Know-How Exchange : Other

I've been using Webex now for over 2 years, and we've ran over 100 events on the system. A few experiences in our specific case:
- it's not so hard to get people registered, but it's had to get people attend webinars. We obtain 40-100 registrations per webinar, but actually only a 3rd of registrations show up. Since your purpose is leads, rather than customer education, this should not be a major concern

- the quality of the lead from webinars is low. The lead is not qualified. In a seminar, a prospect would not be suprised to receive a call from a presenter, but this is harder after a webinar. You could ask the question in the registration form whether participants accept being contacted. But after a webinar, you have all email addresses, and you can prepare an email blast to participants sending webinar presentation materials, and including a call to action (subscribe to mailing list, fill in an exit survey)

- in our experience, filling in the registration form is a barrier. Asking lots of questions will lead to fewer registrations, but possible a higher quality of lead. In general the quality of data in the forms was so low that finally we ended up just asking name & e-mail

- a good thing about systems like Webex or On24 is that they offer landing pages for events, which you can then promote and attract new leads. It's surprising how few webmeeting systems think about this feature - in many cases, the sales people for the service do not even understand the question

- another source for leads might be to offer the recorded webinars for 24/7 viewing. This typically gets us 10 - 100 times more participants. And if you require registration for access, this could generate a deluge of leads. You probably want to subsequently qualify these leads through e-mail marketing campaigns.

We're launching a new video web conferencing software that perhaps you should consider.

It doesn't have the custom registration form that Webex has, but is high quality and only a third of the cost.

Plus audio, video, application/desktop sharing, powerpoint presentations, & chat is included in the basic package.

It even includes 2 free 5.2 megapixel web cameras...yours to keep...even if you decide it's not for you.

In my experience, it's almost impossible to get prospects to register with more than their name and email address.

A benefit driven email following the webinar is much more effective and cost effective.

Let me know if you'd like to give it a whirl - I would appreciate the feed back either way!

I have never used ON24, but have extensive experience with WebEx. I've used WebEx at two companies, and had several bad (horrible) experiences with them at both companies.

我在线研讨会期间技术难题——洛杉矶tency in the web portion has happened more than a few times, though admitedly we were using PowerPoint slides with a lot of animation. We also had an issue where the call either got cut off, or something happened to drop everyone off the call. It was extremely embarassing and we had to do damage control.

However, the worst part was WebEx's response to these problems. Again - happened multiple times to me, years apart, and at different companies. They tried to blame it on us, couldn't figure out what was wrong, didn't escalate the problem to someone who could fix it. Once they knew it was their fault, they still didn't give us satisfactory customer support. We basically had to force them to send an email to our customers to apologize and explain the problem.

Because of our experience, we switched our hugely expensive contract and took our business to GoTo Webinar (which is MUCH cheaper). It's been a pretty good service, although it doesn't have all the bells and whistles. You might also want to look into the Microsoft webinar product and Adobe's product. Adobe's looks really good but I think it's pretty expensive - though maybe not more than WebEx.

Event Center has several pieces of notable functionality that can be helpful in running formal webinars:

1) You can add an arbitrary SourceID parameter to the registration link for your event. This lets you track where people found your registration link. You could put one URL in your press release, another in your website banner ad, another in a list email, and so on. The ID is tracked for you in registration reports.

2) You can create separate email templates in the event setup for inviting presenters, inviting attendees, confirming registration, denying access, sending two before the event reminder emails at your choice of date/time, and sending different post-event emails to attendess and non-attendees. That's very good and flexible setup.

3) You can add custom fields to registration pages and make them required or optional. You can set them to be text entry, dropdown, or checkbox. But you don't have much control over the cosmetics and arrangement of fields on the registration page.

4) If you use WebEx's integrated telephony for the audio portion of your event, you can easily give attendees the option to listen via streaming audio on their computer or dial in on the telephone. They also have global toll free dial in numbers from most of the major industrialized countries and attendees can see the numbers from the meeting room instead of having to go to an external source.

5)笨重,但网讯有唯一workaround for integrating a recorded video into a live event where you need real time audience interaction. Scenario: You introduce a topic, show a recorded video, and ask for audience feedback on the video when it's done, commenting on the responses you get. The problem is that buffering and line speed mean that fast users finish and listen to dead air before you start talking again. Slow users don't finish the video before you begin talking again. WebEx lets you embed the video in their proprietary format and cache it out to the audience. If they are on the line long enough for the caching to complete, it plays locally for everybody, so there is no difference in ending times. This is a royal pain to make work, but it can be done.

6) Annotating slides, Q&A, and Chat are well developed and work properly.

Negatives in my experience include the following:

1) Infrequent misconversion of PowerPoint graphics if you use certain combinations of shapes, rotations, and special fills. You'll only hit this if you are a serious PowerPoint geek!

2) Matching up Attendance and Registration report information can be a pain. WebEx is case sensitive in comparing a person's registered and attended email, so they won't show a match even with the same record if the case is entered differently.

3) While you can direct people to a "Program" page (a series of events that they can choose for registration) rather than to a specific event, you can't use the SourceID tracking... It doesn't carry down from Program to event.

4) Once you start your event (such as 30 minutes before show time for presenters to get ready), registration closes. You lose last-minute audience.

5) Audio streaming won't work on most Linux machines. If an attendee loses their stream or has a bad connection, the instructions for trying to restart it are confusing and hidden behind menus.

6) If you run in full screen mode, showing attendees how to request a telephone dial-in is tricky. It is hidden in a popup panel and definitely not obvious.

7) If you run in full screen mode, Macintosh users don't have the proper icon to engage in Q&A. They end up having to use the chat window.

8) Despite WebEx claims to the contrary, trying to be a presenter on a Mac is a lost cause. Use a PC.

9) Email templates (especially in HTML mode) are quirky. I have had numerous formatting problems with their timezone display and other replaceable fields. I usually write everything in statically, rather than using the placeholder fields.

10) I had two events this year where their server died right as we were starting. We got locked out... Couldn't start the event and couldn't switch to the backup server because of the event state at the time of failure. Both cases resolved themselves within 20-30 minutes, but they were nail-biters.

Hope that gives you some more specifics directly related to your query!