Business Conferencing Solutions Blog

How to Generate Webinar Interest Using Social Media

Webinar ChalkboardWhether you write a blog or connect on Twitter, you and other business pros know how valuable social media is for engaging with clients, investors, employees, and reporters. Social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, are affordable, efficient, and encourage sharing among others who may be outside your own network, making these tools an ideal way to generate interest in your webinar. Here’s how:

Invite: Some social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, provide the ability to create and promote events. And while most professionals use these tools for events of the face-to-face variety, you can leverage them for virtual events, like webinars, as well. For example, LinkedIn allows an attendee to share that he or she is attending a virtual event, plus it will post the webinar attendance in a status update after “I’m attending” on the event page is checked.

Tweet: Promote a webinar in a short (but tweet) way by using the microblogging social network to tweet links to a registration page or an event web page. Keep promotion consistent because tweets tend to have a short life span. Remember to create a hashtag to help followers stay up to date, and include that hashtag in all other promotional messages, whether it’s an email blast or a Facebook post.  

Promote: If you’re like many owners, managers, or entrepreneurs, you have a host of social media channels already at your fingertips. Log onto those company social network accounts and promote the event in posts and status updates. Also recruit internal brand ambassadors (the employees) to share event news on their company profiles, whether it’s on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Blog: Write a blog post about a topic pertaining to the upcoming webinar. It might be a brief preview of one of the main points or info reminding potential attendees why the virtual event will be worth their time. 

For a range of affordable and scalable webinar platforms, contact RollCall Business Conferencing. To learn more about using social media to build revenue, gather intelligence, engage customers, and manage online reputation, contact the team at our partner company, Social Strategy1.

How Valuable is Collaborative Content For Your Biz?

How valuable is collaborative content for your business?  Very, according to a report by Gartner.  The report suggests that social software and Web 2.0-based collaboration tools are no longer just for consumers. In business, they are empowering information workers, giving them more control over content creation, sharing and dissemination.

The Key Finding – the adoption of social software is being driven by end users and marketers. Wikis and blogs enable content creation, but can users manage content with them? Social software and other collaborative, Web 2.0-based content like webcasting is flourishing outside the scope of most organizations’ formal corporate content management strategies. At some point, businesses will need to manage this, using content management tools like RollCallTV.

Gartner’s assessment?   Content management is becoming part of a businesses’ infrastructure. Yet, at the same time, consumer and user-centered technologies are experiencing “grassroots” adoption in enterprises. Wikis, blogs, podcasts and instant messaging have become staples in most enterprises, especially as marketing tools or as means for communicating with customers, prospects, employees and partners. Social networking tools, such as Facebookand LinkedIn, are increasingly being used in business to support initiatives such as knowledge sharing, product announcements and brand promotion. However in most businesses today, all of this content creation and sharing is typically happening outside any formal content management strategy. Gartner’s report suggests that businesses often overlook ad hoc content and collaborative processes. Social software encourages informal collaborative activities that fall outside the traditional scope of transactional applications, formal workflows or engineered teams. Social software and Web 2.0-based collaboration tools are changing how we define content and, more importantly, how we will create, manage and share it in future. Web 2.0-based clients will become the user interface with content management solutions, fostering real-time content sharing, and delivering content to users in the context of their role or business process.  It’s these businesses which adopt such processes that will achieve significant growth in this next decade.

Has your business incorporated Web 2.0 based collaboration tools into your business process or sales functions?  If so, how has it been received?

Are we relying too much e-pinions?

How much weight do we put into the opinions of others? epinions and online ratings

If you are reading this, you are using the Internet.  We all know how this great ” information superhighway” has changed how we make purchasing decisions, buy products and services, communicate with colleagues and family, and it’s even changed the way we work in general.  We’re listening to what others have to say about their experiences with certain products and services, and buying from a trusted network of peers – their ‘e-pinions’, if you will. 
For example, if Jane loves the functionality of her Dyson vacuum cleaner, and finds Dyson’s service to be stellar, then she’s likely to tell her friend. On the flip side, if the vacuum is more hype and quality isn’t justified by the high price tag, then she’s even more likely to tell her friends using her virtual megaphone to the world through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.  Her conversation isn’t limited to just her small circle anymore, rather she uses the Internet as her soapbox, which can make or break a brand.    
From an work perspective, 91% of B2B decision-makers are taking part in social media and 69% do so for business purposes (Forrester Research).  Not only are we no longer confined to office desks, an increasing number of us are working remotely, and making decisions based on e-pinions we read on the internet, not what the person in the cube next to us recommends.    That Forrester stat shows that more business people are using social media in their daily work lives, and perhaps there’s even a little bit of an overlap between business and pleasure.  But, how much can we trust what we read online if anyone can post anything?
I’m curious.  Have you recently made a purchase for your company based on an e-pinion that you read on the Internet?  Perhaps office supplies, holiday cards, software, phone service, conference calling, travel, rental cars, a holiday gift?  Have you ever left feedback on a purchase you made online?
On a side note, my Dyson really is stellar!    That’s my honest  e-pinion!

Last Chance to Win the Worst Travel Experience Contest!

Time is running out, tell us about your Worst Travel Experience and be entered to win a brand new Motorola H790 Bluetooth® Headset!

We have all been a part of a horrible travel experience at one point or another in our lives.  As we all know there are plenty of painful stories people have about being stuck in a hot airplane for 6 hours on the runway or having your important luggage sent to the other side of the world.   Finally you can be rewarded for sharing your struggles. Airplane_unhappy

Enter to win the Worst Travel Experience Contest from RollCall Business Conferencing Solutions.  Submit a description of your worst travel experience for a chance at winning a Motorola H790 Bluetooth® Headset. The winner will be announced Tuesday 11/3/2009 on our blog and on our Facebook Fan Page.

To enter, visit our Facebook Fan Page or click here to see contest details.

Facebook to Add Voice Chat

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If the average Facebook user spends too much time on the site, just wait for the release of a free voice chat service available to members.  Vivox, a software developer of voice chat for online communities (gaming and virtual worlds), is developing a voice chat product for Facebook users.  The product will be like RollCall’s WebPresenter, WebEx and GoToMeeting, except much more basic.  It will be a plug-in for your browser which will allow users to hold live voice chats and share podcasts with however many people are in the group.  People will also be allowed to dial in to the conference call despite not being a Facebook user.  Vivox might charge for the non-user phone service, but it is still unclear.  It will be very interesting to see how this new voice product does amongst the large population of the Facebook nation.

Where do you think FaceBook is going with this? 

Read this article to learn more about the new Facebook voice chat service.