Amazon.com's A/B Testing Approach
Using Social Media For Institutional Knowledge Transfer

Social Media Tips To Energize Webinars

In my career as a marketer I’ve often found good evidence for using webinars as a lead generation tool, a company provides valuable content that is interactive and compelling in several formats, visuals and sound. Attendees can save time and effort by logging in online instead of flying to an expensive conference and hotel, miles from their home office. Webinars are web 1.0 but marketers can easily make them web 2.0.

When injecting social media into a webinar I’d start by thinking about what exactly the terms, web 2.0 and social media mean? Both terms describe websites that allow the active participation and sharing of information among a community. As such when designing a webinar you have to think about how you can use social media to achieve your goals. Typical goals are (1) increasing attendance at the webinar, (2) providing amazing value to participants to the extent that it converts attendees into customers, and (3) encouraging attendees to share the knowledge and content from the webinar with their colleagues.

In achieving those goals a digital marketer has to think about how to use social media in three steps (1) preparing for the webinar, (2) during the webinar, and (3) follow up after the webinar.

The guiding principle about using social media and webinars is giving webinar participants the ability to ask questions, and share information within the context of the webinar. Allow people to ask questions and share information both publicly and anonymously. 

Here are some more tips on how to use social media throughout the webinar stages.

Preparing the webinar with social media

1) Twitter Profile Retweets: At the registration for a webinar ask attendees for their twitter information. Promote attendees participation on a public website if desired, however, make the default non public because of privacy issues. Once attendees have signed up, ask attendees to retweet the webinar within the registration thank you page.

2) Valuable Content: In today’s world of social media, people are going to have back chatter about your event no matter what you do, make it simple to sign up for the event to capture attendee information, make sure you let people know they will receive additional valuable information for signing up to the event. Offer them something and you will get their contact information in return.

3) #hashtag Marketing: Associate a short hashtag with the webinar. You have as choice here, either make the hashtag unique to your company, event or webinar, if you plan an developing a series of webinars I’d seriously consider taking this approach, but if your brand needs a boost from the community tap into industry related #hashtags that will identify your event with the associated industry. A #hashtag in twitter is a word, phrase or abbreviation with the hashtag symbol # at the front of the word, when using a #hashtag attendees and people following posts and conversations about an event or idea can use twitter search to list all references to the hashtag and as a result see all related conversations.

4) Social Media Thought Leadership: Consider featuring social media writers from your industry in the webinar, conduct interviews with the thought leaders a few weeks before the webinar and post part of those interviews. Chris Brogan and Radian6’s first twebinar series was tremendously successful because social media thought leaders were asked their opinion about questions in social media running up to the twebinar event. The video produced great content, and attracted the attention of the people who were interviewed, they were almost guaranteed to watch and promote the event. Use the same tactic in your own webinar interview thought leaders and feature their content in your webinar, by promoting colleagues and competitors they will have a greater likelihood to having an interest in what you have to say. Make sure you pick a topic that is current and an industry discussion topic where there’s still not a consensus about what works. Your work should help the community to answer questions, educate the industry and take a leadership position in what will work for the industry.

 Twebinar 1

5) Bio Credibility: Put pictures and bios of the presenters on the webinar write up. Ask the presenters a series of simple questions running up to the webinar, write up their answers, and retweet them. The goal here is to create more background on the presenter’s credibility for giving the presentation. Also, include the social media contact information for each presenter, especially their twitter address; make it easy for participants to contact presenters running up to the webinar. Thanks to Jillian Koeneman for ideas about adding a twitter profile.

6) Partner With Media: Build a partnership or advertise with your important industry media sponsors
- Share This: Pass it on, or share with a colleague, provide people with a way to share your webinar with their social networks. Create share this buttons with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Think about the important social networks in your community, include them.

7) Tweet and blog the Webinar: Use your existing social media channels to promote the event, ask people to retweet the event, and connect with colleagues and friends directly to ask them to help you get the word out about the event. Half of social media is about relationship; you have to have already formed relationships with colleagues in social media prior to the event. If so people will be much more likely to share your event if you’ve helped them.

During the webinar

1) TweetChatRooms: During the webinar give people the ability to follow along any conversation with services like tweetchat, a tweet chat room where attendees can sign up and easily follow the twitter discussion in a webpage room, so that people can follow the webinar. Radian6 a social media monitoring company pioneered the concept of the twebinar. Radian6 uses a recent webinar a twitter chat room tool to focus the conversation but also enable people to promote the ongoing event to their followers as they attend in the webinar.

2) Hosts: Whether you have one or four presenters, make sure you have a team of hosts responsible for introducing the presenters, and looking for questions within the webinar technology and on social media.

3) Video: Consider live streaming the event, use tools like Ustream or Tinychat. http://tinychat.com/

After the webinar

1) Valuable Content: Prerecord the webinar, and post the link immediately after the published event. Provide a link to a content marketing center, so people can access both the webinar content and additional content. Also record the event and get that content up with questions as soon as possible.

2) Poll: Survey your attendees after the webinar, don’t ask too many questions, ask what was good, ask went wrong, and how you can improve.

3) Ask For Commentary: Tell people you will feature people’s live blog posts of the event in your content center. Promote attendees and they will promote your content in a blog post.

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