As Entrepreneurs and SMB’s we are always looking for the edge – to get our story seen, heard, shared – to inspire people to consider doing business with us. Simple. Not always easy, but simple.
Crowdcast just went a long way towards making part of our job easy AND simple. As you continue to establish yourself as an expert in your field, webinars are a natural extension of that sort of marketing. Problem? Webinars are no longer cool and sexy (been on one too many boring ones) and are less and less effective – (in part due to Fake-inars, webinars that seem to promise to be real, but are just recordings) but the opportunity to connect with real people in real time is such a goldmine, it’s got to get better again – and it has.
We are all ready for the next iteration in webinars, masterminds, training sessions, seminars or virtual conferences – and it seems like Crowdcast is delivering exactly that; a new, awesome, interactive connection experience. Designed and developed by Cy Hossain and Dylan Jhaveri, Crowdcast this is an exciting new alternative to how you set up, register, launch and run a meeting or presentation.
“We wanted to make live events fun and allow the host and attendees the ability to interact with one another.” ~Dylan Jhaveri
And they have done just that. A sneak peek at V2.0 this morning proved them to be right on track – the changes they are rolling out are hugely valuable to small business marketers and Fortune 500 – luckily we will catch on faster than them, so we get a jumpstart on this new tech.
I’ve been watching these guys for a while now and have had the pleasure of spending some time with Cy at my home – you know when you just get a good feeling about WHY someone is doing WHAT they are doing? I got that from Cy.
The goal was to create a way for people to learn and collaborate together in a frictionless environment where there are no time delays between questions and answers or worse yet, where the host and audience are unable to interact at all.
In a Crowdcast event you can have up to four people visible on screen, while to the right of it is a rolling chat pane where all attendees can not only see who else is in the Crowdcast but they can also chat with one another. You can even click on someone’s icon to learn more about them or take a 1-on-1 conversation offline.
There is another interactive space below the chat window where viewers can post topic-specific questions and everyone else can up vote the questions they want to see answered first. And there is a Polls tab which lets attendees see how others are responding to the event as it is taking place.
As a host you can set your event to be either public or unlisted. You start an event with just 2 clicks and you control who is on the screen with you at all times. Currently – there can be up to 4 individuals screen sharing. Another great feature is that you can now add a CTA with an attached link to the Crowdcast so folks can buy your products right there while the Crowdcast is occurring – no need to wait until the event ends to send people to yet another Landing Page.
As soon as you go live your Crowdcast is being recorded. You can click the share button and send the recording out to your Twitter and Facebook pages, you can download the recorded video and upload it to your YouTube channel, or you can embed it on your website.
Crowdcast is also integrated with zapier.com so that you can link it to your current CRM software. This means that if you use, say, Infusionsoft, then you can set it up so that each person who registers for one of your Crowdcast events has their user information piped right into your Infusionsoft contact list. Brilliant!
The Mobile App is in development and they are looking to roll it out in the coming months. In the meantime, Cy and Dylan are hard at work adding some additional cool features and making final tweaks to the overall look of the design based on feedback from early testers. But look for it to be released sometime in the next few weeks – you will not want to miss out on this!
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UPDATE: as I give this a quick proof-read, it seems a bit like I’m on their PR team 🙂 not true. Full disclosure, I am good friends with a member of the team and I just plain-old like Cy – the links provided are not affiliate links and I’m not an investor in the company … but perhaps I should be 🙂
