The Webinar Blog is now located at a new Web address:

http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog

Please update your links to reflect the new location.

I apologize for the inconvenience, but Easyjournal was not providing the support and features I needed in order to bring you a quality reading experience. I have high hopes for Typepad, as it is used by many of the bloggers I read regularly.

I have moved over all entries from this blog, with their original dates, times and titles. So you can safely use the new location to browse through all archived entries. I will be updating links in archived entries on this domain to point to the new Typepad location, so if you see updates reported in your subscribed feed, it means you have a direct link to this obsolete version. Please be so kind as to visit the Webinar Success Blog Page and use one of the links to quickly and easily subscribe to the new feed channel.

Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to greeting you as a subscriber on Typepad!

--Ken Molay
March 8, 2006

Just a short note today to blow off a little steam. If you put an apostrophe in the word it's, it means "it is." That is the ONLY use of an apostrophe in that word. The possessive does not use an apostrophe. Does this paragraph make its point clearly? If you put an apostrophe in that last sentence, it's wrong.

If you put an apostrophe in the word you're, it means "you are." That is the ONLY use of an apostrophe in that word. The possessive does not use an apostrophe. I think you're getting my point by now. Your writing should be getting more accurate already.

If you put an apostrophe in the word who's, it means "who is." That is the ONLY use of an apostrophe in that word. The possessive does not use an apostrophe. Who's still confused about this? Only those whose grasp of grammar is shaky.

If you put an apostrophe in the word let's, it means "let us." That is the ONLY use of an apostrophe in that word. The present tense verb does not use an apostrophe. Let's assume that this is enough on the subject, which lets us drop the whole thing.

Thank you, I feel much better now. (Does this have anything to do with webinars? Only that I end up correcting these mistakes on clients' slides far too often.)

Today was a big day for press releases from VoiceCon, a business conference focusing on internet-protocol telephony and VOIP solutions. I have placed the releases that talk about integration with webcasting and web conferencing on the Webinar Success Industry News page.

Convergence of voice and web collaboration solutions continues to be a hot topic. I talked about this a while back in Integrated Collaboration – Who Will Win? In that entry, I concentrated on features such as instant messaging, shared calendaring and scheduling, and document sharing. Naturally VoiceCon participants are more concerned with convergence of voice and web communications. I noted with interest that Cisco has an integrated offering in this space. I never thought of Cisco as a web conferencing provider, but they certainly have the underlying technology expertise. I haven't seen their user interface, so I can't comment on functionality. Interwise hit the same kind of a story with its ECP Connect solution to merge voice and data communications.

Both TANDBERG and RADVISION announced solution pieces that piggyback with Microsoft Live Meeting and the newer Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.

And we also caught a few press releases not associated with VoiceCon... Saveonconferences.com is touting the fact that they resell WebEx Meeting Center at a discount (you can sometimes pay less for the same software by buying it from a reseller willing to work for lower margins than the vendor!). And ON24 announced a platform to better handle rich media content in webcasts. I'll be looking into that, as getting a good solution for streaming video has been a challenge with my clients.

With luck, the Easyjournal server is stable again, so be sure to check back frequently for updates.

Looks like my blog host (Easyjournal) has finally got their system up and running again. They were shut down with a Denial Of Service attack that overloaded their servers. You couldn't read anything and I couldn't post anything during that time.

I'm annoyed with the Easyjournal service. They advertise an upgraded version that would give me more control over my template and surrounding content, but it is not really available. Click through their poor navigation to try to order it and you get a generic message about them still putting together the details. Send an email to their customer service account and you get no reply. I recently sent one email asking about the upgrade service and another one asking about the server availability, since they hadn't given any notification to their users. Neither email got a response.

Now I want to switch to a more reliable, responsive, and feature-rich blog host. But the task is truly daunting. I'd like to move my existing content over, since I have dozens of entries complete with links. Only a couple of services let you import content from a historical file. The serious problem though is the amount of time and effort I have spent promoting this blog to blog search engines, portal sites, other bloggers, and so on. All that goes for naught and I have to start rebuilding my web presence from scratch.

Stay tuned and I'll let you know if you need to reset your bookmarks and feed registrations. In the meantime, I'll keep posting here, simmering in anger at a bad situation.

Starting a blog? Don't use Easyjournal.

I was struck by the accuracy and importance of this very well-written article on The New Rules of PR by David Meerman Scott. I agree wholeheartedly with his assertions. You need to use press releases as a consumer/customer outreach medium and think of their impact on your overall internet search marketing approach. I worked for a number of years in corporate marketing, churning out press releases for companies and products. Every time I tried to create a release that varied in the slightest from the traditional phrasing and structure of the classic 1985 classroom marketing curriculum it would come back red-lined from a corporate marketing group with notes about how I didn't include a generic and meaningless company executive quote in the second paragraph, customer quote in the fourth paragraph, and first sentence including the official company press release descriptor (GenericTech, the leader in innovative technological approaches to profit advancement, today announced...).

When publicizing your webinars (whether free lead generation events or paid registration revenue generators), you should use press releases to get the word out. No journalist is going to pick up your release and run it as a news story, so word the release for effective search utility and customer involvement. Speak directly to your audience in words that they can understand and are interested in.

Regular readers have seen my plaudits for WebEx's marketing and outreach effectiveness. Note that Mr. Scott picked them out as an example of how to align press release strategy with overall marketing efforts. Looking over the last month of press releases consolidated on my Webinar Success Industry News page, you will see releases from many of the technology vendors. (You do check that page daily for the latest breaking news, don't you?) Want some extra publicity? Work a partner release with your vendor to mention that you are using their technology to deliver your event. They want to be seen as a critical business technology being used for real web conferences. You can probably get them to pay the distribution costs for the press release. And you'll double your search vectors, since you can key on your company name, your topic, and the vendor's name.