Do you have any teleseminar tips and tricks?

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Permalink Reply by Karen Scharf on June 14, 2008 at 6:50am

Patric,

I do teleseminars often for clients. Let me know if you want to sit down some day and talk about it. I have tons of information that will probably be helpful for you.

~Karen

P.S. Did your basement stay dry with this last round of rain?

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Permalink Reply by Joe Dager on June 14, 2008 at 10:06am

I have been doing them for several years, but you might want to try a few things:

1. Sign up for a couple of services, most have 30 days for free and practice. All the reputable ones are pretty good, I use gotomeeting and it works fine, no issues. I use it because, I can do on demand presentations very easily.

2. You can tell just about anything except if they own a pet, but you can find out that if....

3. If you have 30 at the start, welcome the problem. However, most people do not talk that much and your issues end up being more about letting 1 or 2 control the entire conversation. There are ways to do it, if you ave a lot people mute them all and have a Q & A only at certain times.

4. Lots of things to learn, but go out and practice. My dog was the only one to listen to my first couple. He got bored and went to sleep.

Let me know if you need more info. I can send you links if you would like more info. Take Karen up on her offer. Been there, done that..beats a book every time.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Semester on June 14, 2008 at 11:48pm

Patric,

Joe and Karen are exactly right. Learn from the experts, and practice, practice, practice. I bet we Smoosiers would be willing to be a practice audience for a presentation or two!

I recently participated in a web-based demonstration teleseminar with Constant Contact (they do them, like, every weekday at 2:00 or something), and the system they used was great. It allowed the participants to e-mail in (or chat in) with their questions, as well as call in to ask their questions verbally. I don't know what system they used, but it might be worth checking out... (constantcontact.com)

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on June 16, 2008 at 7:43am

I've been on several teleconferences and teleseminars for the government. A few things that I remember:

- Encourage everyone to use the mute button. In fact, if it's possible, have the incoming calls default to mute and they have to turn it off to ask a question.
- Schedule times for questions, rather than leaving it open.
- Find a service that has a chat function. This will allow people to ask questions without interrupting.
- If you use PowerPoint, the same rules of live presentations apply: don't use too much text, don't read the slides.
- Avoid reading a script. It's evident when someone is reading.

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Permalink Reply by Patric Welch on June 17, 2008 at 10:24pm

Thanks for your help everybody. I really appreciate it!

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Permalink Reply by Lynn Zettler on June 27, 2008 at 10:21pm

I know I'm late in the reply chain, but I have used www.freeconference.com

It is free to you. However, it is a long distance number for the participants. It has an option of taping for a fee. I've had very good luck with it, both with taping and without.

I offer classes using this service and I ask the attendees to identify themselves before speaking so that 1) we can start to recognize voices with names and 2) if more than one person starts speaking at the same time, I can identify them and ask one to follow the other. This has worked quite well.

I also started a class blog that the participants can all subscribe to on blogspot.com. This is nice if you are doing classes over several weeks and having communications/sharing inbetween.

Good Luck

Lynn

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