The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

Chapter 2

Webinars

My favorite kind of content to produce is webinars. I love speaking, live, in front of a group of people, both physically present and virtually. And webinars present a unique ability to scale to sizes not possible at real-life conferences. In fact, I hold the Guinness World Record for the world largest webinar—we had 30,000 registrants and 10,890 attendees.

I spend a lot of time working to improve my presentation skills, and part of that time was spent studying webinars and presentations from a scientific point of view. I did qualitative research, with a survey and expert interviews, as well as quantitative measurement of actual tweets about a big webinar we did.

I started with a survey in which I asked takers, through an open-ended paragraph entry field, “What makes you want to tweet or blog about a presentation?” I read through the thousands of responses, by hand, and grouped them into a handful of different topical categories.

In Figure 2.1 you can see the most common reasons survey respondents gave. “Sharing” answers told me about a desire to share what they were hearing with the world around them. “Novelty” and “news” answers said they tweeted or blogged news and newsworthy information they heard. The “relevance” answers indicated that they thought about how the information they were hearing would interest their Twitter followers or blog readers. “People there” answers reflected that they were thinking about the community created by other people in the audience ...