How Webinerds are Adapting to Work from Home
Businesses are starting to adapt to a work from home world, but the day to day of office life isn’t back to normal and may not be for quite some time. To compensate, our webinerd community quickly adapted and shared their tips on how to keep work steady and operations going.
Here’s what they had to share:
Rachel Ross Creates Physical-Turned-Digital Events and More Webinars for Customers
Rachel Ross is the Field and Corporate Marketing Coordinator for Cherwell Software and the coronavirus pandemic made work a little crazy for her. Rachel and her colleagues had to quickly create and publish webinars to make sure they’re staying visible to their customers and supporting their sales teams. She’s also been working hard to transition in-person events to digital events using the ON24 platform.
Brandy Rowden Shares Webinar Best Practices with Colleagues
Working from home gave Brandy Rowden, Senior Marketing Program Manager for ServiceNow, the opportunity to take a seat on the other side of a webinar and present to colleagues. Brandy spoke on webinar best practices and made sure to wear her #webinerd t-shirt for an added boost in confidence!
Ariana Raftopoulos Works to Support Customers’ Needs
As the Corporate Webinar Manager for Salesforce, Ariana Raftopoulos keeps busy by adjusting topics and producing webinars that support customer needs. As a big fan of webinars, Ariana is happy to see so many others realizing how webinars can be a powerful tool for success.
Dean Shaw Created Good from Bad with A Virtual Conference
For Dean Shaw, Global Advocacy Program Manager for SAS, the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on SAS’s biggest conference of the year and forced them to cancel the event after many months of planning and preparation. After struggling to break through the historical mindset of a traditional face-to-face conference, Dean and his team transitioned their event to a virtual conference with almost 50 webinars powered by ON24.
Webinerd Tips
Businesses are taking a more cautious approach by letting employees return to the office when they’re ready. But this push to return to normal also misses a critical outcome of digital-first situations: that strong digital experiences will necessarily need to be a part of any company’s marketing plan regardless in both good times and bad. This means webinars, digital conferences and virtual trade shows should remain a critical tool in every marketer’s pocket.
But what about the attendees? What should they do? Well, here are a few tips to keep in mind if you find yourself watching a webinar:
Focus
You signed up for a webinar for whatever reason: the topic interests you, you need continuing education credits or everyone on your team is doing it and you don’t want to be left out of the discussion…whatever! You committed to do this, so embrace the experience and do what you can to get the most out of it.
Most webinars last an hour and include a question and answer portion toward the end. Commit to getting the most out of the experience by focusing on the presentation. Break out a notepad and jot down any interesting perspectives you may come across. If you need specific information that is shared during the webinar, jot down the timestamp of important content if you know you’ll be able to go back and review the presentation at a later time.
Engage
A good webinar encourages engagement from participants through tools like quizzes, polls, or chat pages with the hosts and other participants. Just like in a face-to-face presentation, the audience may be asked to raise their hands for something or to call out answers to a question.
This is also true with webinars, so if the hosts ask you to do something, be a good participant and engage with them! Doing so can help introduce your fellow participants to new ideas and perspectives. In fact, you and another attendee may even have the same question. So, participate!
Be Patient
Some webinar hosts are bonafide webinerds who are long past the days of being nervous about hosting a live webinar, but those people are few and far between. So, be patient with your webinar hosts — especially when they’re broadcasting from home.
Recognize the more personal side of business — especially if there’s a noise in the background or a child is seeking a parent’s attention. Most webinar hosts will have prepared contingencies in case something goes wrong, but even the most experienced webinerd encounters problems they’re not equipped to handle. It happens and it’s human! Have fun with it and when things get back on track, start taking notes again.