We held our first webinar for a major customer yesterday. This webinar was designed for sales representatives around the country to understand best practices in the use of the Customer Portal we built. I wanted to share some of the highlights and lessons that we learned in putting together this webinar. This was the first time we've done a webinar — we have done many one-on-one web demos with conference calls to clients, however this was the first time we ventured into the realm of webinars.

Our first decision point was to select a software platform for the webinar itself. We use GoToAssist and GotoMeeting for our database support and conference calls — so we naturally migrated to GoToWebinar from there. We engaged in this Citrix solution for $99 per month.

We had a healthy number of users who signed up for the webinar with 35 participants attending. We planned ahead based on feedback from others to have two moderators in play outside of myself (the presenter). This really helped to manage the many questions that were asked by the participants. We experimented internally to understand how the Chat feature works so that we could communicate internally while answering participant questions in the Question window. The one area we had difficulty was in the hand-off as we attempted to transfer the audio from one presenter to another.

All in-all, we had a very good first webinar and posted the link to the recorded presentation on our customer's website.

We have learned a lot about putting together webinars and getting the small things right. We will definitely address the smaller issues to improve on our execution for next week.