Webcasting Yields More Leads: Proving the Value of Taking Your Conference Online

Hi I'm Erica St. Angel.

Thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar.

Delighted to introduce Sandra Sillion who is events manager

with RTC group.

And before we get into the presentation, I wanted to take

a couple seconds to talk you through some housekeeping

about the player experience that you're

watching right now.

This presentation will be available on demand

immediately after the webinar's over.

You can access it by clicking on the same link

that brought you here.

There's a little speech bubble--

might be above or below the video window-- and if at any

time during the presentation you have a question, just

click on that and you can submit it to us.

And we do ask, if you're comfortable with it, to also

include your email address.

That way, if we don't have time to answer your question

during the live webinar, we can have Sandra or Sonic

Foundry follow up with you afterwards.

And the slides will be available in a Links tab.

You'll find the PowerPoint there.

And with that, I'm going to open it up for our

presentation today, which is, Webcasting Yields More Leads,

Proving the Value of Taking Your Conference online.

I wanted to start out with having you tell us a little

bit about RTC Group.

Well, thank for having me, and I appreciate everybody being

here with us today.

The RTC Group is a sales and marketing company, and we

focus on lead generation.

And we do that through events, publications, web activities.

And we've been in business for over 20 years, and I'm

involved in the events department, and we do about 30

trade shows a year.

Great.

And today we're going to talk about a specific conference

that you did, but many of the themes that you'll talk about

today apply to several of the conferences that you work

with, and I'm sure they'll be familiar to you watching, too.

So for this conference, which is the ARM Techcon 3

conference, what were some of the challenges you were facing

as you were gearing up for the event itself?

Well, with any challenge in an event, it's always audience

acquisition and making sure that you're going to get

qualified participants coming to your show.

With the economy being an ongoing problem, getting

travel authorizations or approvals for people who want

to participate in the conference has

been a growing problem.

And so while we wanted to still get qualified leads and

a lot of people on the floor, we were trying to think of

ways on how to get them there without them actually having

to get on a plane, while also trying to embrace technology

with webcasting for events.

There are two different ways of doing a trade show.

And one is where people are taking them completely online,

and then there's another way of face to face.

Our company strongly believes in face to face trade shows.

And so, we want to try to find a way to where we

can embrace the two.

Right, and this was the technology-based conference,

so you're really looking to technology which set with the

theme, but it really wouldn't matter what the content was,

it seems like more and more conferences are looking to use

technology to reach more people online.

And so you decided to a virtual classroom.

How did that decision come about?

Well, with any conference you would normally get copies of

the presentations to any of the attendees.

So in the past we've been burning those to a D and

handing them out after the conference.

And so we wanted to do that, but we wanted to also be a

little more interactive.

In a perfect world, we would have recorded them on a video

camera, had their voice.

That is expensive and logistically a little bit

difficult to do.

And so we found Sonic Foundry, and it had the equipment to be

able to record a voice at the same time, and sync it up with

the PowerPoint presentation.

As I learned what Sonic Foundry's products were, we

developed an idea to create the virtual classroom.

It was an idea that generated as we learned what different

products were out there.

And you talked--

when we had talked before we went live today-- you were

mentioning that there are other virtual event platforms

that you considered.

But based on the face to face nature of the conference, you

felt that Event Services was a better technology choice for

your particular needs.

Yes.

There's always that a growing fear of if you put an event

completely online, then are you going to lose those people

coming to the conference?

I looked at several different products, and you go online

and they'll actually give you a virtual platform where you

actually have an entrance, and there's sponsorship banners up

on the the walls, and you have this real experience.

But really it's not a real event experience.

So we wanted to be able to get the live action of all the

conferences, in addition to having the face to face event.

And so that's why you started looking at webcasting, but

originally, that was not in your budget.

That was something you had to add in later.

Not at all.

As we sat around the round table with the steering

committee, lots of ideas go back and forth.

And we always have these dream ideas, but then we don't have

the budget to back it up.

And so we had to find a way to be able to get that live

experience of our conferences and not have the money--

the small budget-- to back it up.

You came up with a really unique ways to fund that.

Right.

So the way that we came up with it is that we have a call

for papers, and we--

for this particular conference, we have 120

sessions that we need to fill, and we probably have three

times the amount of people wanting to

submit their papers.

So what we did is, we charged the speakers for their

presentation.

So anybody that submitted a paper, we gave them an

agreement saying that, if their paper was expected at

the conference then there would be a fee attached to it.

And because of the exposure that they would be getting at

the conference, and the exposure of the virtual

costume after the conference, they saw a

lot of value in that.

And we didn't get a whole lot of kickback.

And this particular conference, you had a lot of

vendor-type--

they were people talking about technology, and who make the

technology, doing training on that.

I suspect there's people watching who maybe don't have

those types of presenters, where there may be

practitioners sharing best practices.

Do you think that this model would work for

that type of an audience?

Or have you thought about how you might, in the future,

replicate a funding model like this with

another type of venue?

I think it's really easy to go across any industry

with what we did.

What's unique about it-- about the virtual classroom--

is, the conferences has a set schedule.

So they might have a conference or a session they

want to attend in one track, and they can't get over to

another one.

It gives the opportunity to be able to attend the whole

conference without having to be able to do

it completely live.

Making choices [INTERPOSING]

And so any industry would be able to adopt this model.

Let's see, we've got some examples, I think.

Oh, so some of the decisions you had to make about the

technology, I think a lot of people say, oh what platform

are we going to use, and once you choose that

platform, it's over.

And that's really just when the decision making process

begins, I think, for many people, in terms of what

sessions, you're going to webcast, whether it's public

or locked down.

Yes, because of the nature of our industry, there's a lot of

proprietary information that they don't

want to be made public.

And so we did allow people to opt out of the recordings.

In fact, their equipment records it, but all we had to

do is delete it, and it was gone from any accessibility

from anybody.

We had a lot people opt out of any sessions that they didn't

want to be made public.

And you only to them on demand, is that right?

We only to them on demand.

And how we figure that out is that since we would give a

copy of the presentations to the attendees anyways

post-show, we made it available to anybody who

attended the conference--

press and attendees--

available first. And then a month after the event, we

began marketing to everybody else to be able to come to the

virtual classroom.

And how did roll out that, how did you let people know that

the content was available to see?

We did it through our publications and email

broadcasts.

And you could then track the clickthroughs and things, and

see that people were watching?

Yes, it was fabulous.

The platform is awesome if you ever get a chance to take a

look at it.

But it gives timestamps in real times of when they visit

the presentation, how much they watched, which slides

they watched, when they came back, when they first logged

in, with they last logged in.

And what's really unique about this information and all this

data that you get from it is that it's going to help its

choose on what papers we're going to accept next year.

And which are more popular, and which

ones are less popular.

And that's a great tip.

I've talked to some event planners where they use how

packed the room was to gauge who tho most popular speakers

are, and more increasingly, Twitter, where they'll say how

many tweets were generated.

But this way, you know how many people watched each

session and which ones got the most traction after

the event is over.

Absolutely.

Great for your program committee in terms of choosing

topics and speakers to ask back.

We have a couple questions coming in and so please just

keep on coming, and we'll queue them up and

ask them as we go.

I know one of the one was, what type of video connection

are you using, or video quality.

And so if there's other technical questions, we'll

probably answer them offline.

But keep them coming, because we get a lot of questions

about the microphones and cameras and

the platform itself.

Also wanted to know, how did the decision to finally

webcast get made?

Was there a committee that was brought together, or was it

something that one person championed within the

organization?

We so run this event off of the steering committee.

So when the idea was thrown out on the table, we went out

and we looked at every possible option that different

vendors were giving us.

And then we took a look at what was best for our needs

and our budget.

And then we made a group decision on what the options

were on the table.

And did you end up charging people for the virtual

classroom, for access to the virtual classroom?

No, absolutely not.

It's a lead-generation activity.

So once we put up online on our website, we a window that

has virtual classroom.

And you click on it.

They give us their information, and then they

gain access.

And then they can have unlimited access.

And we've left the virtual classroom opened for a six

month period of time, so we'll be closing

it in about a month.

And I think we have some examples of that here.

Maybe you could take us through--

You can see the tag right there

on the virtual classroom.

So after the one month of the event, we wanted to give

enough time for the event to happen and sink in before we

actually post it up on our website.

So once we put the button on the front of the website, we

then directed everybody through our website to the

virtual classroom, which then linked into Sonic Foundry's

platform, where they could go into the log.

And that's where you get here, in terms of the lead

generation, where it's publicly available but you're

asking people to give you the email.

Absolutely.

It is all about lead generation sales.

And we want to pre-qualify our leads as well.

And then is it sort of all the leads who logged in then were

referred back to your presenting

companies or your sponsors?

Or was it just the people who watched their particular

presentation?

It was just the people who watched their particular

presentation.

Multiple companies had multiple presentations so what

I would do is just gather the leads of who visited their

presentation and put it in a spreadsheet and email it to

them on a monthly basis.

On a monthly basis.

OK, great.

And this is an example of the catalog?

Yeah, this is a really simple catalog, it

worked out really well.

There was a lot of discussions on how we wanted it to look,

how many features that we were going to allow, and, in the

end, this worked out really well because they can search

it by a keyword.

So if there's a certain technology that they're

looking for, they'll be able to search it

in the keyword box.

If they want to do view it by presenter--

which is actually the company name--

they can filter it out through that that, or by the date of

the conference, because a lot of people can't remember--

they don't remember their presentation materials or what

it is, they might just remember one thing about it,

and they're able to look at it.

And you said you noticed that the presenting companies were

often watching their own presentation.

Oh yes, it's great.

It's a great tool.

You get to see who went back to view their own

presentation, like anybody would do.

Absolutely.

A lot of companies go back in and look at their

presentations.

And we've heard of companies, too, using them as their own

sales tools, where they'll send the link around.

Yes, what we did provide to all of the presenters--

and that was included in the price that we charge them-- is

that we would give them a copy of their presentation to be

able to post on their own websites, or used in their own

marketing way.

And they really appreciated that.

That's a great value add.

And I think you have some examples of the different

types of how the content looked as you

were streaming it.

Right.

So Microsoft was the only company that wanted to use

this particular format-- which is Silverlight--

and so we had the ability to choose which

format that we wanted.

We didn't just have to choose one player,

which was a nice feature.

They appreciated that.

You might be watching that player experience right now,

and then another one was more the classic player experience.

Right.

And in this particular side, you're going to see

that there is video.

We did choose to film our keynotes, we felt that was

really important to choose the video for that particular part

of the conferences.

Budget-wise, it was a big decision, because cameras are

a little bit more expensive and the budget was

non-existent, we chose to film what was most important.

And then for most of them, they were audio plus the

PowerPoint.

Right.

So you'll see the abstract and the title on the left, and

then the PowerPoint on the right.

And that's perfectly synced in with their voice, so it's like

you're actually there, which is a really great feature.

It's different than just getting a

presentation burned on a DVD.

And you've noticed people bouncing around, and you

mentioned the reporting statistics that people are

maybe watching parts of presentations and other parts.

Do you see--

Yes.

So people aren't navigating, necessarily, all the way

straight through.

No.

What happens when somebody first visits the site is they

jump around.

They they visit a little bit of this and a little bit of

that, and then when they come back, they might go into it a

little bit more in depth because the first time is just

an adventure.

Just browsing.

Yeah.

So any other questions that you have, please

keep them coming in.

And I have question here from Becky about tracking.

Did you find that most people would watch--

sort of covered this-- the entire presentation online?

I've heard it that people tend to not make it through the

entire recording.

Generally, how long were each presentations, and did you

find the longer or the shorter ones worked better?

It all depends on the content.

The more popular presentations, they watched

them all the way through, and then they keep coming back.

So it really depends on what material is with each

presentation.

So it's a very hot topic--

you know, a hot topic for our conference was Android, so

anything that had to do with Android, people just attacked

it and looked at it in completion, so it really

depends on the content.

And I know for live webinars, like you're watching right

now, we found that we've moved from an hour, to 45 minutes,

to 30 minutes.

Seems to be, for a live experience, that's about a

good 30-45 minute chunk.

But in the on demand, because you can pause and stop and

watch it on your own time, people can make time to

continue working on it.

So moving then on to some of the benefits that you--

you categorized the benefits into a

couple different groups.

There's some for your agency, some for your exhibitors and

partners, and also for your attendees.

Benefits.

I think that the benefit would be--

number one is that quite often when we do a trade show--

that's only once a year, as opposed to a road show--

you have your event, and then it dies until you kick up your

marketing again for the next show.

What this virtual classroom had done is it's taken our

event to an all-year round reason for people to come and

visit our website.

And so the show is over, but then we post up the virtual

classroom, we keep giving people reasons to come back to

our website.

We keep updating what's going to be happening for

our show next year.

So new programs or keynote speakers, we'll just keep

giving them reasons to come back to our website.

So that's probably the biggest benefit, is that we keep

people coming back.

Lead generation all your round.

Normally when people participate in a conference,

it's for that one day, or those two days, or those three

days, and then it's over.

Whatever you get on your little scanner

is what you've got.

And with this, it keeps the leads going on, and we keep

doing different marketing activities to get people into

the virtual classroom, not just in North

America, but worldwide.

So they have a benefit of that presentation, where they

continue getting more and more leads, that they wouldn't have

access to otherwise.

You've also had good feedback from the attendees.

Nothing formal, in terms of survey, yet, but people liked

the experience of being able to--

People like the experience.

They love the idea of putting money into a show and having a

successful show.

But then once a month they get an email

from me for more leads.

And that's what companies want.

They want fresh leads that they can try to sell to you.

And did you find your on-site attendees then went back and

watched the presentations, as well?

Yeah, we did have one-site attendees go back because the

people who didn't participate in the conference on-site were

then allowed to go in and actually look at the

conference material post-show, which was a great value.

Great.

And some of the results that you have, I know you've

doubled, at least, the number of leads that you thought you

were going to bring in, beyond just the 24/7 marketing tool,

what are some of the other things that you found had been

beneficial as part of the overall program?

I think that doubling our leads is really--

the number one thing that we got out of this is that

getting the audience acquisition target number

reached was phenomenal.

And so it left no question in our mind, is that how are we

going to take what we did this year and take it the next step

further for our next show.

And every time you send an email, you said you are seeing

an increase.

Any time we do an email broadcast, we always have a

quick uptake on the--

And those are new people registering, but also

returning people coming back to watch?

New registering, and returning people.

And how did it effect your on-site attendance?

It didn't effect it all.

That's definitely was the concern when we were choosing

which platform to choose.

Again, you don't want somebody to choose not to fly out to

the show because they can see the show online, and we didn't

see any decline at all.

And do think some of the people who are watching online

will maybe come in the future?

Have you had any--

I would like to think so.

[LAUGHTER]

Definitely.

That's one thing I noticed in Twitter.

Sometimes people say, oh, I'm watching online, but I'd love

to be there next year.

So hopefully you'll see a bump in the years that follow.

And how was the feedback that you got from your exhibitors

and you sponsors?

Over the moon.

They just thought it was a great feature and

[INTERPOSING]

definitely in for doing it again.

Do you have advice for people who are--

If you have other questions, keep them coming in, but I

know you'd had some lessons learned where it went

smoothly, but because it was the first time you did it, now

you know more.

Well as you're planning, because this was something we

chose to do midway through, we kind of scrambled to try to

find money for it.

So my biggest piece of advice is to try to build this into

your budget automatically.

I don't know how other conferences are built, but

being able to charge our speakers was the absolute best

solution, and I think that we'll definitely do that again

in the future.

Have a really good idea about what you want your platform to

look like, because we kind of learned as we went, and I

think that's just the event industry.

I think everybody's doing right now, because the

technology changes.

So there's a lot to say about getting out a sheet of paper

and saying, OK, this is what I want it to look like.

This is the demographic information I want to capture

on the registration form, what's the most important

things to get from these people that are going online.

Try to figure out what kind of information you want to get

out from it, and then build it up from there.

And did you require everybody to present who was--

it wasn't mandatory that you had to stream, or had to be

streamed, if you didn't want it to, because of the

proprietary nature.

Yeah, we made it mandatory, but we said that we would

delete the material and not put it online afterwards, just

because of the way that the process works.

And what was really unique about it is that they might

have just wanted one slide out of the presentation deleted,

not the whole thing.

So they have the ability to actually edit out that

particular slide, and then there's not an issue.

And then course, they can contact the company afterwards

to get any information.

And how was it in terms of the workload?

Planning conference is enough work, and then you add

something like this on top of it.

Did you find that it changed the scope or the staffing

requirements for the event?

Not at all.

Sonic Foundry made it really easy for us.

It actually took work away from us because we didn't have

to get all the presentations on the flash drive from the

presenter, which can be a very difficult

thing to get from them.

Because it seems like presenters are always changing

them up to the very last minute.

And that's probably a huge thing to consider is that

whatever their presentation is live is the final version,

that's what gets recorded.

And then once you get all the presentations, then you have

to figure out a way to get that to all the attendees.

So it actually made our lives easier.

And I've heard of people doing the content management--

there's a links tab in this presentation, and they just

put the PDF of the presentation there to share

the PowerPoint, instead of doing a bunch of links in

their content management systems. It's the same kind of

theme where, have it all aggregated around the

presentation itself versus in a bunch of different places.

And I know you started marketing it while the

conference--

when you were not too far out, right?

That you could have started earlier, or how was the

timing, I guess since seemed like you added on.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Post-show, we had an idea about how we wanted to start

marketing it, when we wanted to start marketing it, but I

think that we would have rather had a more

international plan once the show was over.

Because the quicker that you market it after the show, the

more impact that you're going to have. And in the technology

industry-- this might not be true for other industries--

but the content's always changing, so you really have

to hit it pretty quickly because people are going to be

doing their new products and solutions in the spring.

So then what we've recorded in the fall is going to be in the

past, old news.

So being able to have a quick, aggressive marketing plan

about three weeks to a month after the show is

the best way to go.

But again, it was a learning experience.

And I think once you've been through it once, then all

these other things come up that--

Absolutely, as with any event, once you get it done you're

like, we should have done it the other way.

Such a learning experience, definitely.

So what's next for you, in terms of doing this for this

conference, or others, that you work with?

Well, we had such success with this.

Since we do multiple events and other trade shows, we're

now trying to figure out how it is that we can bring this

product to our vendors and other events that we're doing.

And so we're absolutely going to be doing it for our next

event in the fall, The Global Technology Congress.

I don't know if we're going to do it exactly the same way, or

if we're going to add on to it, but we loved the product

and we're trying to figure out how to use it even more

because it is so popular.

And the lead gen was great, but you had said segmentation

maybe wasn't as rich as it could have been.

You're thinking about maybe adding more

fields to the lead capture?

The platform that we used was a very simple catalog, and so

moving forward, we probably will make it

a little bit more--

More hoops to jump through.

More hoops to jump through, more information, and a couple

different windows, a little more web-friendly, the

searchability will be a little bit more detailed.

That's great.

Well thanks for the case study.

And, again opening it up to you to ask any other questions

that you might have about Sandra's experience.

We do have a couple.

Is web streaming the only method of distribution for the

presentations, or are you also putting them on a CD or USB in

addition to having that online catalog?

We're not putting them on any other form of media, we're

just doing it on the web streaming.

Just because it was the only thing that we had.

Only thing you found the need for.

Yeah, the only thing we found the need for, so we are't

really using it, but I did send a link to all of the

presenters that they can use it in whatever format that

they wanted

And the platform itself does allow you to publish to go.

So it could be on a DVD or a CD or a USB key.

You'd lose some of the reporting capability, then,

because someone's watching it offline not clicking through.

So there's a trade-off there, but for portability, you

absolutely can put it on other things.

But it didn't really make sense for--

For us, because we're a lead generation company, we want to

know who people are and what they're looking

at, and for how long.

How long.

[LAUGHTER]

Exactly.

What were some of the kinds of emails that you used to drive

people back to the presentations?

Were they rounding out the event or were they

specifically about visiting the classroom?

It was specifically targeting the classroom.

And so we segmented our email depending on what product or

solution that they were involved in, and targeted that

particular email audience.

And it was just a typical email broadcast that would

come from our company.

And about the different player experiences, in terms of, the

presenters chose different options.

Is that something that you recommend doing again, to

allow people to choose the different types of players?

Or would you dictate as the conference organizer?

I would dictate as the conference organizer.

One, only because not every computer is set out to support

Silverlight, and we did get a little bit

of kickback on that.

But ideally, it's up to you.

And most of the times, too, people will do--

and again, it depends on your audience and how much you're

promoting the content ahead of time-- they might do a test

presentation to say watch this, and prompt people to get

any download that they might need or to test their system.

And that's sometimes, too, a way to make that easier.

The other thing, too, that I noticed, was your branding was

consistent throughout all the different presentations.

So is that something you provided, or Sonic

Foundry did for you?

I think it was a group effort.

We figured out what fields we could modify, and then we

supplied graphics to fill in those holes.

And it really gave it a cohesive experience,

regardless of the player or the conference itself.

You want it to feel like a conference.

Definitely.

Do you have any plans to do a strictly online conference in

the future, or is it just going to be the on demand

compliment to a face to face.

We're considering doing live web streaming during a

conference.

We're going to toy with that idea in

moving into this future.

But as far as a strictly online event, that is

definitely, most likely not going to happen.

Again, we believe in face to face events and we are liking

the balance of both, embracing the technology of the

webcasting, and having a face to face.

There's been a couple questions--

which, it's up to you how you, exactly, want to talk about

it-- in terms of the fees that you charged the presenters.

Was it the same price as a registration fee, or something

much smaller?

Basically, how did you set up your funding structure?

It was a nominal fee.

We charged $500 per presentation.

And the way that we came up with that, is that we got a

quote of what it was going to cost us to do the webcasting

for how many presentations that we had, and we divided it

out like that, in order to be able to cover our costs.

So it was in a money-making deal.

It could be in the future, but for this particular event, we

just wanted to cover our costs and have this

feature on our event.

And along those same lines as having exhibitors and

sponsorship, we've seen examples, too, where people

find a webcasting sponsor.

So they're going to be the ones to foot the bill if that

model doesn't necessarily work for your particular

organization, and, obviously given limited budget.

So that's something else we've seen, of

late, an emerging trend.

Right.

Finding a sponsor is always--

Always nice.

The best way.

Definitely.

Well there's a couple more questions about the

technology, which I think we'll take offline.

So I want to say thank you so much for joining us today, and

thank you for tuning in, and if you have any other

questions, just keep using that ask button, and we'll

route them to Sonic Foundry event services

staff, or to Sandra.

Thanks again for watching.