I am the Queen of the Frebinar… Give Me Your Sourcing, Recruiting, HR Expertise!

What’s a frebinar? A free webinar. And I will admit that someday I may need a 12 step program to ween me from listening to them. Everyone’s offering them lately and I love ‘em. I don’t have to leave my office, they’re definitely a nice workday change of pace from Pandora, and great to listen to while multi-tasking. The good ones always give me at least one thing to walk away with. There have been times when I’ve been working on a research project and I’ll integrate a sourcing tactic immediately and find it’s a huge value add.

Frebinars can be an awesome tool in the HR space – get someone who gives great phone, is energized and obviously an expert in their topic and they are marketing gold. From a personal and a business marketing standpoint.
But my gosh there are some bad ones out there. Here are hints from a professional listener on running a great frebinar…

Know Your Subject… and your attendee. I attended a LinkedIn frebinar about 8 months ago and what was lacking was the user knowledge. Great company knowledge but they weren’t looking at it from the recruiter perspective. When I’m thinking of things you should add to your frebinar, that’s no good. Do like some companies out there and partner with one of your fanatic users.

Don’t re-tread the same old, same old. You know what I mean… covering territory in your current frebinar that you covered in the last two. Reference the others, briefly, but give me new content. New is good, re-hashing bad.

Do a dry run. Check your software, find out how to upload your information, slides or whatever you may be using. Always, always, always test your phone and your headset. Nothing kills a frebinar faster if the phone the presenter is using has an echo, the attendees can’t hear you or hey, there’s no mute! If you’re going to do frebinars, invest in the back end and use decent quality phones and software.

Have a team. Or at least you and one other person. You need someone to troubleshoot and handle questions as they come in from attendees.

Mute the line. I want to hear you… not the peanut gallery. I don’t want to hear their hold music, office conversations or heavy breathing. I don’t want to hear echos on the line from people putting your call on speaker or calling from their cell… and putting that on speaker! And don’t b.s. by telling me there’s 200 attendees when I can see there’s only 63. Just let the audience know you want to give them the highest quality listening experience possible.

Offer up the slides. Don’t gasp, but I was pretty darn impressed when I attended a recent Arbita frebinar and there was a list of white papers, slides and additional audio of recent frebinars that I could access when I logged in to get my initial materials.

Answer questions… at the end of the preso. Via the online system or have a live Q&A session. But don’t interrupt your preso. Make yourself accessible. You’ve stepped into a role to be forward facing for your company, accept that and interact with your customers, respond to emails and keep the momentum you’ve started to build.

And by all means keep the frebinars coming… feel like you’ve had an epic fail? Low turnout? Loss of listeners mid-frebinar? Fix the issues and get back in there…