A webinar is an online classroom, workshop, or seminar, bringing the educational experience to you, wherever you are.

While there are a lot of best practices for webinars out there, and recent improvements in the webinar software and platform industries make it easier than ever to get your message and products out there and connect with customers and students, what do we really know about how webinars work – and how to make them work better?

As the webinar industry grows into the social web, expanding from product presentations, press conferences, company meetings, and education and distance learning, we need to better understand how to maximize the social experience of the webinar. In her “Social Media for Trainers” program, Kanter has been experimenting for over six years with different ways to integrate social media tools and tricks into her instructional practice, and now she is ready to share those tips of the trade with others.

As most bloggers know, the key to a success interaction online is no different from offline. Beth Kanter’s research has found that retention rates increase when there is more immediate application, helping participants teach others, practice by doing, and general discussion than there is from demonstrations, audio/visual presentations, reading, and lecturing, which is why most seminars and webinars fail.

Applying this to the web challenges presenters, as Taming the Beat explained:

One of the disadvantages I’ve found working in an online environment, especially when collaborating with others, are the limitations of email, phone and IM in getting a point across, demonstrating a concept or explaining complex issues. Back when I was in the bricks and mortar corporate world, whiteboards were a great way to record and highlight points for discussion and the use of overhead and other projection equipment allowed for delivering effective presentations.

For example, when training employees in computer use, I could have them working along with me and easily see what they were doing in the process. Phone, email and IM training leaves you somewhat blind – important points can be missed and attendees can easily skip over crucial aspects. It’s been my experience that people will tend to not speak up and say “I don’t understand”, but just fumble along; feigning comprehension. That translates into ineffective conferences, training or poor sales conversions.

Whether it’s training or sales – it’s so important that people understand what you’re relaying to them; and for you to have feedback mechanisms that provide you indicators that they are following along with you.

The key is improving the engagement, a challenge that faces bloggers daily.

Kanter turns to the social web as the first step in “thinking like a social instructional engineer” rather than just the “teacher” or presenter.

Social Media Tools for Improving Webinar Experiences

How do social media tools help improve webinar experiences? No differently than they do for bloggers. According to Kanter, the key is to make the process easy to share and collaborate, increasing the interaction, thus enthusiasm, with webinar participants.

The use of tags and hashtags across different social networking tools and services, especially unique tags, helps to track collections of data for participants, encouraging sharing and more interaction. Custom feeds can be set up to track such tags and hashtags or keywords, or even specific social media services and tools like bookmarking services, like Feed2JS or the Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose.

Your blog and Facebook and similar social online publishing venues can be used to relay information during and after the webinar. Polls and forms such as PollDaddy and Google Forms can be used to solicit and collect information before, during, and after the webinar. Google Docs can be used to share documentation and share notes and research in various ways with the group.

Twitter can be used during the webinar for extended conversation, information gathering, interactions with non-participants, and tracking discussions with hashtags.

Social bookmarking services like Delicious allows sharing of bookmarks with participants and between them, building a collective research body of references.

Add to the mix social media tools like YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr, social aggregators like FriendFeed, Youmeo, etc.,

While many bloggers present webinars and webcasts, it’s clear that bloggers have a lot to teach the webinar industry about taking advantage of social media, with Kanter leading the way. Still, there is also a lot for bloggers to learn from the webinar industry.

Are you maximizing your social media tools for yourself and your blog? How goes your social web?

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Email from Jonny
Hey there,

I’m currently designing a wordpress theme for someone, but I can’t figure out how to change the size of the posts and sidebar. I need them both to be 650px together, to be inline with the header image. Here is the link to the style.css file: http://jonnyblackler.com/wp-content/themes/starpower/style.css

Please can you help with this.

[gigantic stylesheet]

Comment from Nick on Episode 2
Akismet is really a good spam protection plugin. I want to add two things:
1. you should activate the check-box in the Akismet option panel which says “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” – all lot of spam comments will be made on posts you made a long time ago. This will help you that you don’t have to worry about these spam comments any more.
2. you should use the WP-Spam Free plugin together with the Aksimet to block out almost 100% of spam on your blog
url: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spamfree/

Hope those two little tips help some of you. Great show, keep them coming.
- Nick

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