59pm Eastern, just as we were wrapping up. But this time it wasn't the teleconference provider, and really it wasn't the webcast vendor's fault either. From what I understand, a utility crew was doing some digging on the street, reasonably close to the webcast vendor's building. The crew cut a trunk line, the major phone line connecting a large number of buildings in their area.
  

So even if your teleconference provider and your webcast vendor are rock solid, Murphy can still get you.

Arby's super-targeted direct mail campaign? Not quite

Shortly after making this post yesterday about a college's laser-targeted mass media campaign, I started going through my mail at home. I pulled out a direct mail piece that really caught my attention.

My wife and I are both rapidly approaching our 30th birthdays. Hers is only a few weeks away, and mine isn't that far behind. So when I pulled a mailer from Arby's out of the stack and I read "Save big on my 30th birthday!", I was excited and curious at the same time. Arby's is my favorite fast food restaurant, and for a few seconds, I thought they were doing some sort of clever customized mailer to people who were hitting milestone birthdays. (Especially since targeted mass media campaigns were on my mind, after writing that blog post!)

But then I read further. It turns out Arby's Beef 'N Cheddar sandwich turns 30 this month, and they're doing a special $.30 sandwich promotion to celebrate. So much for targeted mass media.

But at least I learned something. Two of the loves of my life (Michele and Beef 'N Cheddar) were born in the same month!

Wilkes University's super-targeted ad campaigns, and can they work online?

You may have heard about Wilkes University's unconventional ad campaigns. This is the second year the Pennsylvania school is using super-targeted ads aimed at a handful of top seniors. It's placing ads like "Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)" These ads are appearing on billboards, on TV, and even on pizza boxes. See AP article here, NPR story here (audio), and one of the TV commercials embedded below (also linked here).


These are the first college advertisements I've ever seen that don't make me yawn. They're smart, they convey the intended message (Wilkes cares about getting to know you as a person), and they clearly generate a lot of buzz in the community. Of course, their effectiveness at recruiting some of the top talent to the school is just one facet of the campaign's objectives. They're meant to get those students' friends, classmates, teachers and staff, and members of the community to talk about Wilkes -- and to get this lesser-known school on many Pennsylvania seniors' short lists.

It got me thinking about customized online ads. There's the "Find a mortgage in insert your community name here" ads that you see on many sites today. Those are customized based on your IP address and other technology that helps the ad figure out your location. The first time I saw one of them, it made me say wow, but it also creeped me out in a way too. It seemed a little big brother-ish, even though the site really doesn't have any personally identifiable information about me. These types of ads aren't even in the same league as the Wilkes ads, but they came to mind first.

Then you have some of the more targeted campaigns that I've occasionally seen in the B2B world. A while back, one of my colleagues got a direct mail piece. If I remember correctly, it was in a plain, hand-addressed envelope. Inside it had an invitation that had a customized URL with his name as the subdomain (for example, http://johnsmith.xyzcompany.com). When he went to that particular URL, the page was customized with his name, our company name, and a demo or pitch for a product that was somewhat built around him. After he showed it to me, we discussed it for a while and tried to figure out how they had built the program. It seemed like the kind of campaign where they had taken a list, micro-segmented it down to a couple hundred prospects they were interested in pursuing (either that or they spent a lot of time and money to make it seem that way), set up the custom URLs which probably took a little time but I'm sure was database-driven, and then of course hand-addressed the envelopes to get the personalized factor on the outside too.

Wilkes' ads make me think about the concept of The Long Tail and how the Internet is enabling companies and organizations to pursue a niche strategy. Although Wilkes is using mass media, the university is using it in a much more targeted manner than the "photo of the three students sitting under a tree with laptops" that's prevalent in most college ads. The Wilkes approach is an interesting combination of a Long Tail strategy but in a mass media way. I have a feeling many other companies and organizations will be experimenting with this type of ad campaign soon.

Ever wonder why every marketing project comes together at the last minute?

It never ceases to amaze me how many companies scramble to get their marketing projects finished at the last minute, sacrificing quality on a program because they're constantly in panic mode. Sometimes it seems like companies are needlessly throwing their marketing dollars down the drain, just because they can't plan ahead effectively. They pay for something, dedicate resources toward that project, then squander opportunities because they miss deadlines or don't do as much with the project as they should have.

Now I can't claim to be the most proactive person in the world. I miss plenty of little opportunities with my own projects -- for doing an extra round of testing on an email, for building a new feature that's going to impress a client, etc. -- because I didn't have enough time or give enough thought to the project in advance. There are plenty of times when I look back and say to myself, "Wow, I missed an opportunity there. I could've done that better." But I can't remember blowing a huge amount of money and effort on a project that went out the door half-done and way late -- which is something I see pretty frequently (way more often than I should!) in this business.

I always thought this stuff was common sense, but I guess it isn't. I'm not writing anything groundbreaking here, just a gentle reminder:

• Build a project plan and stick to it.
• Get buy-in from the key people in your organization who need to be involved, to make sure they understand how important the project is. If you don't sell the project's importance to them, they won't cooperate in a timely manner and you'll miss deadlines.
• Communicate effectively. Keep other people in the loop. If you're going to miss a deadline, at least let the interested parties know why, and let them know what you'll do to rectify the situation.
• Brainstorm with your team. Just give a few minutes' worth of thought to each project from a wider view. Am I missing anything here? Are there any opportunities for cross-promotion, or to use assets that have already been created?

If you're able to do all these things, you'll be a step ahead of most other people in this industry. (It's sad but true.)

What's the best day and time for a webcast?

Here's an interesting question blogger Ken Molay is asking. What day of the week is best for a webcast? And what's the best time of day?

He's doing a survey to collect data, because as he notes, conducting tests on this sort of thing would be difficult. I completely agree that gathering hard data from tests would be tough, but I think most producers of frequent webcasts could get a pretty good hunch for which days and times pull well, just knowing some of the variables that are in play (like how popular the topic of each event is likely to be). On the survey front, I also worry about whether people's actions of actually attending webcasts at certain times will follow their responses, because quite often, what people *say* they'll do is quite different from what they actually do. But it should be an interesting survey nonetheless, and it's probably better than the hunches all webcast producers are operating on right now.

In July 2007, webcast vendor ON24 did an interesting study that looked at a lot of different data points with key webcast trends. They examined things like months of the year for webcasts, plus which days of the week are best for registration. But they didn't dive into the attendance question based on day of the week or time of day. (Here's a link to a press release about that ON24 report, with a contact name on how to request a copy of the PDF. I couldn't find a direct link to the report PDF anywhere, probably because ON24 wants your name first so they can sell you something. But hey, ON24 is the best webcast vendor out there as far as I'm concerned, so let them sell you!)

Here's my contribution to conventional wisdom on best times for a webcast...

Last October, IndustryWeek did 12 webcasts in two days. We called it the "Operational Excellence Online LIVE" web conference. Sessions started at 11am, noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm Eastern on each day (a Wednesday and Thursday). The target audience was manufacturing management. The majority of our audience is based in the Eastern and Central time zones, although there are still quite a few manufacturers in Mountain or Pacific. Overseas audience is generally around 5%.

Since there were lots of variables with these 12 sessions -- 12 different sets of speakers, 12 sponsors who did differing amounts of promotion for the event to their current customer/prospect base, 12 different topics of varying interest to the IndustryWeek audience -- it's hard to draw scientific conclusions. But in terms of attendee percentage, we can make some pretty good guesses.

We found that the first session (Wednesday at 11am ET) had the best attendance percentage. There were several others that had comparable numbers that were just shy of the first session's numbers, so I'm sure that's not statistically valid.

We also found that the 4pm session each day was by far the weakest in terms of attendee percentage compared to other sessions that day. This is despite the fact that both 4pm sessions had particularly good speakers and particularly interesting topics that are normally "hot button" sort of subjects for our audience. (We survey the audience after each session and ask them to rate each speaker, and out of 24 speakers for the 12 sessions, the speakers for the 4pm sessions were rated as the #1, #2, #4, and #8 presenters for the entire conference.) Good content, good speakers, poor turnout.

We had similar results for the 4pm sessions during our December 2006 multi-session online conference. Those two sessions underperformed from an attendance % standpoint as well.

As a result of these pretty convincing results, we've eliminated the 4pm time slot from future multi-session online conferences. We'll see how the numbers change in the future. Perhaps the 4pm time was too late for manufacturers, since a lot of manufacturing companies start and end their days earlier?

Lock up your web forms: Google has started indexing the "invisible web"!

Webmasters and web marketing managers should be sure to read a recent post in the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google is beginning to submit web forms in an effort to find additional content that resides behind them.

It's part of Google's effort to index the "invisible web" -- pages that aren't currently being spidered by the Googlebot. Up until now, when the Google spider hit a page that required you to fill out a form to continue, it would stop there. But now Google says that in some situations, the spider will attempt to submit the form so it can find out what's on the other side.

Is this good or bad? I'd say it's more good than bad. It's good for web searchers who use Google. And it can be good for webmasters and marketers, as long as you're aware of Google's new spidering policy and you design your web forms with the Googlebot's new capabilities in mind.

Take a typical B2B landing page. It's a single page with an offer -- let's say "Download our latest white paper on widgets!". But in order to get the white paper PDF, the visitor needs to fill out the form. Under the old rules, Google wouldn't be able to get to that white paper because it was housed behind the form.

But with this new initiative, Google might try to fill out that form and get to the white paper. Once it gets there, it would spider the white paper (because of course Google can index PDFs) and the white paper might appear in search results. So if someone types in "Widgets" and your white paper is relevant enough, it could appear high in the search results and people could be viewing it thanks to Google -- without filling out the form!

So if you have critical pieces of content like white papers that you don't want to appear in Google searches, make sure you exclude those form pages in your robots.txt file. (A simple Google search can tell you how to edit your site's robots.txt file.)

Webcasts: What's more important -- leads or thought leadership?

The April 7 issue of BtoB magazine has a graph with results from an online poll they conducted about webcasts. The question was "What's your top webinar objective?" and the two choices were leads or thought leadership. Interestingly enough, 69% said their top objective was thought leadership and only 31% picked leads.

These results really surprised me. I'm sure this wasn't a scientific poll, so perhaps I should take this data with a grain of salt. But in my many years of experience conducting webcasts, I'm accustomed to most sponsors being obsessed with leads. That's how sponsors usually evaluate success -- based on number of registrants and number of attendees, plus the quality of those people. It's just the way many companies are set up right now...they're dependent upon leads.

But after thinking about this poll, I realize just how difficult of a question "thought leadership or leads" is. A webcast needs to do both to be effective, so it's silly to say that one or the other is the primary goal.

If a webcast doesn't generate leads, it's going to be difficult for the sponsor to quantify results. How will sales and marketing turn that thought leadership into action without leads? But on the other hand, if the webcast doesn't provide thought leadership, the leads are actionable but they're not nearly as valuable. After all, there are a lot of easier and less expensive ways to get leads. But the thought leadership conveyed during a well-executed webcast, combined with the fact that the person just sat through an hour-long presentation about a topic, makes for a very qualified lead.

This is exactly why I believe webcasts are so popular in B2B markets right now. It's not about the lead -- nor is it about the thought leadership. It's an inseparable combination of the two.