Mastering the Art of Attendee Engagement

Webinars Don't Have to be Boring! 

We've run over 400+ webinars in the last 12 months and we've cracked the code to advanced audience engagement. Now, for the first time, we're sharing the exact strategies that get attendees to wake up, pay attention and personally engage with your webinar presenters and moderators! 

On this episode we'll share a webinar with the essential engagement 'tricks of the trade' with ActualTech's lead webinar moderator Jess Steinbach.

If you've ever felt like you need some fresh angles to get webinar attendees to sit up and take notice, you'll love what this fast-paced event has in store!

Creators & Guests

Host

Geordie Carswell

ActualTech Media

Guest

Jess Steinbach

ActualTech Media

What is Tech Marketer Live?

Helping you create and capture demand in the enterprise technology market.

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Tech Marketer Live, helping you create and capture demand in the enterprise technology market. Now, here's your host, Geordie Carswell.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
All right. Hey, listen up everybody. We just wanted to introduce the following episode with a little interlude here. So this was a webinar that Jess Steinbach, our lead webinar moderator at actual tech media, and I recorded a little while ago to help our clients who are looking for ways to increase engagement on their webinars instead of just the death by PowerPoint. And we think that this would be really helpful to give a listen to. So we hope you enjoy it. It'll give you some fresh inspiration to jazz up your webinars and help w attendees up and get them engaged. So without further ado, here we go. Hey everybody. I'm Geordie Carswell and the C M O here at Actual Tech Media, and I'm happy to be joined by our webinar ninja, Jess Steinbach, our moderator extraordinaire. She spends hundreds of hours on webinars every year, and she's going to be taking us through her strategies for engaging audience members on webinars in a way that gets them to wake up, take action, and be a part of the virtual event. So welcome to Engage Palooza, Jess,

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Engage Palooza. I love that. Yes, Geordie, I'm so excited to be here. And you know, and I were talking about this, it is really fun for me because normally I'm in the webinar and now I'm here in a webinar talking about webinars. So it's a very meta sort of palooza today, and I'm on board with it. I love it. And we're going to talk about something that I really love, which is creating really engaging experiences. So let's dive right in. Ready to rock Geordie?

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Let's do it. Alright, Geordie, I'm glad that you're ready, that you're pumped up because I am going to start things out by asking you a question. And what I want you to do is think about the last time you were at an in-person event, and I want you to describe the scene, set the stage for us visually.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah. It was the seventies. Pink Floyd. No, I'm just kidding. We

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Shocked. Do you remember that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
No, no, no. Yeah, no. It's amazing, right? When you're in a crowd, there's buzz, there's a feeling to it. There's sound lighting energy that you just love from a live event. That's why people go,

Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yes, yes. Geordie. That's it. And when you're in that room, when you're standing in that crowded room and you're feeling all that energy and that vibe and the buzzing, and then what happens, the lighting crew will set some kind of a lighting cue and they'll be like a whoosh of the lights. And then there might be a swell in the music and there's all these little cues that come in and tell you the show is starting, turn your attention onto the stage and we're going to get things rolling. And that's so cool. And it captures you instantly, which is awesome, except we do that, right? You and I don't have the luxury of that When we're building these webinars online. Our team can't change the lighting in your house. We can't change the background music in your living room or in your home office. So it's great that we can connect with you and reach you at home without you having to put on shoes or go stand around in a conference center.

(03:19):
And that's really exciting. But it means that we have to work that much harder to capture your attention, to make sure that you are looking at, of all the browser tabs that are open. And I know that a lot of you out there right now have your many browser tabs open on your computer screen, and I hope that this is the one that you're looking at. But if it's not, come back to it right now. Knock, knock, knock. Come on back because that's what we're here to talk about today is how we can keep your audience focused and attentive on this webinar, whatever else is going on around them. Right?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Exactly. That's not you in the bathtub, is it? That's not, no, this poor lady. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
It doesn't look like the most comfortable office, but it's also probably not the worst office setup that I've

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Ever, I feel like this is her conducting the moderating the webinar from the tub. Yeah. So there's no noise from the kids. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (04:11):
That's it. That's her sound booth. Yes. Why didn't I think of that? Okay.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Safe place. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Future, future webinars. I will give that a shot we'll do, we'll do from the bathtub with actual tech media. J. Okay. Let's jump into some specifics here because our key takeaway without kind of getting started here is that it's all about energy, right? The biggest thing you are connecting, your speakers are connecting with people and you're trying to tell your story to an audience that your speaker can't see. And sometimes if you're off camera, the audience can't see you. So hey, good little plug there for trying to be on camera as much as possible. But certainly the biggest thing is finding those ways to get energetic. And that's why my number one, our first tip for all of you out there is to get physical Geordie. Before we came onto this webinar, you would mean jumping jacks, right?

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah. You made me, you said, I must do them

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Drop and give me 10 jumping jacks. Yes. Before every webinar, our wonderful production crew has a countdown video that starts and it has a cool little music track to it. And I do like little dance party and it just kind of gets me moving, it gets my blood flowing. You can see that when I'm doing my speaking, I like to be standing up. That doesn't work for everybody, but it's getting me moving and it means that I'm having a more interactive conversation with you out there. So get physical. How can you do this? You can play games with your speakers. You can eat something gross or spicy. I have had to do this a few times now. We're going to show you an example of this in just a moment. It's rough, but it immediately brings some authenticity to it. I'm having a real physical reaction to those horrible jelly beans or those spicy sauces that I had to eat.

(05:57):
And so you are getting an authentic version of me, and you're also getting an authentic version of the speaker. And the audiences love that. They love that you can play a game, you can get people up and moving that way. So this one's a really fun one, but the most important thing about it is getting the speakers out of what they've said a hundred times before and getting the audience out of what they've heard a hundred times before and instead sharing a little bit of an authentic human moment, right? Absolutely. So Geordie, do you want to see an example of this? All right, let's do it. Let it rip. Oh boy. Okay. I'm going to show you an example of me. We're going to start with something I'm calling. Here we go. Jonathan. I have to say, your team has now asked me to play some hockey. We've eaten some terrible jelly bellies. This is the first time I've been a little scared coming into a chat with you,

Speaker 4 (06:56):
Jess,

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Jonathan, I can't say I'm happy to be back here with you, but we are here. We're going to do some q and a. And while we do this q and a, we are, I'm going to ask you, I think we're going to have time for about four questions. We're going to do four peppers, so we're going to do a Chipotle, then a cayenne. Oh, then a whiskey hub and arrow. Oh man, guys, we're bringing it home with a ghost pepper. I'm so scared. Okay.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
Right, Jonathan? Yes. I That is a scary one. Yeah, it's a scary,

Speaker 3 (07:29):
We're starting with a Chipotle pepper, so Chipotle, pepper it up. And Jonathan and I talked about this. We agreed that if we're going to do this, we're going to not woos out. We're putting a decent amount. Oh, that's too much. That was, I did too much, guys. All

Speaker 4 (07:42):
Right. Well, you going to have to do it. You're going to have to do it.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
I have instant regret. I have instant regret. Okay, Jonathan.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
There's a lot there. So we eat this first and we start the q and a.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
Oh. Oh, I hate it. Oh, so bad.

Speaker 4 (08:00):
That's a little hot.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Jonathan is the keeper. Skim is the keeper. Skim rest endpoint also use.

Speaker 4 (08:10):
That's a very good question and a deep one, especially when my mouth is already burning and I'm trying to maintain. I think I'm going to break a sweat after this one.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Okay. Hi. Does the on gateway run on Windows or Linux?

Speaker 4 (08:26):
Go? Oh man, I think I totally accidentally answered that. The gateway. The gateway can run on Windows or Linux. It doesn't matter if it's physical, it doesn't matter if it's virtual. Wow, this is hot. This one's getting hotter. Or as I talk. One second guys. Man,

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Getting

Speaker 4 (08:45):
Worse. Physical, virtual. I'm about to cry here. I'm sweating already

Speaker 3 (08:52):
Because I know that your team is not going to let us skip this one. We are going to do the ghost pepper, Jonathan, we're going to give it a really good doll. We're going to give it a solid, solid go. If we're doing this, we're doing this right?

Speaker 4 (09:04):
Okay. All right. My hands are shaking.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I hate myself

Speaker 4 (09:09):
There. There's a lot on there, guy. I mean, not even, you see, I mean, yeah, if I showed you it's spilling in my hands, I went

Speaker 3 (09:16):
There. Okay. Alright, go.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
Oh my God. Okay.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Okay. Jonathan, why does your hate me so much? Jonathan? Do the post rotate scripts have a standardized format, like PS one that, et cetera, or a template list? Oh, it's throat.

Speaker 4 (09:44):
Yeah. Yeah. Let me,

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Oh man. Oh, they gave you the longest possible q and A questions to try and get out of your mouth after taking that

Speaker 3 (10:01):
So bad. And you know what? Okay, two things. One, after we did that, I looked back at the recording after it went live, and Jonathan was putting three times as much hot sauce on as I was putting online. So I thought I was being ballsy, and Hugh just blew me out of the water.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Okay. Now it was fun to watch, but did the audience like it?

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Yes. And that was the coolest thing about it. This one and another one we're going to show you kind of at the end here, that was from the same team, were so interactive, the audience immediately started responding, commenting. They were telling me that having milk was cheating. I heard that from a few people and they were telling me, why are you doing this? Or I like this hot sauce. And they were interacting. And what was great about that is it got them more engaged with this particular company solution. And the questions immediately went up. Interesting. So we started seeing more and more questions, more and more interactions, because I'm guessing of all the tabs that people had open at that minute, the one that was the most entertaining was watching Jonathan and I suffer trying to talk about Pam.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
And nobody's, nobody's going to ignore that. I mean, that was awesome.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
No exact hope. They're not ignoring that. Otherwise, I suffered for no reason.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
All right. So play a game. Do something physical. All right, what's next?

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Okay, so we're jumping from do something physical into play a game, which is kind of, I jumped, sorry, kind of something. Yeah, I mean, think they can be one of the same in some ways, but there's a lot of fun games that you can play. And the example that I like to use, or the reasoning behind this is Geordie, do you remember when you were in school and you came in your elementary or middle school class and your teacher would say, we're going to play Jeopardy, or we're going to play bango, or something fun like that, right?

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Well, I was homeschooled, as I'm sure you can tell, but I think, no, I'm just kidding. No. Yes, I do remember.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Yes. You remember playing. No

Speaker 5 (11:56):
Offense to homeschooling.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yes, right? No, you and the neighborhood kids played Jeopardy in your backyard. No, it's a game that gets you interacting with the information in a slightly different way. And what was fun about those games was that you would come into that classroom and your teacher would say, we're going to play Jeopardy today. And you were like, cool, I don't have to learn anything day off. And then they snuck the learning in while you were having fun. And the truth is, we are no different as adults than we were when we were in kindergarten or elementary school or middle school. I think maybe we drank a little more coffee Now maybe some of us were a little taller, but most of us are still kids at heart. We still love the idea of playing a game more than we love the idea of learning. And so this is a way that you can kind of sneak some of that information in and stand out a little bit. So we have another fun example for you all here. We are going to watch some of our awesome teammates here at actual tech media, and we're going to play a game called No Dumb Questions. So let's get that up here.

Speaker 6 (13:05):
There. There's something I wanted to discuss with you today, David. It's a little bit sensitive and it is the idea of dumb questions. What's your feeling on dumb questions?

Speaker 5 (13:16):
Dumb questions. There are no dumb questions, Keith. Let's play our new game. There are no dumb questions.

Speaker 6 (13:32):
So let's get started with our first dumb question for today, David, on edge computing. And the first dumb question is, number one, what the heck is edge computing anyway?

Speaker 5 (13:43):
Well that's a great question, Keith.

Speaker 6 (13:45):
Okay, now we come to our last dumb question number five of this keynote before we wrap it up. And this is probably the most important one of all. Okay, I'm ready. Why is it David, that hot dogs come 10 to a pack, but hotdog buns only come eight to a pack? Can you explain that?

Speaker 5 (14:06):
Well, Keith, you, we said there are no dumb questions, but I'm sorry, this is a dumb question.

Speaker 6 (14:12):
Maybe it's a question more for philosophers to answer than the rest of us. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (14:17):
It's like how many licks does it take to get to the middle of the Tootsie Roll Pop? We may never know.

Speaker 6 (14:21):
You're showing your age, you're showing your age. David, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate that. And we, I think, did drop some knowledge on edge computing and hopefully people will take your advice to heart and ask questions during this particular webinar. And no question is dumb except for the hotdog question that was dumb. So don't ask that one today. And with that, we're going to throw it back to you, Scott.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Very cool. That hotdog thing, I'd never even, did you have to google dumb questions to get that one?

Speaker 3 (15:01):
I think I really think they did. I think they actually looked up a bunch of dumb, dumb questions. But I love that one because I think it was so fun watching you'd know David, and that those were really authentic reactions from him. He was genuinely laughing and Keith was genuinely laughing. And it's such a fun thing to see them just enjoying asking and answering these dumb questions.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
And I think too, for the audience, we say dumb questions, but inevitably the questions that get highest interest in traffic are often the most general and the ones that, especially in a new concept area. And so doing stuff like that was nice, is setting the audience at ease. Plus it's fun. Yeah. How do the audience react on this one?

Speaker 3 (15:48):
It was great. And one of the things that David said that we don't have in the clip here was he said, after the initial, and I have to give a shout out to our production crew for the music and the graphics and the number one that catches me every time. Awesome. What David said at the start when they were getting rolling was he backed it up and he said, I do want to make a comment here that there is no such thing as a dumb question because we're all here to learn and we all have different blind spots and different understandings and different depths of understanding. And also, let's be honest, we talk a lot about technology. That's where our world is. And tech changes all the time, all the time. So what you think you knew might be different tomorrow. And so asking those general questions isn't dumb. And immediately the engagement shot up. And what I thought was really cool about that was we did start to see for the rest of that, that was a multi-vendor. So we had quite a few different presenters happening that day, and we saw the general questions come in a little bit more frequently. Nice. I think people were less afraid to ask things, what is ransomware than they would normally be. Going back to the basics.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Let's hope they got that one figured out. But yeah,

Speaker 3 (17:01):
That might be,

Speaker 2 (17:02):
I think we got the idea. All right, so games cool. What's next? Alright.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Ok, let's do it. Sit down with friends. David, that's what you and I are doing right now. Oh my gosh. Geordie,

Speaker 2 (17:10):
You just called me David, you spend so much time on webinars with David that I'm not even going to take that personally. Cause I understand, I understand

Speaker 3 (17:21):
That. I do mean that as a compliment to you both. And Geordie, this is what we're doing right now is we're having a conversation with friends or we're sitting here wishing David was here with us. That's all I'm saying. But basically the point of this one is that sometimes I think we get really caught up in the format of a presentation, so the slides and the presenter and the speaking and the moving of the slides. But what can be a really fun way to get information across is to just have a casual conversation, just to shoot back and forth and discuss something. And what's great about that is more often than not, what you'll see is that the speakers will start to zero in on what they're actually excited about. So if you give me a script, I'll follow the script, I can do that.

(18:05):
Sure, no problem. But if you, let me just sort of roll into where I have fun things to talk about. So again, lifting our curtain today, Geordie and I are totally off script on this one. We're just free forming and free styling as we go through. And so what you're going to hear today are the things that I am excited about. You're going to hear the things that are coming out of my brain, my heart, my energy as we go through, because this is the stuff that I want to talk to you about and that's fun about these sorts of more conversational webinars. So

Speaker 2 (18:34):
I have a question about that. So Jess, you meet dozens of our clients a week. How do you develop a rapport with them to be able to have a sit down with friends type conversation where you can get them to relax and create great content for the webinar without having a preexisting relationship with them? How do you do that?

Speaker 3 (18:56):
This is a great question, and the first thing I would say about it is we at actual tech media, we always ask the speakers to have what we call a sync call to meet up with us prior to the webinar. And we try to get the moderators there and the speakers there so that we do have that opportunity to connect and just kind of chitchat, get to know each other a little bit. Some of the silly things, talking about backgrounds that people have, if they have funny toys, you'd be shocked at how often I learned that one of our speakers is a jousting champion and I wouldn't have known that except they had a jousting knife, sore pointy pokey thing in the background. So I got to ask a question about that and then we can develop that relationship. So first and foremost, if you have the opportunity to get together prior to the webinar, I think that does lead to that authentic connection. If you don't have that opportunity, I think that's where having a moderator be a part of the conversation can be really helpful because it's our job to build connections. It's what we love doing, it's what we're passionate about. And so we can help the speakers kind of find that connection point even if they weren't able to prep that in advance.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
And I think that's what we appreciate about you guys because so many times we've been on webinars where the moderator unquote is the person from the conferencing company who says, welcome to the call we are today, we are discussing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's what they consider the moderator's job to be. But it's so much more than that. They are the host of the discussion. They're like a talk show host. They're there to tee it up for the guest. And you guys do an amazing job on that. And I'm just going to put a plugin for you there.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
Well, thanks Geordie, I appreciate that much, Lee, and moving on to get real. All right. Well, I think a lot of times, especially as we were talking about in the tech world, we want to talk about the technology, we want to talk about the theory, we want to talk about the philosophy behind it, but it's really important to just look at the audience at where this hits them in their lives. Where are the connection points from this theory that we're talking about to you in your life and how you're going to use it? I think one of the coolest things I heard, and this is a marketing anecdote, but was that thing, I don't know where it comes from, and maybe you do, but I don't sell somebody the drill or the nail. I sell them the shelf that they're going to build in their living room and all the cool stuff they're going to put on it.

(21:20):
And so the idea is instead of us telling you, I have this tool that you can use to drill a hole in your wall, I'm telling you, wouldn't it be amazing if in your living room you had a shelf that had all these really cool pictures on it that you could look at every day and you want to live in a world where that shelf exists, and if you want that shelf to exist in your world, the way that it does is by buying this drill and making this hole in your roll. So I think in a way that's kind of what you're doing here is instead of talking about the drill, you're talking about the shelf they can build. You're talking about how this is going to impact their life and kind of painting a picture with that.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, that's marketing 1 0 1, right? You want to sell the vision of what your life was like before and what it'll be like after when I'm using that solution. And two, I think customer stories are a key to that. If your speakers can show up with one or two customer stories or anecdotes that they can share and the opportunity comes up to weave those through, you're going to see a huge amount of engagement from as humans, we learn through stories. That's how they got passed down, generation after generation and lessons get learned. So leveraging that can be a huge win I think, on these presentations.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Well, and speaking of stories, one fun version of the Get Real. So the examples that we have are things like the stories from the trenches use cases, but also kind of a fun one is pop culture references. So this is a bit of an interesting spin on it, but bringing it into the real world by connecting it to something that we can all relate to has been really successful for us. Things like superheroes or movie references and finding ways to talk about tech through that. So we have an example for you of that. Let me get that up here and let's take a look at our pop culture game.

(23:17):
And about halfway through the conversation, he told me that he was talking to me on his new Apple Watch, and he told me that he felt a bit like Dick Tracy. Now, I haven't read Dick Tracy the comic in years, and I had completely forgotten about his radio watch, so I had to go back and do some Googling to check it out. Sure enough, as far back as January 13th, 1946, you can see that famous crime fighters sporting his iconic and ahead of time, two-way communication gadget. And we thought that it might be fun to kind of dig into some of the tools that we've seen referenced in pop culture. And today our entire eco cast is about AI and machine learning and how to take that up a notch. So we're going to dig into some examples where maybe we're seeing that in movies and TV shows.

Speaker 7 (24:06):
Okay, great. Well, this definitely qualifies as taking things up a notch, but it is not a good notch. I'm talking of course about everyone's go-to AI dystopia. This is Skynet from the Terminator. This is the military AI that tries to wipe out humanity over the course of, I don't know, 30 years of movies. Thankfully this does not exist.

Speaker 5 (24:29):
Another AI robot, one of my favorites of all time from Star Trek, of course, commander Data, and he's a full autonomous being, maybe even with his own emotions that was gone into a lot in the series, whether or not he had emotions and he could feel and everything. He had his pet cat. Can anyone remember the name of his pet cat? I can't right now. But anyway, so do we have the equivalent of Commander data today? Definitely not with Alexa. And when it comes to autonomous robots, I would say no, we really don't. Don't have that today. Not really. Moving on to another one. It's one of my other time, all time favorite movies. 1990 is total recall. He had self-driving cars in there that weren't all that helpful in many cases, but do we have that today? Well, yeah, we do have self-driving cars and they're getting better and better all the time.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
It's true. I was riding in a self-driving car the other day and it worked pretty well. It was a little nerve wracking. I'm not going to lie to you.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yikes. But I think you get the point, right? What did the audience think of that one?

Speaker 3 (25:47):
What was really fun about that one? The audience started responding with their top. First of all, everybody else remembered cat's name, which was spot. And so everybody was responding with that. And did he

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Strategically forget that so that he could get people engaged in answering the

Speaker 3 (26:03):
Question? That

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Would been brilliant.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
He's

Speaker 2 (26:05):
Pretty smart.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
He fooled me if that's true, but spot, spot got a lot of engagement, and then everyone wanted to kind of chime in and respond with their own favorite movie, their favorite movie tech, and also sometimes tweak a little bit about whether or not they thought it existed, if they agreed with us or not. And this was part of a keynote, so this was something that we did right at the start of a longer webinar day. And so it immediately got people interested, engaged, kind of thinking about their own personal lives and the tech in their lives. And that was a great tone set for the rest of the day.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Awesome. What do you got next?

Speaker 3 (26:49):
All right, let's talk about myth busting. This one's a really fun one, and the reason that we kind of pulled it out a little bit is because there's a few ways that you can approach, but again, especially in tech, there are a lot of misconceptions. There are a lot of misunderstandings. And so being able to play a little bit with a true false kind of vibe, or you might think this, but actually this over here is a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Now, what I like about this is that if you want to get an SME excited and you want them to show energy on an event, talk to them about things that they hear all the time that are not true and spin 'em up and watch 'em go, this is brilliant for getting some passion out of people. And maybe they're at, they're a sort of unpopular opinion. We'll get others to enter their unpopular opinions in the chat and get some discussion going and some engagement, right?

Speaker 3 (27:47):
That's exactly right. Is that no, everybody loves to correct people or tweak people. I think I saw that in an episode of she Sherlock on BBC that Sherlock was using this thing where he would sort of say things slightly wrong because he said, people won't tell you things, but boy do they love to correct you. So myth busing is kind

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Of, it's called the troll.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
And see, there you go. So we're sort of trolling a little bit with some of these controversial opinions or with these myths and then letting the expert correct them or letting the audience get involved with correcting them. And we have an example of that. Let's pull it up here. We actually asked the moderators here at actual tech media to fact check the atm Oracle, a very mystical, mystical being. All right, well, speaking of innovations, we have a brand new piece of tech that we want to unveil to all of you here today, live at the summit. David, do you have it ready?

Speaker 5 (28:50):
I do. Yeah, it just arrived in the mail.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
Okay. Okay. Okay. David's going to get that ready and unwrapped. So I want to welcome one and all to the grand unveiling of the actual tech media magic oracle. This handy dandy little doodad will predict answers with a certain amount of undisclosed accuracy that may or may not be a truthful representation of a possible could be future scenario. Hard to beat that kind of accuracy. Hey guys. Yeah, David, should I invest my time looking for new and innovative tech to use at my org?

Speaker 5 (29:27):
Oh, the Oracle says very doubtful.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
So David, what do you think? Let's fact check that.

Speaker 5 (29:38):
Wow. I think the oracle is absolutely on this one. I'd say the Oracle may be new to it because that's a sure way to lose your job, is to buy some expensive new thing that everybody has to use and you never even told them about it or asked them about it before.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
David, I'm going to kick this one to you as well. Let's talk about demos. So Oracle, are demos worth it?

Speaker 5 (30:03):
My sources say no,

Speaker 3 (30:06):
David,

Speaker 5 (30:07):
So I would highly absolutely disagree with that. All

Speaker 3 (30:10):
Right, let's do one more here. And I'm going to kick this one over to Scott to fact check for us, Scott or Oracles to start, do I pay attention to customer success stories?

Speaker 5 (30:24):
The Oracle says as I see it, yes,

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Scott, another win for the Oracle.

Speaker 5 (30:31):
My question for the Oracle is, will I get a lot out of the summit today?

Speaker 3 (30:38):
And

Speaker 5 (30:42):
Yes, it says yes. Woo,

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yes, that puts it in the win column. Look, you can't see that. There we go. My terrible handwriting. And look at this high tech scoreboard I've got going on here. Alright, that is a win for the Oracle, and I would have to, I'm going to fact check that one, David. I would have to totally agree with the Oracle on that. We've got some incredible vendors. I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
That looked like some early Jess, like some 1.0 Jess,

Speaker 3 (31:13):
The early days before our team got me a much fancier camera set up. But look, I still have, I'm still using.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
There you go,

Speaker 3 (31:23):
My fancy. I always have my low tech scoreboard here with me. Yeah, I liked that one a lot jdi. And again, part of what was fun about it was that the audience was fact checking it as we went through. Yeah, they were responding with their opinions about whether the Oracle got it right. And it's been a while since any of us have played with an eight ball.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
And I think that that's the point though, right? You're not just trying to do stuff to make people laugh. They can watch TikTok for that. What they're really there for is, or what we're really trying to do is to get them to do something to wake up, come to the tab, engage with the webinar, ask a question, make a comment. Remember that they were there, have a memorable experience that they learned something, right?

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yes. That's huge. And one of the biggest things, especially let's say that you're participating in a webinar where there's multiple vendors presenting in one space, you're at a big conference or on a virtual conference in that style, we call them multi-vendor like eco cast summits. If you're in something like that, you want to make sure that when the audience is scanning back over their day, or let's say that you were totally alone on the webinar, but just think about all the information that your audience is taking in any given day when they scan across their day on their drive home or when they're sitting around the dinner table, you want to be the thing that sort of bumps out from their memory. Yeah. Oh, I saw a funny clip today of some people playing with an eight ball. I haven't thought about eight balls in a while. It was really funny. And then that's logged away. And then the next time when they're thinking about a technology solution, you're, you're there, you're up, you're in their brain.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
Or when the vendors, SDRs or sales folks reach out and say, how'd you enjoy the webinar? Yes. They're more likely to go, yeah, I remember it. And maybe that's what all of these things, this is a good point. All of the things that you did for special engagement, share that with sales so that they can reference those things when they call the customers after the fact. Say, how'd you enjoy the webinar? Did you enjoy watching Jess and our rep with the hot sauce or Yep. Things like that to jog their memory. That's an incredible point, right?

Speaker 3 (33:38):
That's huge. These things are only as good as we do something with them. So that follow up aspect. And actually before we wrap, I am going to show you one example of a follow up, a social media campaign that we did. And I spoke with the team about it after we wrapped, and they said that their email marketing campaign that they did on this particular one that I'll show you was one of their most successful email marketing campaigns that they had because everyone was so excited about it and so interested in this funny little thing that we did that was a awful, and I still have PTs D from it, but boy was it good clickbait apparently.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Right on. Well, before we get to that one, yeah, I think that there's a few things here. We want to be creative, we want to do great events. We're strapped for time, we're understaffed, we don't have ideas, we got whatever, got a million things going on to try and think of how am I going to make an engaging webinar is probably, even though I know I should, it's may not be something that I feel that I can execute on. And this, I'm just going to put a plug in for our team here. This is what we do. We work with you to figure out what will be fun and to execute it without you having to do all the heavy lifting. We will make it work and we will bring the ideas and we'll work with you on those and iterate on it and find something that will really be unique, something you can be proud of, and something that will be effective for your sales team when they're closing deals off the back of these webinars. So don't feel like, oh yeah, that's great that someone else was able to do this idea or that idea. Think about it as when we work with actual tech media, we will be able to do this kind of stuff if we just ask them to help us.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yes, Geordie. And I'm actually really glad you brought that up because one of the things that I do want to add in here is if you're watching along with this and you're watching these clips and you're thinking like, oh, these are really fun, but my team wouldn't really be interested in this, or I don't think I could convince a speaker or I'm not creative enough to come up with these. A few things to point out. One, almost every single one of these ideas that you've seen today and all the other things that we've done working with some really wonderful teams have come out of a collaborative discussion. It's very rare that someone knocks it out of the park with an idea on the first try. It happens. I know there's some brilliant folks out there that have come up with those wonderful engagement ideas, but more often than not, it's a conversation.

(35:56):
They bring it to us and we kind of kick it around or we bring it to them and then they kick it back and forth and it flows. And in some cases, and I had this happen recently, and I won't tell you what it is because it hasn't gone out live yet, but we had a really wonderful experience where I sat down with the team and I said, here's all these big shiny ideas that we can do and all the engagement things. And they were like, oh, those are too big. Those are too much for us. It's too much creativity and we need to be a little bit more toned down. And then we kept talking about it. And where we ended up coming to was an idea that is deceptively simple and not over the top in terms of the kind of showmanship of it, but is going to be incredibly impactful because it's really authentic to them.

(36:41):
It's their brand voice. It works with them, and it is still something that's going to stand out in the audience's mind. So don't let these feel intimidating because of the showiness of them. There's lots of ideas here to be had. And on that note, I do want to give you just a few last little things here, one of which is demos. And the reason that I'm calling this out in particular is because, and the Oracle even just said, don't do demos, and David disagreed, and I would have to agree with David on that one because demos, I think sometimes they're almost ubiquitous. We know they're selling tools, so we stopped thinking about them. But Geordie, you and I actually had a conversation about demos once, and you said something really impactful for me, which was to ask the vendors to think about, or the speaker to think about what is that one key feature or two key features that they are really trying to showcase with this demo?

(37:38):
And to be sure that they're making sure that they're coming across. So not just to do a demo for demo's sake, but to be very clear about that aha hook feature and make sure that they're getting that across. So don't brush off demos because you know about them. The other ones that I want to mention is just very quickly is incentivize or incentives. Geordie, I'm actually going to kick this one back to you because I think you deal with incentives quite a bit in marketing. Can you talk to our audience about what we mean when we say incentives and how we do or do not use them?

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, I mean, just think of it as prizes, right? Either large grand prizes, small activity prizes, whatever it takes to get people to take the action that you want them to take. People worry about, well, they're doing it for the wrong reason, cetera, et cetera. When you offer them a prize, I would suggest to you that the gains are well worth any folks who are in it just for a prize. That the lift that we see from people doing incentives to motivate the actions that they're looking for people to take and getting results from having done that, whether it's pipeline or whatever it might be, is well worth it. So don't dismiss it out of hand, give it a chance.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
And I'm going to show you an example now of a style of incentive that was so creative, and I absolutely love it and was also just a lot of fun for me. So let me pull this up here. Okay.

Speaker 4 (39:05):
Hey Jess, what's going on there? Why you all, what, what's, what's happening? What's going on? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Jonathan, I mean, you told me that I was going to be playing some hockey, so I showed up ready to play some hockey, man.

Speaker 4 (39:18):
That is true.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
As I understand it, we're going to play some hockey here because we're giving away a prize to, or a gift card to everyone in the audience who signs up for a demo with keeper security today, right? Is that correct?

Speaker 4 (39:32):
Yeah, that is correct. That is correct. It's not just one, it's for everyone that's on this webinar today and schedules a demo with us. They will be getting a gift card individually.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
I love that. And now here's where the fun part comes in. So I get to play for your gift card. So today you need to be cheering me on because I am earning you money. So I'm going to be trying to get some pucks into nets, and every goal that I make adds $10 to that gift card. So every goal I make is bringing that dollar value up that you will get when you sign up for that demo. So you need to be cheering me on and I think of, we should probably play some hockey. What do you think? Man?

Speaker 4 (40:16):
I, I'm ready for this. I'm ready for the album, but maybe not ready, but I'm going to try.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
I feel like I got to do like the, I got to. Yeah. Yeah. I can't throw that helmet. Alright, well, since we're playing some digital hockey, I need to be able to see here. So let's get this hockey screen up and going. We'll give it a little test run.

Speaker 4 (40:35):
All right,

Speaker 3 (40:38):
So here's how this goes. I'm going to shoot at the net. Every puck that I get in, you guys all get $10 added onto your gift card. Are you ready? Let's do this. All right, I'm going to go right. Oh, stupid goalie. Okay, let's try that one. Swipe. Swipe. This game is harder than I thought. Swipe. How did I go out? Okay. Oh my goodness. Just one. Oh, yes, yes,

Speaker 4 (41:15):
Yes. That's $10,

Speaker 3 (41:17):
10 for all of you out there. Yes, I am a hockey master. Well, I feel like I shouldn't push my luck anymore than that. So let's get back into it and I'll see you at the next period break.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Yep. That was Jody. I got $50 for them on that one. I made five different goals and I was not play acting it. Every time I missed, I actually was missing. I was genuinely concerned for a second there that I wasn't going to get any money for them.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
That's awesome. Another one that I've been thinking about, it's not on your list, but quizzes. So people love quizzes, and you can do an online quiz together is a shared thing where the mod goes through it and where the presenter goes through it and we get to the end and see what their score result was. So there's so many online tools. That's just a website probably with that game, right?

Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yeah, yeah. That was a free hockey, whatever, digital hockey game. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yep. So I mean, there's so many online tools you can just share screen and just go out there and do stuff.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, sometimes you don't even need the, we did a quiz the other day where Scott was asking people what they thought he was reading, all the different SaaS acronyms and what do they think it stood for? And then we did the reverse make an acronym for this, and we were just having people write in on chat. And that was super fun. And it was a way of sort of laughing about the abundance of acronyms in tech that also immediately got people engaged and then rolling into a conversation about the topic.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Awesome.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
Yeah. All right. Well we are almost at the end of my list. And the most important thing that I want to end with here, the number one tip is to be authentic to you or message your story and your mission. And when I'm talking about your mission, what I mean in this particular case is your mission for this webinar. So I mentioned this at the top, that what can sometimes happen with these virtual events with webinars is that it just becomes a checkbox. It becomes the thing that you need to, oh shoot, we have a webinar next week. We get a speaker, we get the sides together and we present. And again, forgetting about that audience on the other side. So you have a room full of people, more people than you would likely ever get to come and sit in a actual physical room with you and across this whole global scape.

(43:44):
And you are able to speak to them for that time that you have them. And let's be honest, that minute or two that you've got with them before they're going to tune out is where you need to bring that authentic self. So a lot of what we've been talking about today are ways that you can bring an authenticity from your speaker and that bringing that genuine human interaction from the speaker to the audience and asking them to be a part of it. And that starts with you knowing what you want to get out of that webinar. You knowing what is the story that you want to tell? Why are you trying to make a sale? Are you trying to get people to sign up for a demo? Are you just trying to get knowledge and information out there to have people brand recognition, know who you are? Is there a specific product launch that you need? And start with that start and then bring in that authenticity, bring in that energy, and I promise you the audience is going to interact with that. And we actually have an example. So Geordie, I promised that we were going to show a social

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Media. Before we do it though, lemme just say, we'll, we'll go out with this being bozel on an outro. But before, I just want to say before we wrap up, if you need help, if you want to talk about ideas, if you want to talk about Jazzing up your webinar program, if you would like to run your first webinar, whatever it is, get in touch with us at your rep at actual tech media. You can email me Geordie at actual tech media. Jess, what's your email address?

Speaker 3 (45:03):
It's Jess period steinbach future net.com.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
All right. We're part of the future family. So we've all got different email addresses now, but yeah, so definitely shoot us an email. We would be glad to hop on a Zoom and chat over some ideas with you. And for all the folks who've done webinars with us today, we appreciate you. All right, thanks everybody. So we'll go out with an outro here of a bean boole game, which is a game where you get identical colored jelly beans, some may taste horrific due to the wonders of food engineering. That could be anything from puke to used bandages to who knows what, or they could be pears, grapes, something yummy. You never know what you're going to get until you eat it. So Jess is going to show how we use that. But in the meantime, we're just going to draw the winner of our Kindle scribe and all right, and then we're going to pop the name in the chat and push it out to everybody so you can see the lucky winner of the Kindle Scribe. We'll get that out to you. A SAP can start recording your amazing webinar ideas and reading all about how to do them better with all the books of the Amazon Universe. All right, let's see. B Unled Bean. Boole, Jess,

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Let's do it. Cheers, my friend. Oh God, I got toothpaste. Okay. This is Juicy Pear or Booger.

Speaker 8 (46:49):
Oh, I got Pear,

Speaker 3 (46:50):
I got Booger. Oh yeah, I'm glad. I love, I got to live Run Onion. Yep. Yeah, I did. How's my grandmother eat this? It's on my tongue. I'm not, I'm trying not to taste it. Oh, it almost came up. Ok. God. Oh.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Alright everybody, I hope you enjoyed that, Justin, and I enjoyed recording it. And hopefully it gives you some ideas about things you can do to spice up webinar attendee engagement, and we look forward to seeing you on our next episode.