If you are going to put all that money into creating a webinar, you should also think about how you are going to distribute the content and archive it after it is made. The demand for tools that allow you to easily record, publish and distribute conferencing recordings is increasing, as organizations do more produced webinars.

We have always led the industry in content distribution and recording. With our integrated audio and web platform for one-click recording and our industry first podcast ability and hosted RSS feed. We have supplied these things to our customers at no extra charge.

With Conference Center 4, we have re-done the ReadyTalk Media Player and have added several nice new features that add to the production value of your conference recordings.

Check out this short video of the ReadyTalk Media Player.

1. We have re-skinned the player and gave it an up-to-date look with embedded controls, a new thumbnail view and thumbnail previews. It also scales to fit in your browser to avoid scroll bars and clipping
2. You are now also able to embed your recordings into your website or social media site of your choice. This meets your audiences viewing expectations (think YouTube) and also allows viewers to stay on your site while they watch your content. No more annoying pop-ups to watch recordings

For a complete list of all of the enhancements,visit our Conference Center 4 page or you can watch this short video.

I wanted to highlight some of the more important features of the release.

1. First and Last name were separated on registration reports. This was important for importing information into your CRM.
2. You can now upload confirmed attendees. Now you can use the 3rd party registration program of your choice and then upload a list of confirmed attendees. This allows you to take advantage of the Conference Center’s advanced email capabilities.
3. The ReadyTalk Media Player got a lot of love. I will cover most of this in another post but briefly the player got a facelift which involved new embedded controls, new slide view and thumbnail view as well as it being scalable and embeddable
4. We also added Broadcast Audio to our Event packages. Our Broadcast Audio is streaming audio that allows the participant to listen to your conference on their computer. It has been optimized for large events and delivers high quality audio

You can check out all of these new features by taking one of our demos.

Did you know you can have a personalized high-converting soft-sales campaign that is completely automatic? That’s right—you can make money on auto pilot!

In this post we’ll show you how to reel the customer in with semi-personalized message and then upsell them over a period of time with auto responder messages.

Here’s how the system functions.

There are several types of content that can be used here to “soften up” the customer:

• eBooks (can be used to educated and sell, or sometimes can even be what is sold as the solution)
• Automated emails (usually the primary upsell method after the potential customer is sucked into the system through a landing page). These emails should seem personal and should be sent out at regular intervals. Some variations might have an additional “exclusive” email series as the sold solution.

Of course, the goal of these ebooks or emails is to do some light education around a thorny problem, then show how the product for sale is perfect solution to the problem just described.

Here’s the model for using this method spelled out. First, you need to establish pain, then you create rapport, after that move on to framing the issue. Now, you’re ready to provide the solution. This is completely different than the direct sales model of sell, sell, sell:

• Establish pain: People won’t buy unless they are in pain. At Blitz, we do this right from the start by showing how the prospect doesn’t show up in search results when people are actively looking for the very service they offer. Jealousy also plays into this, since they can see what competitors are doing. Some of the tools we are building appear to be rank checkers, but are really pain generation tools—they point out what is wrong with your site.
• Creating rapport: Rapport is a fancy way of saying identification and comfort being around you, which is a low level of trust. The casual, conversational tone and revealing of semi-personal details and emotions humanizes the seller. They still wield an iron fist, but it’s covered with a velvet glove. In other words, they’re still trying to sell you, but are doing it an apparently gentle way. People buy from their friends, people they like. Do you feel empathy for the seller while reading? Good—his techniques are working on you. Often times the email series or ebooks will be written from the first person and appear to be from the CEO himself, sent apparently from his own email address. It’s a nice personal touch, and one that is fairly easy to mimic (if you want to adopt this strategy for yourself).
• Framing the issue: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The recent Borrell Research report on local framed the high churn issue among local resellers as one of insufficient PPC management software. Therefore, the solution is more PPC software, provided by Clickable, who just so happens to be the sponsor of the report (imagine that). A recent piece by a software company takes 30 pages to basically say one thing—that email autoresponders are the key to selling, since it’s automated, warms up the prospect over many touches, and allows them to respond when they are interested (not when you want to sell them). There, in one sentence and I’ve perhaps saved you 57 pages of reading. But look at how clever that formula is.
• Providing the solution: Now that he has you all worked up– you’ve intensely felt the pain of not having enough revenue, you identify with him as a friend, and he’s described the problem in a way most favorable to his solution– he mentions the answer. At first in passing and then more strongly as you get to the last few pages. Of course, he’s been talking about his product the whole time, you just didn’t realize how this trap was being set. He’s got you right where he wants you. And he didn’t have to spend a millisecond of his own personal time to get you there, the whole thing was automated. You perhaps watched a 2 minute video of him talking to you– like a good friend would chat with you. He’s been talking about your needs and you feel like you kind of know him. Time to buy!

And he, meaning the system, will continue to send out automated emails until you cry “mercy” and sign up for his software. Meanwhile, he’s sitting back, letting the automation software run, and the sales come rolling in.

But after reading through all the material, consider how you feel emotionally (I’d like to buy this software and I like this guy) versus what you’ve actually learned about what type of industry the product addresses (what specific steps and techniques can you implement?). If you’ve gone to a Baptist church, you may know what I’m talking about—call to action at the end, where people come up and confess. Probably not rationally-based, but one of emotion. The music is playing and you’re feeling spiritual. Ever seen “Leap of Faith”, the Steve Martin movie where he plays a huckster preacher, faith healer, caster outer of demons, and revenue generator extraordinaire under the big tent?

There really is little difference—think about it.

The “smarter” people think they are, the more easily they will fall for these sales techniques, since they’re thinking with the left side of their brain (rational), while really this system hammers them on the right side (emotional). This is how you can sell to anyone, no matter how “logical” they are.

Our first event is this Wednesday Sept 9th entitled “The Influencer ID Advantage in Social Media”. Moving from monitoring keywords to tracking influencers is a critical shift for any organization seeking to effectively implement, maintain and grow a presence in social media. While listening is an important first step, engagement is a critical step to success. James Clark, Co-Founder of the social media agency room214, provides an overview of what an influencer is, how to ID them, and insights into the ‘Influencer – Trust – Loyalty’ process.

The second webcast on Oct 14th will be done by Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal. The webcast entitled “Facebook Marketing Tactics: How to Monetize Your Brand Through Facebook” will focus on using Facebook to create search campaigns, user targeting, track performance and take advantage of the viral loop.

The third webcast on Nov 11th is by Porter Gale, VP of Marketing, for Virgin America entitled “Twittering from 35,000 ft.” In this webcast, hear how in-flight Wi-Fi changed the social media landscape for start-up airline Virgin America. Listen to stories of real-time service recovery in the skies, the impact of tweeting brand fans, using social media to amplify press and more. Porter will share details on how a lean team monitors, manages and responds to tweets and Facebook postings.

If you are tired of listening to social media theory and want some real tactics, this is the series for you. Each speaker has immense experience in implementing new media strategies for their clients and brands. If you are serious about using new media as a marketing tool, this series cannot be missed. Register for one or for all of them, the webcasts are free of charge.

If you’re a small business owner like me, you check up on the competition now and then. Look at the big guys. How many people do they have, how much do they spend on advertising, how much muscle can they flex compared to tiny little you?

Sometimes it’s daunting to be the small guy– maybe you have a single office and are competing against a national chain. They may have 20 people in their Internet marketing group and you are perhaps doing it part-time, among the 15 other things you’re trying to do. How can you compete?

Let me tell you a story…. The angel investor in our tiny company is Markus Frind. If you haven’t heard of Markus, a few years ago, he taught himself how to program by building a dating site. At the time, folks like Match.com and eHarmony were established players with millions of users. This ONE GUY built a website that is now larger than both of these players, generating over 2 billion pageviews a month, earns more than any other website on the planet on Google advertising, and is the #70 most popular site on the planet.

He did this all by himself. One guy. At Yahoo! Personals, I was proud to be part of a team of 80 folks. Match.com had well over 300 employees. The other publicly traded firms also have hundreds of employees. How did one guy beat industry giants with massive staff and marketing budgets to become the #1 most popular dating site on earth (verified by HitWise)?

• The race is not about big and small: It’s about fast versus slow. You as a small business are more nimble than the mega corporations. Do you remember your days suffering in the bowels of a giant company, tied up in bureaucracy, perhaps hating your job? Now you’re the nimble guy who can make decisions and just go, as opposed to having multiple committees and PowerPoints to discuss who should be at the meeting to make a decision.
• Many people slow things down: Ever done a 3-legged sack race at a carnival? If two legs are good, three legs are better, right? If you’re the one person doing the Internet marketing for your company, you don’t have to worry about a ton of coordination. With bureaucracy, things get mis-communicated and lost. Back to the dating example, Markus was the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and so forth. He could make decisions immediately with no paperwork.
• You have a better view: When you serve multiple roles, you see things that folks who are splintered into many functions wouldn’t realize. In a big company, Marketing can’t get stuff done because IT has set up things for their benefit, not that of Marketing. If that technical person understood marketing, maybe they would have set things up another way.
• The buck stops with you: It’s your money– and, therefore, you care more than a corporate drone ever would. You’re not a wage slave who is disgruntled or trying to skate by unnoticed. You are motivated to succeed.

The fact that you’re reading this says that you are actively looking for ways to improve your business.

So take heart in knowing that small is an advantage. The race is won by the fastest, not the biggest. You can seize on new marketing techniques and optimize several times before the behemoths are even aware such techniques exist. Be the David killing the Goliath– or for you history buffs, Sir Francis Drake versus the Spanish Armada: little ships that outmaneuvering the big battle ships.

In our effort to break down a qualified leads and easily measure them, we came up with two categories for these leads. We called them actively and passively qualified leads. An actively qualified lead is defined as an action that a prospect takes to “raise their hand” and signify interest in your products or services. Our sales people decided that if a prospect “raises their hand”, they are a qualified lead and warrant a call. Some of the ways a prospect can actively qualify themselves are (some are quite obvious):

Filling out a form with a pricing offer
Requesting a free trial or live demo
Inbound phone call or email
Tradeshow booth visit and card received/conversation with salesperson
Referred by a partner/customer/employee
Asking for more info at one of our webinars

Passively qualified leads are done through our lead score algorithm. These leads come in through various sources some of which are:

Whitepapers/Case Study/Testimonial downloads
Registering/Attending web seminars
Opt-in lists
Trade show lists (double opt-in)
Networking attendee lists (double opt-in)
A visit to our pricing page (with duration of stay)

These leads are not considered qualified until we gather 5 critical pieces of information on them. For the sales team, those pieces are:
Name
Email
Phone
Company
Time frame for purchasing decision

Marketing is in charge of getting these pieces of information gradually through our lead nurturing programs.

This is how our sales team has decided to define a qualified lead. We did it this way to be able to easily measure the leads and provide metrics to marketing on how many qualified leads we are supplying sales. In the next blog, I will talk about how we measure these leads.

Several items were addressed in the process of putting together our annual customer survey. We reviewed everything from question content and presentation to survey vendors to ensure a successful campaign. Selecting a survey vendor was a key part of my involvement in the process. In my role as Manager of CRM Optimization, I focus on improving how we view and use data within our CRM system to drive both new business, and keep our current customers happy. Having the survey data fully integrated with our Salesforce.com instance was our primary selection criteria. We also looked at ease of use, time of deliverability, cost and scalability. As a growing company we needed an affordable surveying solution that would also scale to meet our future initiatives. By addressing all of our requirements up front, we were able to find a vendor that fit all of our needs, and then some.

In the end, ReadyTalk’s first annual customer survey was a great success. Since we kept the survey short without compromising relevance, we had a very high response rate. We also offered a small incentive for completing the survey which we believe also helped to boost the number of responses. We received invaluable feedback from both our audio and web conferencing customers regarding our support teams, existing services and future feature requests. The results set the benchmark as we look to improve our scores in 2010. And since all of this was integrated with our CRM system, we were able to follow-up with customers, aggregate responses, and measure areas where we can improve our services in the future. The ReadyTalk Management team loved the ability to simply click on a Dashboard to get to the information they needed. Our Sales and Support teams were thrilled to be able to see real time responses from their customers, and our Marketing team is now hard at work leveraging customer referrals and market potential for our future customers.

How is your company using surveys to measure your customer’s experience? And what are you doing to optimize your results? We’d love to hear your success stories.

Excuses: There's no one to blame but yourself

This is a guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, a local lead gen company specializing in driving calls via pay-per-click advertising.

Have you ever heard of Yabbuts? They’re invisible little creatures capable of massive destruction. Here’s a few:

• You: “I’m so excited about the new prospect that came in today– we could make a killing!”
• Person A: “Yabbut, they’re also looking at our competitors, who are much stronger than we are.”

• You: “Check out our Facebook and Twitter social media campaigns– we got 100 followers today!”
• Person B: “Yabbut, that stuff is all a waste of time and those users are worthless surfers.”

Yabbut, you’ll never get the budget approved. Yabbut, I’m not feeling well. Yabbut, I don’t have time to do that– I’m so busy.

See? I’ll bet, now that you’ve heard this, you’ll hear Yabbuts pop up several times today in talking to co-workers, friends, your kids, anyone. Just like when you learn the meaning of a new word and magically you then seem to notice it used many times.

The core material of self-help guides boils down to eliminating Yabbuts– since when you focus on failure, that’s what you get. Think you might fail? You will. Think you’ll succeed. You probably will. There are even things like “The Secret” that dress up this concept in a “passed down from Jesus, whispered in his last breath” holy sort of way. The summary: think of success and it will come. If that’s what it takes to get people to pay attention to the concept, fine.

Is this a chicken soup, apple pie post about positive thinking? Hardly, it’s about ignoring the noisemakers who unintentionally sabotage your success.

Yabbuts: The Rats of Conversation

With some practice, you can even sense when a Yabbut is about to pop out of a person’s mouth.
When you hear a Yabbut– point it out and kill it!

Explain that Yabbuts are insulting– that you’re demeaning someone else’s goals, while seemingly in agreement with them. The “but” in a Yabbut totally negates whatever was said earlier:

• “Yeah, that’s a good idea, but I don’t have time.”
• “Yeah, this project is a priority, but something else is more important.”

A related species to the Yabbut is the backhanded compliment:

• “You run really fast… for a girl.”
• “What do I think of Bob? Well, uh, he has a great personality.”

As a small business owner or even a cog in the big bureaucratic wheel, as long as Yabbuts exist, you’re doomed to fail.

To turn things around, consider what might be possible, with no buts. If someone hits you with a Yabbut, ask them how it could be possible for X to occur. What would we need to do for X to happen?

Don’t think of all the ways to fail– you will be there counting butts all day long. Not the most pleasant of tasks.

Constraint breeds creativity– use that advantage you now have to run past your competitors stuck in Yabbut land.

The decision of whether to harness Social Media Marketing’s potential, or turn away and stay safely unharmed by its vastness could ruin anybody. This is why I am going to uncover some of the benefits of using Social Media in these next few blogs.

Social Media has become the new “hip” technology. So much so, that when you used to get frustrated when your 80 year-old grandmother didn’t have a cell phone (or even know what it was), now you get mad at your grandmother for not staying up-to-date and getting a facebook. It seems like everybody has a facebook these days, and to turn away from such a progressive and popular technology is an unacceptable type of behavior in today’s social expectations.

Other then allowing you to conform socially, here are 10 more reasons why SMM will benefit you and your company:

1. Developing Relationships: Often times, huge corporate barriers are placed between businesses and their customers, and it is hard to develop a relationship with customers. Through social media, customers can express their ideas regarding your services, and you can monitor their satisfaction and develop relationships. A closer relationship is obtainable and it engages customers in your company and encourages them to participate.
2. Search Engine Optimization: By using social media and creating links to your pages you increase your visibility on the web.
3. Acquiring Secondary Traffic: You will have people that go looking for your site (customers), and people that will be channeled to your site through various connections and links. It is a good opportunity to promote your businesses to others, generate potential leads, and create an over all awareness of your company.
4. Promoting company goals and morals: You can use your social media site to outline goals your business has and develop morals so that customers see you in a good or appropriate light. If you a program where you donate money to charities, or if you are environmentally friendly, or focus on superb customer service, you can outline this to your viewers.
5. Promoting upcoming events: Using social media, you can invite people to webinars, fundraisers, or other various events your company is hosting. This is an easy way involve people in what you are doing and promote events.
6. It is Free. Although it may cost some time, it costs no money.
7. Complimentary Strategy: You do not have to give up existing marketing tools–SMM can be used along side regular marketing techniques as something that compliments/furthers your existing marketing strategy. You can continue using all the techniques you have been, but add in Social Media as a side note.
8. Recommendations: You involve customers and encourage word of mouth promotion. A happy customer blogging about the benefits of your service on facebook is one of the most powerful ways to promote your product. Social Media makes word-of-mouth promotion easier for satisfied customers.
9. Becoming More Personal: Add a face to your company. Social media will allow your company to be more “human-like” and approachable.
10. Learning Customer’s needs/preferences: Using social media, getting customer feedback is much quicker process then a lot of other methods. By monitoring activity you can judge what customers like, what they want, and whether they are any problems or they are satisfied.

Social Media can be a useful Marketing tool that costs nothing and breaks the barrier between customer-business relationships. They only major problem now, is learning how to utilize it for maximum benefits. In my next blogs, I will give effective ways that Social Media can be applied as a marketing strategy to promote your business, generate awareness, and develop relationships with customers.

• Only one half of paper product get recycled, and plastic waste (which would include video tapes) takes doesn’t break down for hundreds of years in landfills. (source: http://www.nabshow.com/2009/eventInfo/pdfs/Going%20Green_Guidebook_lores.pdf)
• Cars and motor vehicles are the leading cause in ozone pollution. They account for 72% of nitrogen oxides and 52% of reactive hydrocarbons (principal components of smog). (Source: http://bicycleuniverse.info/cars/pollutionpaper.html)
• When you drive an average of 1,000 miles a month, you produce around 120 tons of carbon dioxide a year: each gallon of gas used by a car contributes about 19 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. (Source: http://www.green.sc/content,stats/)
• A New York Times article was released discussing the benefits of conferencing and the environment.
  o Last year, Building firm Carillion staff spent 34,144 hours talking to people through video, web and teleconferencing, avoiding the costs, time and stress of traveling.
  o Skanska UK, another construction firm, also recently trialed a video conferencing unit at a remote site in Cumbria and found that the money saved on traveling covered the £10,000 ($16388.0695) cost within six months. (Source: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/related_reports/best_green_companies/article3945570.ece)

Audio and Web Conferencing has made going green an easier process then actually staying in the red zone and continuing to pollute the environment. Now that this sort of technology is available we can reflect on how much time and money we were actually spending to fly a sales representative across the country. In my next blog, I will talk about how ReadyTalk provides the ability to become the oxymoron we never thought possible: green and satisfied.