Webinars may seldom be charming. However, they are the most widely recognized application of business to virtual space. The ball got rolling with globalization driving internet and social media towards business virtualization.

Professionals work online, train online, and worry more about online reputation management than about the relations that they share with their colleagues. Within all this, webinars consume a significant and vital space. Let’s face it though; they are boring and unbearable to the extent of torturing. Moreover, they seem like a one way ‘forced’ conversation. Since they are obviously ultimately boring they don’t have a great success rate. How do you turn the tables then, and make them one of the best ways to capture audience interest? Here are a few tips:

Bring Out the Blog: Pre webinar blog posts often give people a fine idea about what the webinar would entail. They work like an energizer and motivator.  Keep the blog crisp and concise. Don’t give out the details here. The blog will serve as a guide or a manual to evoke participation in the webinar.

Focus on Industry Updates: A webinar without current industry updates is like stale bread. You can’t make anything out of it. Facts and figures are important; and so are trends. Even if there is nothing interesting to talk about, the way you present the numbers can make the whole difference. Invite people to comment on the trends and talk about what they think about progress. Ask them if they see progress happening, or otherwise.

Understand Audience Behaviour: People are likely to pay attention to other social media platforms, happily chatting their time away if they encounter even a bit of boredom during a webinar. Analyzing and understanding audience behaviour and reaction is a way of predicting feedback. Mock webinars can help you get more accurate results.

As the adage goes – first impressions are the last impressions – so is the case with webinars too. A welcome slide for the webinar should hook the audience. Your half the job is done there and then, is it? No! You need to proceed in an equally engaging manner to make your webinar a hit.

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You have incorporated every trick from the book of SEO on your website, but when you type the keywords in the search tab, apart from showing organic results to your website, the search engine also displays a few websites and forums that are bad-mouthing your product. That can be such a bummer!

Today, solely implementing search engine optimization techniques to create a wider reader draw to your website cannot help in building a company’s brand over the internet.  With hoards of online communities, review platforms and forums available, reputation management is very much pivotal in enhancing one’s brand power. The functioning of a business is proportional to its brand identity and a positive identity can lead to increased efficiency as well as revenue. Online reputation management (or ORM) helps companies and businesses to prioritize and position the good over the bad by pushing them lower on search engine page results with the purpose of decreasing their visibility.

The main aspects of ORM are publishing positive content on the web and wiping away or at least covering the negative and misleading details with a thick dark blanket so that any user when searching for a company cannot see the detrimental results. Through extensive involvement in the social media (which includes blogs, Facebook, forums, Twitter, etc.), creation of positive content and promotion of existing content, companies are able to improve their online identity to a great extent.  At times companies also make formal ‘take down’ requests to site managers to remove negative or inappropriate content, and if that does not work the last option is to file a lawsuit.

Realizing the importance of ORM several companies have sprung up to help businesses and individuals manage their online reputatio. It seems Google (I have a new moniker for them – The Trailblazer!) might help companies (specifically the big ones) in doing away with ORM needs entirely. Its latest roll-out is huge site-links that take up almost half of the first page, pushing the organic links down and the bad links way further down.

Come to think of it, these monster-sized links can make generating online traffic through keywords quite tricky. Do SEO specialists need to worry? Well that’s a topic for another blog post!