Webinar Platform Buying Guide
If you need to offer webcasts that will allow you to capture registrant (aka “lead”) information, in addition to recording your webcast for future use, then this guide is for you. Hopefully, you all may learn from my stumbles; it hasn’t been an easy journey. The following guide includes questions to ask of webinar platform vendors followed by additional information regarding what to look for, pros and cons of various options, benefits of various features, and more.

Lead Capture and Reporting

• How does webinar registration function?
• Can I tailor the registration form?

Generally the longer the form, the greater the risk registrants will drop-off. However, longer forms provide the opportunity to gather vital information. Your webinar platform should provide the capability for you to easily decide what best fits your organization and to customize the form accordingly.

• Does the platform enable me to capture lead info on my own site?

This is helpful if you’d like registrants to be entered automatically into your CRM system for follow up. Additionally, it is nice to drive the traffic to your own site to strengthen the association with your brand, encourage visits to other pages, and assist your search engine optimization efforts.
Alternatively, you may benefit from a service that manages this for you. In either case, it’s an important decision criterion.

• Even if the registration form can appear on my site, do registrants need to register with, and accept the terms and conditions of another organization?

Some services provide embed code you can include on your site to enable registration with the webinar platform to occur transparently.

• Does the platform offer attendance reports?

While it’s important to gather the information of all those who registered for your webinar, it’s equally vital to know who subsequently showed up. Additionally, the length of attendance at a given webinar is important & should be recorded and readily available

• Does the service consolidate registrants and attendants?

You do not want to have to manually de-dupe this info yourself, trust me! Receiving one .csv file with registrants and another with attendees is not fun.

Webcasting Functionality

• Does the platform offer audio through phone, computer (VoIP) or both?

I was using a platform that offered only phone audio and received a few complaints. One would-be attendant emailed me that it was “very ‘90s technology.” I must admit, I see his point.
According to On24, they’ve held more than 32,000 webinars in 2009 and although they often offer both options, approximately 93 percent of attendees selected VoIP audio. As a webinar attendee, it happens to be my personal preference as well, so as a webinar platform purchaser, I consider availability of VoIP more important than phone.

• What is the chat functionality like?

Flexible chat features enable you to offer better customer service to your webinar attendees. I consider it crucial to have the ability for numerous people to reply to chats, as well as the ability to reply via chat to one individual attendee. Attendees typing, “I can’t hear the audio/ see the slides,” is inevitable. You will encounter this complaint – and you don’t want your presenter disturbed with this sort of house-keeping. Nor do you want to interrupt the flow of the presentation, for example, to explain again that the slides will be e-mailed out tomorrow.

• What’s the actual presentation platform like?
• Can I offer polls to attendees and record responses?
• Are there limits to the number of polls I can present and the number of options per poll?
• Can I share a file that I must upload first or show my entire desktop?

The latter is helpful for certain types of presentations, such as walking attendees through navigation of a software product or website.
Consider the look and feel of the actual webcast windows. This is where I’ve seen the least variation amongst vendors. Personally, R2i doesn’t consider the ability to dynamically highlight items on the screen very important. But, hey, it’s nice, so it warrants a bullet.

• Does the platform have multiple presenter capability?
• Can numerous people in numerous locations present?
• If so, what is the maximum number of presenters?
• How does this work and is it clear who is ‘driving’ things by pushing slides?

Recording and Subsequent Promotion

• Am I able to easily, seamlessly record the complete webcast (slides along with audio)?
• Am I able to obtain a file with the recorded webinar for use in other locations, such as YouTube?
• Does the webinar platform provide a promotional venue? Can new leads find my content by exploring webcasts within an existing community?

While this may not be a primary goal of purchasing webcasting services, it is a nice advantage when available.

• Do you offer automated sending of e-mails to remind registrants of upcoming webcast sessions, and e-mail the recording after the session?
• If so, do those e-mails contain an Outlook calendar file?

Pricing, etc.

• Is there predictability in pricing?

I’ve seen extra fees charged for items such as per-minute, per-user phone access, extra webcast attendees, extra webcasting minutes, video files of webcast recordings – or extra fees for particular formats and more.

• Customer Service

I submitted an online info request form twice now for a Platform-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named: once in October, once in April. I have not yet received one return phone call or e-mail! This company is no longer in the running here at R2i.
Technical questions seem to be inevitable. Responsive and helpful contact people are an important buying criterion. I’ve also granted bonus points for those who offer me best practices tips. Likewise, I’ve deducted points for charging “training fees” upon set up for what should be a user-friendly technology.

Now a unique business proposition has arisen. Various web technologies have provided brands with the ability to become publishers and many have done so successfully. Among the most successful members of Twitter are Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga; certainly best classified as “brands” rather than “publishers.” Now that celebrities have achieved huge numbers of engaged followers, other brands are taking notice and seeking to pay to advertise within their newly created communities. In other words, celebrities are brands, and these brands have become publishers, and also in some cases have now become paid advertisers. Tweets from celebrities can be considered personal endorsements and therefore represent a potentially lucrative advertisement platform.

Twice in the past week I heard of this phenomenon. The first instance was the infamous Andy Dick stating on The Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM Satellite radio that he has 55,000 followers on Twitter and was offered money for his tweets. I believe the sum he mentioned was $2,500 (although I may be remembering incorrectly). Next, again on Sirius XM, I heard that Limp Bizkit front-man Fred Durst tweeted that he too was offered money for his tweets. Apparently dismayed at the prospect of becoming a walking advertisement, Durst stated that he is leaving Twitter for good.

At this news, my colleague stated that he would imagine a smart advertiser would approach a celebrity covertly and offer a fee in exchange for subtle, occasional endorsements of their product along with silence about the existence of this arrangement. I certainly agree. Such a deal would have a much higher probability of success. Considering the logic of such an advertising scenario, it is entirely likely that it is already occurring. The only reason we are aware of such specific examples is because Fred Durst declined the offer and subsequently informed his followers, and Andy Dick, well, I can’t attempt to explain his behavior.

So, this leaves us all in doubt. If a celebrity happens to profess fondness for a particular product, we have no way of knowing if his opinion was influenced by several hundred thousand dollars. I can tell you, if I was responsible for marketing a B2C product targeted toward women, getting onto the “Oprah’s Favorite Things” episode would be a goal of mine.