Web Conferencing: Your Way to Building a 'Sticky' Community

All the buzz these days is around building virtual communities – or social networks – using innovative technologies that employ voice, video, text or even avatars. According to Wikipedia, these “virtual, or online communities are used for a variety of social and professional groups interacting via the Internet.”

The success of these communities is undeniable, if measured only by the sheer size of some of the more well-known communities and by the money invested in them by other, larger corporations and venture firms. One example is Facebook, which has 120 million active users and more than $300M invested in the company so far.

While the power of these communities to influence actions and drive behavior is proven, there remains a solid, if unspectacular, technological augmentation in the form of web conferencing. Made commercially famous by the companies WebEx and PlaceWare*, web conferencing remains extremely popular today.

And yes, Virginia, there is a connection to Cleantech Marketing too... (famous quotation alert: borrowed from history's most reprinted newspaper editorial first published in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897 by veteran newsman F. Pharcellus Church).

According to Wikipedia, web conferencing is “used to conduct live meetings or presentations over the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the Internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendee’s computers or a web-based application where the attendees will simply enter a URL to enter the conference.”

But then you already knew that. And your response might be, “So what?”

The real community building magic occurs in a form of web conferencing called a webinar. Generally speaking, a webinar is a one-way communication form with limited audience interaction. The magic occurs both in the way the limited audience interaction is conducted and in the overall systematic outreach to one’s webinar community.

Let’s examine the first point, the so-called “limited audience interaction.” Most commercial web conferencing systems – and there are scores of them – offer an electronic Q&A whereby the audience can ask questions of the speaker online. Many presenters prefer this format because there is no audio to worry about, and they can manage the quality of the questions. Who wants to answer an audio question the attendees can hear (some of whom may be your clients) that is either a) not relevant to the topic of the webinar, b) too difficult to answer, or c) disingenuous because it comes from a competitor who sneaked onto the webinar? Nobody. As such, the electronic Q&A format is often preferred. It also enables the presenter to selectively introduce questioners to one another during the webinar session so they can share tips on the webinar topic or share tips with all attendees online. The result: a managed community, one that gains topic insight value both from the presenter and other webinar attendees.

The second point, outreach, is very compelling. If you can deliver a systematic webinar experience, one that combines a regular calendar expectation; relevant topics presented compellingly by knowledgeable and capable presenters; online forum parameters that deviate little; and pre- and post-webinar communication that is not intrusive, then you’ve captured the magic. Furthermore, that magic translates into an ongoing interest from people to whom you’d like to sell (or influencers of those to whom you’d like to sell) to return again and again to your webinars. A sticky community is born using an old, standard tool. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, then why do so many early-stage technology companies execute their webinar programs poorly — losing all hope of building a relevant community? We will talk more about this topic on a future post.

* WebEx was founded in 1995 and was acquired twelve years later by Cisco for $3.2 billion. PlaceWare is a spin-off from the famed Xerox PARC and was acquired five years later by Microsoft and re-christened Microsoft Office Live Meeting,