Webinars
& Online Events: Is Your Platform Optimal These Days?
Since the pandemic, virtual meetings, webinars, and other
online events are now commonplace, and most law firms and companies subscribe
to and pay for at least one online platform to host and deliver online events.
To keep up with the times and save time and money, it may
be time to reevaluate how your firm or company is using online events to
enhance your reputation, build your brand, and nurture and develop
relationships and business.
Some companies are now using LIVE STREAMING to
communicate in real time. For example, J.P. Morgan, MIT, Pfizer, Best Buy, PwC,
Mercer, Boston Consulting Group, Salesforce, Mitel, and others are using live
streaming and LinkedIn® Live (LI Live) to educate, inform, reach, and build
awareness with four key audiences:
- Their
current workforce
- Potential
new employees
- Existing
customers/clients
- Prospective
new customers/clients
But most law firms and other companies are not using
live streaming or LI Live at all, even though the benefits of doing so over
traditional webinars are significant.
- Live
streams on LI (and on other strategic social media platforms) can do a lot
more than a Zoom (or other) webinar.
- Since
there are approximately 1 billion users of LI (around 145 million of whom
are active), doing LI Live events can increase your reach, audience,
connections, and followers. No internal mailing list can match this
potential reach.
- Any LI
Live event is accessible to and can be viewed and shared by ALL the host’s
LI connections plus ALL the LI connections of the guest speaker(s). So, LI
Lives reach a larger audience than does any in-house email list because
the event is PUBLIC and is shown to the networks of both the host and the
guest(s).
- LI Lives
showcase presenters in real time and provide an opportunity to build new
relationships immediately while authentically displaying their credibility
and expertise.
- Live
streaming (on LI or on other social media platforms that support live
streaming) offers the advantage of being able to show the attendees’
questions/comments on the screen. On most online event platforms, you
can’t display the comments on the screen.
- Using live
streaming, experts can present while simultaneously answering/showing
attendees’ questions/comments (with or without back-end assistance), which
demonstrates their knowledge and capability plus enhances their
reputation.
- After the
LI Live is over, the replay is instantly available for people to watch as
evergreen content. Replays of LI Lives get an average of 500 views.
- Anyone who
signs up to “attend” a LI Live event but misses it is automatically sent a
link to the recording/replay (so you don’t have to). Whereas with a Zoom
webinar, it’s necessary to send the recording to those who missed it and
usually only to the people who registered beforehand.
- Depending
on the streaming platform you use, the branding and presentation tools and
communication options can be much more robust and tailored than what Zoom
offers.
- The
recording of the LI Live (the replay) is automatically posted and lives on
your LI profile under “Events,” so it augments your LI profile, anyone can
see it, plus it’s searchable, which can increase your reputation and
reach.
- Once a LI
Live event ends, you can easily download the audio and video files from
StreamYard or Restream (or using other AI tools) and create more evergreen
content, such as a blog post or an article, or you can chop it up into
video snippets. The possibilities to leverage and reuse the content from
live streams are endless.
- Live
streams are live in real time, so mistakes can be made during live
streams, and there is no ability to redo or edit out any faux pas during
the live stream. Unless a Zoom webinar is prerecorded and then edited
first, there’s no way to edit it during the actual presentation.
Remember: Even for “private” or “unlisted” live streams, ALL live streams are
hosted on/streamed from the internet, so depending on the event, privacy or
confidentiality factors may need to be considered.
Some people stop using Zoom or similar platforms once they get a live stream up
and running.
To assess whether livestreaming and LI Live could benefit your firm or company,
consider the factors below:
- How much
does our current webinar platform cost per year?
- What is
the monetary value of the time it takes for staff members to operate it
and optimize the content produced during the event for use after it ends?
- Have we
optimized our webinar production process to reach ALL our LI connections?
- How much
new business has our firm generated from our webinar platform?
- Does the
webinar platform allow the audience to submit questions and comments
during the presentation?
- Does it
allow the audience to interact with one another?
- Does it
allow presenters to do polls and giveaways?
- Does it
immediately provide a transcript of the presentation to leverage for reuse
of the content?
- Could our
firm benefit from hiring an experienced live stream host or growth expert?
