Webcast day and time survey results

Back in April, I wrote a post and linked to Ken Molay's survey about the best day and time for a webcast. He's published the results here. I think it's interesting how the West Coast wants morning events and the East Coast favored afternoon events. Ken suggests perhaps it's conditioning -- that's when they're used to seeing webcasts?

Applying the same logic, I wonder if West Coast TV viewers were asked about their viewing preferences for live events like sports playoff games, if they'd choose 6pm start times because that's what they're accustomed to? I'd love to see data on that. I'm sure the NFL has some sort of data that they use to justify such a late starting time for Monday Night Football games for East Coast viewers.

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.

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?

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.

EST or EDT? Get your time zones right in your marketing communications

This is one of my pet peeves, but it's also something that should be important to marketers of all types. I can't even tell you how many marketing communications I've seen (webcast announcements, event emails, direct mail pieces, etc.) where companies get this wrong. And it should be pretty simple.

Whenever you're writing a time on a communication that's going to anyone outside your immediate geographic area, you should specify a time zone. That's obvious. But getting it right is a challenge for many marketers.

It's the second week of April. Let's say you're in New York right now. You're on Eastern Standard Time, right? Wrong. You're really on Eastern Daylight Time.

Back to Time Zone 101 class: The second word in the the time zone phrase is meant to express whether or not you're on Daylight Saving Time. So in the U.S., from roughly November through March (the dates vary each year), you'd say "Eastern Standard Time." But during the summer months you'd say "Eastern Daylight Time."

So many businesses get it wrong on their voicemail greetings, on the hours posted on their website, and many other places. They'll just say "We're open 9am-5pm Eastern Standard Time" and they leave that message active all year round. So what are you saying, your company doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time? Their message is wrong more than half the year.

Don't want to think about it? Here's the amazingly simple workaround. If you're only communicating with a U.S. audience, just say "Eastern Time." If you don't use that middle word, you'll be less precise but you'll always be correct. People should always know what you mean. (The only place that might backfire is in a couple exceptions like Arizona and Hawaii, the only two states where Daylight Saving Time isn't observed. A few U.S. territories also don't observe DST. But unless you're communicating specifically with one of those groups, the general rule applies.)

Now if you're communicating with a potentially global audience -- let's say a webcast -- you should make sure you're specifying Standard or Daylight. Alongside that, you should also list your offset from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the standard upon which all time zones are based and most people outside the U.S. should be able to calculate from.

So if I'm holding a webcast today (in April) in New York at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time, here's how I'd write the time:

2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4, New York); or
2:00 p.m. EDT (GMT -4, New York)

Note what I've done here. I've told them the time zone (Eastern Daylight Time or EDT), I've also given them an offset from GMT (4 hours behind GMT), and I've told them the major city of the time zone (New York). With this info, just about everyone should be able to figure out when the webcast starts.

Of course be careful when you're doing this, because the offset changes from Standard to Daylight time. If it was December and Daylight Saving Time wasn't in effect, the offset changes to (GMT -5, New York). Remember, GMT never changes.

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty simple. And I'm amazed schools don't teach this stuff -- or at least many people didn't learn it. You might look at all this and say, "But Michael, is anyone really going to get confused if I get EST and EDT mixed up? Won't they know what I mean?" If you're dealing with a U.S. audience, they'll probably figure it out and you won't have much confusion. But some people will notice your error. Why make a simple mistake like this when it's easily avoidable? You don't want to seem dumb in your marketing communications, do you?