Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
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AccuConference
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http://www.accuconference.com
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Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
I. Plan a Successful Webinar ........................................................................................ 2
a. When should you use a webinar? ............................................................................. 3
b. Which type of webinar to use? ................................................................................. 4
i. Conference call .............................................................................................. 4
ii. Conference call w/web capabilities .................................................................. 5
iii. Video conference ........................................................................................... 7
c. Picking the day and time ......................................................................................... 8
d. How to get the word out ......................................................................................... 9
e. Webinar options ..................................................................................................... 11
i. External help or Do it yourself? ....................................................................... 11
ii. Lecture Mode ................................................................................................ 13
iii. Recording ..................................................................................................... 14
iv. Extras to make the webinar special ................................................................. 15
f. Other details to think about .................................................................................... 16
2. Setup a Successful Webinar .....................................................................................
a. Technical preparations ...........................................................................................
b. Meeting preparations ............................................................................................
c. Hosting preparations .............................................................................................
d. Testing, testing, testing ..........................................................................................
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Introduction
Meetings have been around for almost all of recorded human history.
The only things that have changed over the years are more options on
how to meet and, of course, what we talk about. Webinars are meetings
at their most basic, but it is how they let you meet that makes them
special. Webinars shine when the meeting participants are not in the
same country, state, city, or even in the same room. They allow you to
convey information almost as good and in some cases better than a
face-to-face meeting.
Technology has gotten us to the point that setting up and having a
webinar is easy and intuitive. However, there are many ways to improve
your meetings that go far beyond technology. In this eBook, we will take
an in depth look at the before, during, and after of a webinar, as well
as any tips that can improve the webinar experience for you or your
participants.
The purpose of all this is to provide you with an all encompassing guide
in the hopes that every webinar you host will be a successful one.
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1.
Plan a
Successful
Webinar
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i. Conference call
Conference calls are like a telephone call in that they are audioonly meetings. However, they go far beyond the phone or even
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If you are interested in taking your conference calls to new heights,
you cant go any higher at the current level of technology than
with a video conference. Adding video to your conference call
adds a new connection to your virtual meeting. You can see a
persons body language, their mood, and general disposition. A
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scheduling a face-to-face meeting. All of the same pros and cons are
there to consider, with the notable exception of travel time to and
from the meeting. If you plan on scheduling a regular meeting, some
general things to consider are:
Unless the meeting is to orient your people for the week, avoid
Mondays; especially if you are meeting with clients.
Plan for meetings set right before lunch to always end on time.
There may also be a higher level of distracted participants as their
hunger grows.
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To help avoid this from happening, keep the email short with a boldtype title in the subject bar and on the first line. Give them the basics:
who, what, when, why and leave it at that. Any other information
specific to the webinar should be added as an attachment. If you can
add an Outlook Calendar item to the email, this will not only help to
call attention to your email, but also facilitate getting the person to
join your webinar.
An interesting idea is to use party or event planning sites such as
evite. These sites help you create a custom invitation page with lists
of people who were invited, who accepted and who didnt. It also
sends out invitation emails that stand out in an inbox.
Registration pages are an excellent idea to handle many participants,
especially if they are clients or potential customers. A registration
page is basically an internet form where people fill out their
information to receive the webinar dial-in number and conference
code. Of course you still have to email, phone, or advertise to get
people to go to the registration page. If you think a registration page
might work for you, keep these things in mind:
e. Webinar options
A webinar could be something totally new to some participants.
The following options will not only set your meeting apart, but
give participants a memorable experience. Consider these options
as opportunities to make a statement through your meeting, while
making your participants feel valued and appreciated.
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unmuted. If you take the call out of Lecture Mode, all lines are
unmuted at the same time and everyone is free to speak.
Deciding whether or not to use Lecture Mode is not a difficult
decision. If you have ten or fewer people on the call, then Lecture
Mode might not be needed. More than ten, simply for sound
quality, it is recommended that you use Lecture Mode.
iii. Recording
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the codes for the original conference and hear what went on. You
can even distribute the conference codes to people other than
the ones you originally invited, so that they can hear it as well.
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2.
Setup a
Successful
Webinar
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NS
a. Technical preparations
Depending on what kind of webinar you choose to have, technical
preparations can differ. However, for all webinars, the phone part
will be the same (even though there isnt much to prepare for). One
idea is for yourself and your participants to use a landline. Landlines
are a better choice than cell phones in terms of sound quality and
reliability. Telephone headsets are recommended for comfort and
ease of use, and you should make sure your headset is in good
working order. If you choose to use a wireless handset with your
landline, check to make sure it is fully charged before the webinar.
If you are doing a video conference, a major component is software.
This isnt as large an obstacle as it may sound. When you first click
on the provided link for the video conference, an install wizard will
come up. All that is necessary then is to follow the prompts and the
programming will take care of the rest. The software will download
and install itself fairly quickly, but it is still a good idea to do this
process before the webinar. This way, if there are any problems,
they can be taken care of then and not as you are trying to start your
meeting.
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but you also want to prepare for the unanticipated. For example, if
you are doing the webinar from your home, you should keep in mind
that your kids could burst in, or your dog might suddenly bark at a
noise down the street. Some things you just cant avoid, but you can
know where your mute button is and be ready to use it if need be.
For a video conference, location is important, but also what is in that
location. What exactly can the camera see? Is your desk cluttered?
Your participants will see what you show them, so think about what
messages about you the camera will convey. A clean and neat working
area says good things. Another thought is that while a picture on your
desk might be hilarious to you, it could be misconstrued by someone
else.
What about your background? You should have a neutral background
behind you without anything on the walls. If there is something on
the wall that you cant do anything about, try to position your camera
so that your head is by itself when compared to the background. How
you dress is another thing to consider on video. For the best view
of you, avoid wearing all dark or all light colors. You should avoid
complex patterns as well. Try to wear solid color pastels, or mix solid
darks with lights.
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c. Hosting preparations
As the host of your webinar, you are responsible for so many things.
From the moment you send out invites, be prepared to answer
questions about the schedule, technical aspects of the webinar, and
agenda items, just to name a few. While some forethought will take
care of these questions, there are other things you can do as a host to
prepare for your webinar.
First and perhaps most important is a solid agenda. This list not only
tells what you will be meeting about, but why, and how, and the time
allotted. A good agenda is detailed and scheduled to the minute.
It will be referenced, not only by yourself, but by your participants
before and during the webinar. The agenda will help keep your
meeting on track, and provide cues to you and your speakers when it
is time to wrap things up.
Introductions
Agenda
icebreakers
go
time
Q&A
Polls / chat
-15 minutes
Last minute
details
pre-conference
wrap up
action items
final thanks
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Take your time when building the agenda. You should have two
versions: one for yourself and one for the participants with less
details of course. On your agenda you should include:
Alternatives to fill up extra Q&A time, should you have the need
As indicated above, the agenda isnt just for your benefit. Once
completed, create a sparse version with time indicators to send out
to your participants. This will not only help them prepare for the
meeting, it will also get their minds ready for questions and help
them stay focused throughout the meeting.
Speaking of questions, when preparing for your webinar, you
should envision some of the questions that your participants will
have. Imagine what they will ask and then answer them aloud. Take
notes during your answers and review them. Did you say what you
wanted to say? Do your answers truly convey the information your
participants will need?
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A video conference will have controls for both the sound and audio,
but are easy to use nonetheless. Take your time to test out each
function and play around with it. Utilize the video quality controls to
make sure you look your best. Take turns with your friend to gesture
and speak into the camera to get a feel for what looks good and what
doesnt. Keep going until you are comfortable with what you see.
Practice speaking until you can talk while mostly looking into the
webcam.
Web conference features and controls are not too different from
conference calls or video conferences, but you should test them
anyway. Start a whiteboard and play a game. Play with the controls
until you can easily save, wipe clean, or augment what youve drawn.
Start the desktop sharing and get feedback from your friend. Work
on a document or spreadsheet together. You will see many familiar
things, but during a web conference, things are a little different.
If you know about the controls and particulars of a webinar in
advance, your meetings will run much smoother. As always, while
you are testing your webinar, if you have any questions or issues,
now is the best time to speak with your webinar provider.
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3.
Execute a
Successful
Webinar
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After the initial greetings and introductions, its time to go over the
agenda. This is important even if you have distributed the agenda
to your participants. They may have lost their copy, or dont have
it handy. Mainly though, the reason to go over the agenda is to
ground the meeting and express that there is a plan and you are
not here to waste anyones time.
The run- through of the agenda doesnt need to be a big ordeal.
Simply go over who will be talking about what, in what order,
and for how long. Dont forget to point out break periods. The
reason for doing this is to help the participants stay attuned to
the meeting. They are less apt to get lost if they know where they
are and whats coming next.
This is also why you should do a quick summary of whats left of
the agenda after each speaker or section of the meeting. Again
this is to help keep your participants orientated and paying
attention to your message.
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around and tell each person they can have only three things on
the list and ask them what they are. Give them thirty seconds.
This is good for finding out peoples thinking processes,
especially in a time crunch.
First or Worst Go around and ask each person to tell their first
or worst job. This helps to spark conversation and have fun
commenting on things they have done.
Ball Pass When inviting everyone to the meeting, ask that they
have a tennis ball handy. Have everyone put the ball behind the
camera or computer. Then call out someones name and gently
bounce your ball past the camera. The person whose name was
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called should reach forward and pick up their ball. The person
with the ball should say a few things about themselves, then
call out a name and bounce their ball out of view.
i. Time management
have made a promise of sorts when you told them the timeline
of your meeting and you dont want to break that promise at the
end. If you do go over the time you originally allotted, participants
who have rearranged schedules to attend your meeting may feel
especially put out and quite possibly will not return for your next
meeting. Likewise, any participant client, employee, or friend
could become despondent if the meeting runs long and has no
end in sight. You stand to lose their attention and enthusiasm,
now and in future meetings.
A well run meeting is one that is on time. Doing so lets the
participant know that you feel their time is valuable and you
dont want to waste it. And they will appreciate this. But even the
best scheduled webinar can get derailed; its how you get it back
on track that matters.
There are several hot potential derailment spots to be aware of.
The first and perhaps most delicate is towards the end of guest
speakers lectures. You asked them to speak at your meeting, but
you dont want to go over on time. A good way of dealing with this
situation is in the prevention department. During pre-conference,
talk with your speaker and discuss their time allotment. Some
speakers will ask you to give them five or one minute warnings.
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Some prefer you just let them know when to wrap things up. Even
if they have no preference, you have set the stage for letting them
know that you will be stepping in if they go long. This way, they
will not only be prepared, they may even be grateful to you for
helping them not to be seen as long-winded.
The other major derailment hazard is during Q&A. Whether
you are taking the questions or a speaker is, you still need to be
prepared to step in. Most speakers will probably be averse to
cutting someone off as it isnt their meeting, but they might also
be the one going long. Either way, you need to be ready. If you
have a questioner going long, wait for a lull in the question then
speak up:
If the questioner keeps asking question after question, you can
jump in and say thank you for all those questions, but we have
others waiting. Another idea is to say they have only time for
one question.
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If the speaker is going on too long with a question, jump in with
a quick summary tied to a question that only requires a short
answer. Then go to the next question.
The whole idea of a meeting is to get your point across, but if your
audiences attention wanders for whatever reason, your message
is lost. So keeping them involved is crucial. If you feel that people
are zoning out, you can pause things to do an impromptu Q&A
session. Not only will this pull people out of their reverie, it might
also bring out thoughts that someone might otherwise have lost.
If you feel that normally your meetings attention levels tend to
sag after the beginning, maybe you should include a PowerPoint
presentation in each meeting. You could plan the slides to
correspond with what is going on every ten minutes so that just
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noise
as
well
as
removes
the
occasional,
Web
conferences
add
so
much
more
to
conferences.
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While you talk, utilize the fact that they can see you. Gesture
on important points, or hold up the report you are talking
about. Make sure to move a bit slower than usual to avoid
blurring on their screens.
In the last minutes of the meeting, you can sum up what was
talked about and tie it to the main purpose of the meeting. This
helps to cement the points made by you and your speakers. If
assignments or action items were assigned, this is a good time to
quickly go over them as well.
Make sure you have enough time to do a good job of wrapping
things up. Budget about five minutes to give yourself plenty of
time. Two to three minutes before your last five minutes, start
getting the meeting back under your personal control.
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Its been said that when you exit one place, you are simply entering
another. Part of concluding your meeting well is to ensure a
beginning in another meeting. With colleagues and employees,
your emphasis on goals accomplished and the major things to do
next will reinforce this meeting and begin to energize the next.
With clients and potential customers, you can use the conclusion
to get them fired up. Tell them what to do next and what your next
steps are. End on a good note and encourage participants that
there will be more positives in the future.
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4.
Going Beyond
a Successful
Webinar
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hotel, and traveling. Compare that to dropping what you were doing
ten minutes before a webinar to call in, and going back to work after
you hang up the phone. If out of town meetings are a big portion of
your budget, webinars may be a life saver to your bottom line.
Huge cost and time savers dont have to be the only reasons to use
a webinar instead of a face-to-face meeting. Local meetings can be
improved upon as well. Even if a meeting is in a building only fifteen
minutes away, you should factor everything involved in getting to
your car, driving, parking, and walking to the meeting. That usually
leads to at least an hour of wasted time then dont forget you
have to go back. Multiply that by all of the participants involved
and you stand to lose a days worth of man hours. Factor in all the
gasoline involved getting everyone to the meeting and it can get
pretty expensive. Just think of all the pollution that can be avoided
by replacing a local meeting with a webinar its the greenest kind of
meeting available.
b. Better management through webinars
With big companies or even little ones with branches, it can be easy
to lose track of people. Meetings are a good way to keep in touch
with your people, stay current with what they are doing, and keep
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them on the right track. The problem with meetings is that to have
one, you have to stop work. There is also a tendency to use all the
time budgeted, especially if its a rare meeting. With webinars, your
employees dont have to leave their work area. The can just join the
webinar and go right back to work afterwards.
It doesnt have to just be update meetings. You can use webinars as
an integral part of your work process. If more than two employees
are separated by any kind of distance, there is great temptation to
replace true communication with emails and instant messaging.
While this works on a basic level, the potential for miscommunication
or omissions are high. To avoid this, you can setup a special webinar
line for certain groups of employees. When a project change is made,
get a person from each affected department into a webinar. They will
get on the same page much faster and may even come up with better
idea, spot a flaw, or solve a problem. They have their whole desk at
their fingertips, and all without the hassle of going to a meeting.
c. Increase Sales
Webinars have great potential for increasing a companys sales. They
can be used at each step of the process as well as helping to grow a
relationship with your customers. Webinars help a company to stand
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out and make communicating with its customers a new and fresh
experience. It can also bring the company to the customer instead
of making them come to it. A webinar is a great way to distribute
information, but it also can create and nurture relationships.
Once you get people interested in attending your webinar, you can
turn that interest into leads. Set up a registration page that trades
a code to the conference for some contact and sales information.
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Have operators answer your calls and ask some questions before
letting them into the conference. Not only will you find out who is
interested in what you have to say, youll also find out a bit about
them as well.
No matter how you get potential customers into their initial
webinars, you now have the information you need to invite them
to more company-specific webinars.
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v. Generating referrals
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Whether it be meeting with a client and experts all around the world,
or simply having a quick chat with managers in five states, webinars
are changing how we do business for the better.
Take the simple recording feature. Alone it provides a way to preserve
and revisit all of your past meetings. This can be very helpful for many
reasons including legal, cohesiveness, or even nostalgia. Recordings
can also be used to lend a hand to clients or employees with hectic
schedules: if they missed the actual webinar, they can dial in later to
hear the recording when its convenient for them.
You can go even further with recordings. Why not do a webinar
planned from the ground up to be sold or given to prized clients?
You could sell the recording online, or offer it on a CD complete
with a copy of your PowerPoint presentation, agenda, and electronic
brochure.
Every business is unique and each could find a unique use for
webinars. The trick is to look past a webinars obvious use and see in
just how many ways it can improve your communication, your sales,
and your business practices.
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Type of webinar
Features
Agenda
o Conference call
o Operator assisted
call in
o Complete
o Web Conference
o Video Conference
o Operator in call
o Guest Speaker
o Registration Page
o Lecture Mode
o Recording
o Realistic timeline
o Breaks added
o Q&A time
o Closing remarks
o Version for
participants
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o Good Notes
o Location Quiet
Conference Call
Web Conference
Video Conference
o Use landlines
o Install webinar
software
o Install/run video
software
o Webcam installed
o Headsets work
o Wireless battery
charged
o Good video in
program
o Upload/Test
PowerPoint
o Know live
call controls
o Neutral background
o Program ready
o Opening view up
o Good apparel
and colors
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o Thank participants
o Discussed agenda
o Agenda overview
o Closing remarks
o Schedule cues
o Ice breakers
o Thank participants
o Greeting
o Speaker Introduction
o Acknowledgments
o Introduction
Conference Call
Web Conference
Video Conference
o No background
noise
o No background
noise
o No background
noise
o M u t e d w h e n n o t
speaking
o M u t e d w h e n n o t
speaking
o Correct PowerPoint
slides at
appropriate times
o E ve r yo n e i n g o o d
screen position
o E ye c o n t a c t w i t h
webcam
o Deliberate motions
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