9 Tips for running a better webinar

I'm on so many technical and business webinars, I thought I'd give my little Top 9 list of do's and don'ts for delivering one.

• Callers muted!! I cannot tell you how many times some goofball talking in the background, combined with the host's inability to isolate and/or remove that line has led to a completely ruined webinar.
• No phone bridge if you don't need one. If you don't need to have people talking, don't force them to call a phone number - deliver the audio online with the video and don't make people take that extra step. Some webinars I've been on will offer the phone bridge, but it's only for people who want to comment - fine. People can give themselves the option of calling in if they think they might need to chat, versus people like me who are always listeners-only with questions afterward offline. Unnecessarily requiring a phone bridge will lose some participants.
• Communicate beforehand. Remind them at least twice (one of which being within 2-4 hours of the start of the webinar). Can't tell you how many webinars I've casually signed up for and then never attended because I forgot and was never reminded, or only reminded once, days in advance and forgot the day-of.
• Communicate during. A good alternative to phone bridges is to just allow viewers to comment-and-question in a little chat box right in the viewer. The talker needs to have someone monitor this while they're speaking, otherwise they will miss questions.
• Communicate afterward. Webinars also *must* publish a replay. Basic stuff, but some do not. I missed the webinar, and now I get no info? We're all losers in that equation. Publish the replay, and make it easy to get to (no convoluted logins, please!).
• Keep the thread going. Either on the replay page (via a comments section), or in an actual billboard/forum-type posting area, allow people to anonymously (again - without &$%^#%# login requirements) comment on the webinar and discuss the topics. This gives the moderators the ability to easily publish answers to "I'll have to check on that" questions, and for offline-question-askers like me to ask and get answered.
• Slides work and applications transfer nicely. It's awkward having to divert our eyes from someone's half-naked son on their desktop background as they close their PowerPoint deck so they can move over to the video player. It's called a hyperlink - embed it in your PowerPoint slide, test it and use it. *Click* and you're playing video. Video finishes, and you're back on the slide deck. No half-naked sons.
• Time wasting. People either with their decks out of order ("This is someone else's slide deck that I'm using, so I'll skip around a little") or otherwise not able to deliver succinctly are wasting that time *multiplied by* the number of viewers on the webinar. This kind of behavior tells me this is not very important to you to get right . . . so it's probably not worth my time either!
• Have I mentioned no logins? You will probably have to require some kind of login or authenticating link, but then everything else should be free to do whatever without having to jump through more security hoops. You're providing information and mainly filtering out bots, not guarding Fort Knox. If you're collecting info for marketing purposes, do it as non-invasively as possible.