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Working With Webinars
Many businesses now regularly use services such as phone conferencing. But remote presentations have often proved to be a nightmare (and services like video conferencing have tended to be prohibitively expensive). However, a new communications medium – webinars (or web seminars) – is becoming increasingly popular and should soon become a standard tool within the insight delivery toolbox.
A quick overview
Essentially, webinars are web applications offered by a range of providers (and possibly even by your internal IT services team). They allow users to log in and watch / listen to a presentation live over the Internet.
Here are some of the key aspects of webinars:
- The speeches can be heard either via PC speakers or a headset, or by dialling into a phone conference number. However, you can’t speak directly to the presenter, as there could be hundreds of participants, which would make it very impractical!
- You can ask questions by keying them into an on-screen text box.
- You can also see whatever the presenter has on their PC screen – whether this is a PowerPoint presentation, a software demonstration or something similar (although it may not work as well with videos).
Presenting facilities
Presenters also have various facilities they can use. For instance, they can poll the audience on specific questions. This process can be as a simple as a ‘show of hands’ (represented by the participant clicking an icon on their screen) in answer to a basic question. Alternatively, the presenter can pose a question with three or four possible answers on the screen and participants can click on their choice. The presenter then receives instant results, which can be expressed as a percentage of the respondents.
The webinar can also be recorded so that people can view / listen to it later if they can’t attend the actual event.
How should you use them?
Typical webinar applications for Insight teams would include:
- Specific research presentations where there are time and place conflicts
- For doing summary presentations to wider audiences who would learn from, but can’t all come to a main live presentation
- As a replacement or supplement to newsletters and market or customer alerts, allowing attendees to pose questions as you go.
Try it yourself
The service we use is called Gotowebinar – but there is a wide variety of other services available. Try www.gotowebinar.com, www.webex.co.uk, www.netviewer.co.uk, or www.arkadin.co.uk - in fact, just put ‘webinar services’ into Google!
We’re really hooked by webinars now that we’ve attended a few and tried a dummy one for ourselves. At CI Solutions, we want to build on what we offer through 5-Minute Insights, and through our training, by offering webinars on any subject that our supporters would like hear about. So contact us if we’ve ever covered a topic that you want to learn more about, and we’ll see if we can run a webinar on it.
Although video conferencing is a real pain and has never really caught on, we think at last they’ve cracked it with webinars. They’re effective, simple and convenient - and Insight teams should therefore be amongst the first people to start using them! Make it your goal to try one in the next 6 months.
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