Webcast or Webinar

Many people use these terms as if they were interchangeable. In reality, these two web based communication services are completely different.

Webinar: this is a web based collaborative meeting with audio delivered via the telephone. A webinar is a very good replacement for a meeting you would hold in a conference room. Leading providers of webinars are Webex, Microsoft Live Meeting and Go To meeting. All of these share the same exact telephone/web based delivery system.

Webcast: This is where the audio and or video is delivered via the Internet directly to the desktop of a targeted group of users. The webcast attendee hears the audio via their computer speakers and, if video is present, see the video on their computer speaker. A webcast is very well suited to events such as product launches, large scale training, financial quarterly reporting and web based seminars.

Both of the above communication tools serve a very good purpose but only if they are used correctly. Here are two examples that should help you understand how to best use each of these tools.

Webinar:

Take a scenario where you have five to ten managers based around the country. You need to meet and review plans on a regular basis. A simple webinar lasting one hour for these ten people (based on pricing found on the Webex site) would cost 40 cents per minute per participant for a total of $240. A webcast for the same amount of people would run much more since a webcast has an initially higher price because of the set up.

Webcast:

Now let’s look at moving a typical road show event onto the Internet with a webcast. Let’s assume a one hour event with 250 viewers. An interactive audio webcast with registration, slide show and moderated audience Q&A for this event would cost around $1000. But, if we take the same event and try to use the webinar service as the delivery tool we would see a budget breaking price of $6000!

As you can see from the above examples, webinars are for conference room sized events that need a lot of collaboration while your bigger events will be always be best served with a webcast.

Webcast Seminars are the New Direct Mail

Direct mail is a tried and true marketing tool for generating sales leads with well known metrics for ROI measurement. But, it is no longer the best way to gather leads. Our customers are consistently seeing higher lead counts, better quality leads and a much lower cost per lead with Webcasting. Let’s run through a typical scenario for both forms of lead generation and compare the numbers.

Direct Mail

• 5,000 postcard mailing to a targeted list
• List rental = .045 per record for total of $225
• Printing and postage $2314
• Total = $2539
• Expected return of 1.5% = 75
• Cost per lead = $33.33

Webcast Seminar

• 1000 Google Adwords click throughs to registration page = $1100
• Email to existing prospect 2000 names = $0
• Webcast event for 250 attendees = $1000
• Total = $2100
• Registration expectations = 750
• Attendee expectations = 250
• Cost per lead = $8.40

The above webcast expectations are gathered from running thousands of live lead generation events. While your numbers may differ, we feel these are realistic targets.

The bottom line is startling. A webcast event brings in over three times as many leads. The webcast leads are all detailed with names, phone numbers and profiling data. The webcast leads cost $8.40 versus the direct mail of $33.33! Clearly, webcast lead generation is a communication tool that should be in every marketers bag.

Live demos don’t lie

In our world of Webcasting we frequently come up against competitors. When we discover a competitor we always visit their web site and check out their offerings to see what we are up against. Inevitably we discover the competitor has no examples of their work on their web site or they have examples that just don’t work very well. For example, we see one competitor that uses passive pop ups and tells you to disable your pop up blocker. Another competitor only supports I.E. and yet another makes you call their sales staff to get access to a demo.

There is one big constant in all of our competitor’s sites: none offer live webcast demos. How can you claim to be a webcast service provider if you don’t offer live webcast demonstrations? If you are in the market for a live webcast provider you should demand to see a live demo of their work. You should ask to see their registration system, their slide show control and their post event reporting.

Well, enough of my ranting for today. We at WGI are in the business of providing live and on demand webcast services and we want to invite you to our weekly live demonstrations. Each Tuesday at 3:00PM ET we run a live web seminar that teaches the difference between a webinar, a webcast and a video conference. This event is live and features streaming audio, synchronized slides and an audience Q&A. Then at 3:30PM ET we do a live video webcast with slides and Q&A. We are so confident in our services that we want our clients and prospects to check out our work before they buy. Hope to see you there, http://www.webcastgroup.com

Podcasting – Business vs. Consumer

Podcasting is on fire. Audio podcasts are relatively easy to create and number in the tens of thousands. Video podcasts number in the tens or maybe hundreds. However, given time we can expect the market to drive both demand and content creation for both the audio and video versions of this communication tool.

Consumers love their podcasts and business people are also starting to use podcasting. But there are some very significant issues with podcasting that need to be addressed before this tool enjoys success in the business community. Let’s start by understanding a consumer podcast.

Consumer Podcasting

In a consumer podcast, content is created and the content owner looks for the largest possible audience. The content owner hopes to draw a huge audience, sell advertising and make money. This is, more or less, a shotgun approach and it has some serious flaws.

• Bandwidth. When a consumer subscribes to a podcast feed, the typical experience is that the consumer automatically receives each new podcast file from the content creator to whom the consumer subscribed. The consumer gets this file even if they do not want it, thus the delivery of the file uses bandwidth which is charged to the content creator. More than one content creator has had to increase their hosting plan and pay for excess bandwidth due to becoming “popular”.
• Tracking. Advertisers currently have no way to track who watches a given podcast so they are unable to calculate a return on their advertising dollar investment. This is similar to the old days of web advertising where banners were sold by the impressions (now days they are sold by the click and each click is tracked and evaluated).

As a result of spiraling bandwidth costs and no real advertising tracking, may content creators are feeling the financial pain of becoming too popular. However, necessity is the mother of invention so I have no doubt that a solution will arise soon that will make the tracking of a podcast more palatable to advertisers, and thereby remove the barrier keeping many companies from advertsing inside of a podcast.

Business Podcasts

Business communication is all about delivering a message to a targeted audience (prospect, client, employee, stock holder, etc.). Business communication is all about creating sales leads, training, informing and gather data. The current podcasting method which offers no tracking and unlimited bandwidth (and cost) is not going to be very attractive to the marketing savvy business person.

We at WGI have come up with an elegant, simple and effective solution for the business podcaster. Our new business podcast service creates a system that gives business owners a way to gather data on each viewer while offering the viewer the ability to download a podcast or watch a streaming version in real time.

• Registration and reporting. We have created a podcast delivery system that adds a registration system in front of each download. This lets business owners gather data prior to spending money on download bandwidth.
• Bandwidth control. We built our system to allow for podcasts to be hosted on our servers, our clients servers or any server. This separates the bandwidth cost from the data gathering and reporting activities. Our clients are able to shop for the lowest cost download bandwidth while still enjoying our data gathering and reporting service.
• Reports. We provide detailed reports (based upon reg form data). These reports are updated in real time and are available 24 hours a day.

So, there you have a brief overview of business podcasting versus consumer podcasting. Like always feel free to comment.

Webcasting with Video Conference Equipment

We have been seeing a steady and increasing interest in our clients desire to use their existing video conference equipment as the AV front end to a live webcast.

Using your video conference equipm,ent in this fashion is simple and the results are quite good.  Simply use your video conference equipment to “call” our video conference equipment.  We then take the video and audio from our conference unit and send it into our webcast system where it is delivered to a global audience.

Options such as presenter controlled slide shows, audience Q&A, audience registration and our exclusive, who’s watching capabilities are all easily added.

This is a great way to beat the high cost and complexities of on site video signal acquisition.  And, it makes a high quality, good looking webcast.  Of course there are a few technical issue you must know.  Well, actually, only one issue.  We only accept IP based video conference calls at this time (no ISDN).  But, if enough people ask for the ISDN version we will gladly add that ability.

Like always, feel free to comment or ask questions.

Here we go

It seems that I am always explaining something about webcasting to someone. I find myself repeating things. My daughter hates it when I repeat myself so I will be posting all mt explanations here in this handy blog. Now I can just refer people here and I will no longer repeat myself.

Not much in this first post so don’t expect any meat.