But before all of this crescendoed into a great event, there was lots of behind the scenes preparation primarily surrounding selection of a webinar partner. Our primary requirement was live high-quality video and no other visual aids. Now, before I dive into things it is important to point out that this vendor fit our needs and there are many great providers out there. You just need to find the one that fits your requirements.

Two major types of vendors

As I dove into the selection process I went to the name brands of webinar providers and quickly discovered that there are two types of vendors – presentation-focused and video-focused.

Presentation-Focused Vendors

These are the vendors that usually come up in a discussion of making a webcast. Names like WebEx, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect are fantastic for delivering webcasts where the focus is on the presentation or document content while the video goes along with the presentation. Since we were basically doing live television without any type of presentation documents, these weren’t the best for this situation.

Video-Focused Vendors

Since we are focused on doing a webinar that is similar to a live news broadcast with a panel and uses mulitple cameras, the choices were pretty narrow.

Narrowing the Field and Testing the Finalists

Since we are focused on doing a webinar that is similar to a live news broadcast with a panel and uses mulitple cameras, the choices were pretty narrow. We narrowed the choices down to uStream.TV and Mogulus. uStream.TV is a leader in the live video space especially in the area of “lifecasting” where people are live on video engaging an audience while they go about their daily lives. Both had a free and professional version, the free version which was ad supported wouldn’t be appropriate so we focused on the pro packages. They both supported chat, embedding, live broadcast and on-demand replay plus their pricing model is usually a flat fee in addition to a combination of user views and bandwidth.

Selecting Mogulus and Going into Production

After testing both, what it came down to was the ability to use multiple cameras and the graphics options that the Mogulus studio platform provided. uStream.TV is an excellent platform and has some excellent shows and companies utilizing the platform but we had a two camera setup (one wide shot and one focused) that Mogulus was able to handle. I would offer that if you have other technology on the front end like a Tricaster, you can accomplish the same thing but we did not, so Mogulus was the winner.

The Results Were Fantastic with a few hiccups

I have to commend Max Haot, CEO of Mogulus and his team for their help in the preparation, testing and monitoring during our live show. It went off without any major issues and the announcement on their web site in addition stellar promotion job done by Network Solutions and CRT/Tanaka, we had 700 viewers over the course of the hour and the chat room along with Twitter and our #growbiz tag was buzzing. The only thing we ran into was when switching back and forth between cameras too fast, the sync up seemed to cause a hiccup and pause in the audio but that only happened once or twice. This platform and its development has come a long way over two years and this year looks to bring two major requests – live HD (you can only broadcast HD if it is pre-recorded) and all cameras on one machine (only one camera per machine) – to its fall release. It is truly amazing that in the last few years companies have developed the equivalent of a multi-million dollar production studio for your browser.

Truly amazing and the result of everyone’s hard work was what you see below:

The webinar, “Leveraging Social Media Into Your Business Strategy“, was broadcast live on February 5 — I watched the archived version a day after (which is the nice thing about webinars — it’ll be available through August 7 if you want to check it out), and featured Jeremiah moderating, with Michael Sippey of SixApart and Sam Lawrence of Jive Software participating.

Jeremiah set the stage by defining 6 categories of “social technographics” that Forrester uses to define social media users: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. The categories are pretty straightforward (you can see a breakdown presentation here), and a person can move between and through the categories as they use social media (with the exception, of course, of Inactives, though of the people surveyed, the percentage of Inactives dropped from 44% in 2007, to 25% in 2008).

Using these 6 classifications seems to make sense, and you can also map it against the continuum of participation inequality — some people may never contribute their own original blog entry or post a video, but they might still comment, for example.

He also ran through the external, consumer-facing uses of enterprise social media: listening to consumers, talking to the marketplace, energizing sales through word-of-mouth, supporting users, and identifying ideas for development; as well as internal uses: knowledge management, collaboration, community, education from thought leaders, and alerting people to information.

That’s enough of the laundry list. Generally, I advocate that companies (primarily bigger companies, where people can’t know everybody else) use social media tools to unlock institutional knowledge that’s typically stored in your head. Just like publicly sharing your bookmarks can be useful to others, so can keeping an internally-available record of what you’re working on.

And not to get all Cluetrain Manifesto here, but the ability to flatten out the organizational pyramid when it comes to feedback, knowledge sharing and communication can really help get things done.

Plus, internal social media, properly implemented, can be a great test bed to identify voices that will be good for external-facing social media.

Anyway, a few other bits from the rest of the session and the Q&A:

* Michael Sippey, on how to get companies started in social media: Start simple, with a small project with discernible business goals; get used to how things work with commenting and public conversation, and find what works and doesn’t work.

He later added, on the best way to get a corporate culture to embrace social media: Get workgroups to a series of small risks and small wins that lead to visible rewards.

* Sam Lawrence, on trends in social business software: It’s a huge growth category, because it’s an overall low-cost solution, especially for managing prospects and turning them into advocates.  Implementation is simple, yet complex. Users think in terms of tasks, not tools; 4 main buckets to focus on are employee engagement, connecting sales & marketing with the marketplace, supporting users, and R&D/innovation.

* On social business tool adoption on the intranet: The toolset is getting better in complexity and cost, and people are already using social tools outside the workplace — Twitter, IM, Facebook, and LinkedIn, so are more willing to try it internally.

* Getting executive buy-in: Focus on addressing real business issues, that have clear measures of success and measurable business objectives — like, reduced costs, or decreased time to market; even lower Search Engine Marketing costs (since social media content has natural SEM/SEO benefits).

Anyway, there’s a lot more in the Webinar, so check it out. And if you’ve got your own experience with trying to implement social media in the business setting, please leave a comment below.

Network Solutions has experts that are staying abreast of these changes. They are offering webinars to help you respond & maximize your presence.

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Additional Reading for Search Engine related topics:

6 things from Search Engineers by Marketing Pilgrim

The five goals of a search optimized page by DazzlinDonna

Free Links to Your Site by Matt Cutts, Google