The Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA) won the 2010 ACLEA’s Best Award for Professional Excellence for the Virtual Coffeehouse community built and managed by Peach New Media!

The Virtual Coffeehouse is a critical part of the ISBA’s efforts to reach lawyers who are new to the practice of law and demonstrate the powerful value of membership in the ISBA.  Coffeehouse sessions are approximately 5 weeks long and include weekly live webinars with seasoned attorneys, weekly assignments to watch on-demand videos, post to message boards and forums, and blog articles written by ISBA members.

Additionally, ISBA coffeehouse registrants are eligible to receive discounts on online CLE content specifically for new lawyers.

Peach New Media was proud to provide the platform, event management, and logistical support for the Virtual Coffeehouse program and congratulate the ISBA on this great accomplishment!

You see, Karen is the ultimate Support Team manager. She is invincible. No person, place, or thing has ever ticked her off.  She is ROBOCOP of support. She is always polite, courteous, professional, and even cheery in the face of angry customers, frustrated users, crazy busy days, and massive loads of stress usually piled on in very short periods of time.

So the bet quickly grew and before long we had people joining in on the bet (Karen wasn’t included on the conversation, of course), and even our Apps team offering additional winnings if there could be video to prove any claims.

Within the hour, this video was distributed internally from Dave:

Of course, the video is totally staged and Dave didn’t win any money… except a few payments from those of us who were impressed by his efforts to fake and publish the video.

I’m certainly no HR expert, so I can’t tell you how to incorporate this trait into your recruiting processes, but I can simply pass along that I hope your organization can have the same internal joke about your support team. We should all be so lucky to have a Karen Troupe!

In recent posts by Ken Molay, of Webinar Success, and Tim Bourquin, they each discuss how challenging it is to sell webinar recordings and archives. Our clients who offer online continuing education programs know the same thing!  We even have seen this trend developing with Knowledge Communities… the trend is this: if you market something as available 24/7/365, your audience will never do it. They don’t have a reason!  Even if they benefit from this dramatically, they will likely not do it unless you give them a specific deadline and timeline.

The Knowledge Community observation is the most interesting to me. We’ve found that even communities with good steady flow of content, often don’t get the participation they seek until they schedule a webinar, or rebroadcast, or even a Tweet-up-like chat session (where you schedule a time for your forums and message boards to be active).

While they can be, the triggers don’t have to be expensive, high production events. The point is that it is a scheduled “event” from a reputable organization. That’s enough to get at least some attention and participation.

Here are some Triggers we have used at Peach with clients with some if not great success:

1. Rebroadcasts – schedule a time to replay a live webcast or live webinar as a “Pre recorded” webinar, but the key is to have your experts online and ready to handle live Text based Q&A.  It is likely that the presentation wouldn’t have changed anyway… just the Q&A.   So take your well-produced content and schedule it to happen many times over the course of a month. It works.
2. Live Webcasts – even a simple video from a studio or conference room can be enough to entice people to your site.
3. Mandatory CE deadlines – of course these are great triggers when they come from large governing bodies. However, if your organization offers certification programs, consider the deadlines for the CEU’s for these programs as great ways to get large audiences of people online and “doing something” on your site. Be ready for the push, and plan to upsell and promote anything you have that is relevant to this segment.
4. Webinars – tried and true. Enough said! You should always be doing webinars. We do them for ourselves, and they work.  Believe me, they work!
5. Tweet-Chats – during your in-person conferences or active times of the year, schedule times when participants will be online chatting on Twitter using your hashtags.

My goal with this post is to simply get you thinking about Triggers with your online content, regardless of what it may be.  If you have more ideas, post them below in the comments section.    Now, I’d be happy to come visit your site to see what you have, but when is your next scheduled web event, exactly?

Here is the wave: