A little while ago, on September 30, our company organized a webinar called “Free Webinar for Companies Aiming to Release their Games Internationally: How to Accomplish this With/After the Spread of Corona.” There we welcomed the CEO of PTW Japan, Mr. Terao.
Press Release：https://www.atpress.ne.jp/news/225085
As it was our first time doing something like this, there were a lot of concerns. Even the panelists had trouble staying calm the day before. But in the end, we had a significant amount of people participate, and everything went off without a hitch. I’d like to talk about the Webinar planning process, from the day we decided to hold it, to the day of.
Steps
・Decide the schedule
・Decide the target
・Decide the content
・Prepare the tools
・Create the application form
・Gather participants
・Rehearse
・The Main Event
We’d been participating in webinars hosted by various companies, so we decided to hold one ourselves. It was our first time and we weren’t sure were to start, making the first step was research. Thankfully there is a lot of information on the subject available on the internet, so it was a great learning experience.
Decide the Schedule
Since it was a webinar, there was no need to procure a venue. That reduced the labor involved, making things a little easier—but we still had to gather the participating companies and decide the theme. Since it was our first, I knew we’d want to do a few test runs (rehearsal) so I predicted that preparations would take a little under two months in total, and set the seminar date for September 30, after the Tokyo Game Show.
Decide the Target
Active Gaming Media is a company that translates and localizes games, anime, and manga, in addition to more general translation. As such, we started by choosing the keywords “International Expansion,” and went from there. However, “International Expansion” varies depending on the industry, so the next step was to decide who our target audience was. Since we are a company that does a lot of work related to games, we figured a good target for our first foray into webinars would be the game industry.
Decide the Content
With the target audience decided, the next obvious step was to figure out the content, but that’s where we got stuck. What would catch everyone’s interest? We want to talk about International Expansion, but the questions and issues that each participating company has will be different, so AGM staff had all sorts of meetings about what sort of things participants might find interesting. All companies have been more or less affected by the coronavirus, but the game industry is said to have been doing comparatively well. Even still, recently there’s been news of hitches in development, and releases being delayed, so we decided to take real examples of what PTW Japan and AGM have done during this pandemic, and how we’re able to continue developing and releasing games internationally.
Prepare the Tools
When it came to choosing our tools, we referenced various sites, and decided the below points were most important:
- Convenient for the participant
- Reasonably priced
- Easy to use
After looking into a few different applications, we decided to go with one used by many other seminars—Zoom— and quickly purchased an account. Testing it out, the participants have it pretty easy, all they have to do is click a link. However, the host’s settings and functions are a little difficult to get a handle on at first. I’ll talk about that more in the Rehearsal section.
Create the Application Form
Though we were steadily preparing, we also needed to work on gathering a vital part of the webinar: the participants. In addition to announcements on our website and social media(Active Gaming Media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eight), we had our sales staff contact people directly and put out press releases. For all these announcements, we needed to create an application webpage. This required more research. Luckily there’s a ton of information available online. We couldn’t make a super complicated page, so we used Google Forms. It was very simple, but very easy to make; and you can set up automatic replies with a little tweaking. Awesome, Google!
Gather Participants
After making the form, we were ready to start advertising. We used press releases, social media, and direct e-mails from our staff.
Press Release：https://www.atpress.ne.jp/news/225085
Rehearse
As it was our first go at this, we rehearsed a lot. We went over not only the flow of the seminars, time allocation, and the content, but also how to use the screen share and chat features (see below). We also made sure everyone could be heard clearly and that there were no problems with the cameras. There were a ton of things to check, and it wasn’t easy.
Seminar Tools
・Web sharing
・Q&A
・Chat
For this seminar we decided on two panelists, one moderator, and, one to four people behind the scenes so the moderators could focus on what was going on. The panelists shared content relevant to their panel on their screen, and questions during the seminar (Q&A) from the viewers, were sent to the moderators and the panelists via the chat. Those who are used to it could probably do both jobs at once, but we split up the roles. Mr. Terao of PTW Japan was one of our panelists, and he attended many of the rehearsals and practiced quite a bit.
The Main Event
With all the preparations, the time before the webinar seemed to fly by. There was a nervousness that had been absent in our rehearsals, but the panelists all looked calm during their presentations, and, perhaps due to all the practice, everyone was able to finish on time without any major mistakes. We tried to answer as many questions as we could that were received during application, and during the seminar, but due to time constraints there were some that didn’t get answered. We’re also not sure whether the content itself was satisfactory to everyone. Even so, we’d like to hold a second and third webinar at some point. If you have any topics you’re interested in hearing about, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Contact information: [email protected]
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