Attract a Crowd
The adrenaline-fueled two minutes of any race is great, but surely Saturday’s record-breaking crowd contributed to the raw excitement that was the 2012 Derby. Work your marketing magic (mint juleps optional) to put bodies in the stands and fuel excitement for your webinar.

Open Fast
Bodemeister grabbed the crowd’s attention early, turning in the fastest first five splits in Derby history. Reel your audience in with an equally attention-grabbing webinar opening.

Close Strong
I’ll Have Another closed strong, becoming the first horse in Derby history to win from post position 19. Don’t disappoint your audience by fading in the stretch – ride your momentum all the way to the roses.

Call for Questions
Give people the chance to ask questions before the event starts. Use your webinar registration page to offer a call, or use the moments leading up to your live event to solicit questions. This will prepare you to launch the Q&A with real-world questions that are top-of-mind for people on the call.

Text Questions
Use your webinar software’s chat feature to capture questions throughout the presentation portion of your webinar. This approach can net those timely, topical points that participants might otherwise forget by the time you open the Q&A.

Verbal Questions
Verbal questions scare some presenters. They scare some participants. If you’re thinking about a live Q&A, plan ahead – for both sides’ sakes. Some presenters are outstanding off the cuff; others prefer to get their ducks in a row in advance. Give your presenters the opportunity to offer their best insights by preparing a list of anticipated questions in advance of your webinar. Some participants have great questions but can’t bear to break the ice. If you know a participant or two on the call (colleague, customer, industry expert, etc.) consider asking them in advance to get the ball rolling with a question or two. Typically, once a good conversation starts it snowballs.

Screening
There are times when it’s fair to screen questions. Sometimes participants ask questions out of scope for the topic at hand. Sometimes an internal questioner raises an internal question on an external webinar. Fair enough. But cherry picking just the softballs and screening all the hardballs? That’s a no-no. Hit a couple of those hardballs out of the park and you might just enhance your credibility with your audience.

Got a great idea for getting great questions? Tell us about it.

Make a copy

You’ve got a file cabinet packed with copies of W2s, receipts and past returns for a reason. Having a copy of your webinar presentation is an equally good idea. Imagine your computer crashes 10 minutes in to your presentation. Scenario A: You “vamp” while attempting to reboot. I’ve been in this audience. It’s not pretty. Scenario B: You make a folksy remark about Murphy’s Law and ask your colleague or producer to take presenting rights and advance the slides while you continue seamlessly from the hard copy you printed just in case.

Don’t wait until the last second

You won’t see me on the 11:00 newscast live from the Post Office on April 17 (procrastinators of the world, rejoice in those two extra days!) but I’m not done, either. If you leave your webinar preparation to the eleventh hour a) it shows in the delivery and b) you have zero margin for error. Leave enough time to make sure your deck is loaded and looks good, your audio and web connections are solid, and everyone is clear on the event flow. Your audience will thank you for a polished, professional event.

Prepare to be audited

Webinar technology can do it all. You can record your event. You can keep the chat log. You can save your whiteboard. Should you? Did you? Consider the implications of keeping content before your event, and make certain to configure your webinar software accordingly.

Learned any lessons (webinar or tax) the hard way? Let us know in the comments.

Make It Up

Whether you’re using the external camera Fast Company suggests or a high-quality internal one, image quality can be uncomfortably good. (Can you image Nixon/Kennedy in HD?) A little makeup magic will make a world of difference in what your audience sees and perceives.

Don’t Make It Up

You’ve planned your message, right? Winging it leads to likes, ums, ahs, as I was sayings and other fillers that detract from your message. Don’t make it up as you go. Make a plan, walk through it beforehand, and your audience will see a credible presenter.

Wardrobe

You’ve taken the advice on stripes, colors and prints. You know whether suits or shirt sleeves are appropriate for your audience. Your attire is camera-ready. Before the show goes on, check the little details. If you have the choice of glasses or contacts, choose contacts; avoid glare and let your audience see you, not your frames. There’s nothing wrong with jewelry, unless it’s the wrong jewelry. Swing-y and sparkly pieces can create annoying reflections; dangly can be audibly jangly and disruptive. Err on the side of modesty and, when in doubt, remove it.

Reading Is Fundamental

But it’s fundamentally wrong in the case of a video conference. And don’t kid yourself – the audience can tell. You’re an expert on the topic and you’re using the medium to humanize the message; don’t undercut that effort by reading from a script. Talking points are fine, run-throughs are recommended; put them together and you’ll appear confident but not scripted.

Sit. Stay. Good Presenter.

Okay, nobody is asking you to sit with a biscuit on your nose for the duration, but consider your movements carefully. The first time I watched myself back on camera my head swiveled like I was at Wimbledon, my eyes flicked around the room like an auctioneer’s, my hands never stopped moving and I felt seasick. The camera amplifies action, so use smaller gestures less frequently (another place a run-through comes in handy!) than you would in real life and your audience will follow your message, not your movements.

Committed a video conferencing faux pas? Have another pet peeve? Tell us about it.

Physical

Start at home. Or the office, or wherever you’re teaching from. Sure, your webinar software should let you mute participants to minimize background noise, but that’s the easy and obvious fix. Paper shuffling, coffee gulping, office background noise, even a static-y headset can all grate on your students over time. Create a quiet environment for yourself, and share that peace with your students.

Functional

You’ve set up a functional workspace for your event – computers and phone lines at the ready, backup copies of instructional materials just in case, glass of water, etc. Your students are everywhere. Can you take a few moments at the beginning of your class to help them create a similarly functional environment? Invite them to consider a question key to the topic at hand while taking two or three minutes adjust their environments for productive learning. (Get a coffee, clear the desktop, shut the office door….)

Psychological

In a webinar format, this is a frequent concern for trainers – how to keep the many and varied distractions pulling at students from disrupting the learning process. It doesn’t hurt to ask, for starters. Students are in your class for a reason – whether mandatory content, perceived value or otherwise – so appeal to their good intentions. Commit to the timeframe (and honor it) and ask that they do the same by shutting down their inbox and IM, switching off their mobiles, setting office lines to DND and closing office doors.

Have a trick for creating a productive webinar learning environment? We’d love to hear your comment.

Be Prepared

The best webinar hosts must’ve been Scouts in their youths, because they’re always prepared. They plan every aspect of the event – topics, speakers, agenda, promotion, logistics, etc. – and they leave enough runway to do it right. They expect the unexpected – overbooked executives dropping out of or off of meetings with little or no notice, power or internet outages, etc. – and they make contingency plans so that the show goes on.

Do It Right

Every day, in a thousand little ways, the best places to work show employees they are valued. All-hands webinars are no exception. The best hosts set up professional A/V so that remote attendees can easily and clearly hear speakers. They incorporate quality visuals, and make all materials readily accessible. They encourage remote employees to be part of the meeting – sharing ideas, participating in Q&A, etc. They keep the lines of communication open, making all-hands webinars a regular and valued part of the culture.

Momentum

Popick keeps the momentum going with post all-hands pizza, and that’s where many webinar hosts fall down. Don’t send your webinar attendees a virtual pizza, please, but do challenge yourself to keep momentum. The best hosts schedule follow-on meetings, or split company-wide webinars into departmental breakouts, or launch polls or surveys post-webinar to keep the buzz going.

Found a trick for making your webinar flourish? Know how to keep momentum? Share your idea in the comments.

While pondering this question I headed over to LinkedIn. More than 51,000 updates, 17,000 people and 522 companies were returned by a keyword search for webinar. But there were only 14 open questions – less than 1/10 the number of open marketing questions, by way of context.

According to MarketingSherpa, more than 60% of business decision-makers attended a webinar in the last month. According to MarketingProfs, marketers have a 70% confidence rating in webinar effectiveness. We’re hosting webinars, we think they’re worth it, and the right people are coming. So why aren’t we looking for opportunities to improve?

The tagline for a rotisserie product I dimly remember seeing on late-night infomercials when my youngest was a wee, up-all-night thing sums up my theory – set it and forget it. We paid for the research, we have the white paper, the subject matter expert is available to speak, so we’ll have a webinar. Set it and forget it. But bullets on a slide and droning audio just don’t cut it anymore. They never should’ve, but in a social media, multimedia, signal vs. noise world, audiences demand more. Has the research been translated into a deck that’s effective for the webinar format? Does the white paper presentation engage attendees a world away? Is the speaker used to the visual cues of bodies in the seats, and is s/he ready to read a remote audience? How can we give the audience more? How can we make the webinar better?

We may not anoint you a guru, but we invite you to share your expert advice in the comments.

Thirty Seconds

If you doubt the assertion that “half a minute is forever,” set your timer. While it’s ticking, think about the people on the other side of the computer. You know they didn’t close IM, right? Their cellphones are not switched off. Their office doors aren’t closed and locked. Is what you’re saying more compelling than all those other inputs…combined?

Boredom

You can’t see them and you can’t hear them, so you’ve got to take their temperature. Use interactive tools to gauge whether they’re “still with you.”

What’s In It For Me?

“Station WIIFM” is funny, but for those of us who aren’t sales people it’s also a handy little reminder that every webinar attendee is there for a reason – his/her own. If you put your audience’s needs at the forefront of your webinar planning, you can spend less time competing for their attention and more time getting results.

One of our clients compiled the (many!) questions from a compliance training series to create an internal FAQ site related to the issue. Webinar hashtags have sparked great conversations. We’ve seen webinar polls form the basis for everything from blog posts to white papers. Slide decks have been placed behind lead capture forms and on public sites such as SlideShare.

Gotten more mileage from your webinar? Share your secrets in the comments.