How not to do a webinar 101. Test and Repeat.

I was invited to a webinar the other day and it was on the topic of “How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR” It was put on by HubSpot, a CMS provider, and they did the usual webinar technique of offering up some expertise in an area that is newly being embraced by web marketers like my self ie. Twitter. So I received the email invite and set time aside in my busy day to get some learning on in the area of Twitter. I knew that at the end the sales team would try and follow up with me on the CMS tool they where actually selling but I liked the speakers in the webinar and felt it would be a reasonable price to pay for some Twitter insight.

The morning of the webinar I receive a reminder email and everything looked good to go. I login at 11am and there is relative silence. Then more silence and at five after 11 still more silence. I begin to hear a few crackles of audio and turn up the volume and then nothing. Then a voice comes on and he echo is crazy, crazy, crazy…I hit the volume buttons to silence the terrible audio and continue to wait. This continues for 15 minutes or so before I give up on the whole thing. Bummer as I did want to hear what the speakers had to say on the subject of twitter. I figured even if they where able to rectify the problem the speakers and moderator would be so agitated that it would hardly be worth listening to.

This is a marketing disaster in my opinion and is as bad as not double and triple checking and email blast for errors or running through your Powerpoint presentions before you hit the stage. The webinar audience where most likely all web and marketing professionals that make technology and vendor choices for their respective companies and here they are waiting and waiting for your pitch and the very basics function of audio is not working.

So how do you rectify this. The simple solution to any live event is to prep and test then repeat. It seems like a simple idea but it amazes me how many people just don’t bother. This is a bad brand experience on all fronts. In the case of this webinar they probably had worked for weeks to get a great guest speaker and accumulated a large audience for the seminar then wasted the investment at the last second by not being ready with the broadcast equipment. Test and repeat I want you to say it out loud and remember it as it is the number one thing you must do before going out in front of an audience of any size.

JP Holecka

Creative Strategist, Powershifter Media.