myBrainshark Blog

GTMS says Brainshark is the "best sales & marketing tool…ever"

Go-to-Market Strategies, a leading sales and marketing resource site and a new Brainshark customer and partner, has just published an article about Brainshark and myBrainshark calling the solution "Your Best Sales & Marketing Tool...EVER."  We couldn't be more pleased with the praise the solution received in their review!  The article does a good job outlining the key strengths of the solution for sales and marketing professionals and describing the different versions of Brainshark available - from the free single-user myBrainshark offering to the broader, multi-user enterprise versions we sell.  

Go-To-Market Strategies' resources include articles and tips, toolkits, templates and training material aimed at helping companies "practically integrate the magic of marketing with the science of sales." I encourage you to check them out at http://www.gtms-inc.com/. 

myBrainshark headlines list of PCWorld's top "Freebies”

  We're delighted about our inclusion this week in PCWorld's list of 19 Freebies for Smart Web Browsing, Social Networking by Adam Pash and Rick Broida.  The article also appeared in CIO, Network World and other publications as well! myBrainshark is the only solution of its kind on the list, but it has some great company with cool tools like PhotoGrabber, TwInbox and Learn10 also featured. Specifically, myBrainshark is included on a short list of recommended web browser apps which also include:

• Lazarus: Recover info typed into Firefox
• MailBrowser: Manage Gmail contacts, attachments, and more
• PDF to Word: Turns PDFs into edit-ready docs

To see the full list of PCWorld's top Freebies across all categories, check out 112 Best Free Downloads, Sites, and Services: The Full List. There are some really great tools to check out.

myBrainshark February Newsletter

Although we're still shoveling snow up here in New England, February continues to heat up for myBrainshark.    

 In this month's newsletter, you'll find the following topics: 

• Support myBrainshark in Helping Haiti: Silent Auction
• Producing Highly Effective Webinar Replays: Whitepaper download 
• Tips & Tricks: Using attachments
• Featured Content: New media marketing 
• Help Us Make myBrainshark Even Better: a product survey 
• In the news: Brainshark & myBrainshark get some press

 

Support myBrainshark in Helping Haiti

In an effort to raise money for those in need in Haiti, Brainshark is hosting a silent auction in conjunction with Partners in Health. Help out by bidding on some great items that have been donated for the Brainshark Auction for Haiti Relief. Learn more and get a preview of just a few of the items!

 

 

 You can always view valuable content at myBrainshark.

Social Media Education with myBrainshark

Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd's blog post on Intel's Social Media Training gave a great example of how to drive social media adoption in a large organization. Providing over 60 online courses, certifications, and an entire department devoted to establishing social media strategy and guidelines, Intel is a shining example of a social media strategy that works. Jeanne and Karie posed the below questions for other companies on their own social media plan.

"How are you:

• Building a community among your global employee base?
• Engaging employees and customers to more easily collaborate with each other?
• Moving from a marketing campaign to having a conversation with your customers?
• Training your employees to be active participants in using social media to build your brand?"

In response, we decided to take a peek at the interesting evolution of Brainshark's social media strategy with the launch of myBrainshark. Looking back a couple of years, Brainshark has always had an internal social media tool in our core product.

Our employees live and breathe social media - and some don't even know it.

We use the player constantly for training, communication, planning, or asynchronous collaboration. Beyond the business value, employees have long been using Brainshark to deliver event invitations, cheer on employee successes, or promote a charitable cause. But if you were to ask our employees if they used social media three years ago, only a handful would have said yes.
Our social media platform, myBrainshark, grew out of a desire to share Brainshark with a larger community. By creating a site dedicated to sharing Brainshark presentations, one goal was to increase brand exposure, but of equal importance was to build a community for sharing business knowledge.

Using myBrainshark for collaborative learning

While the marketing and sales departments have embraced social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, creating an entire university with certifications and custom courses dedicated to this topic for the rest of the company is only possible for giants like Intel. In myBrainshark, we have a repository of publicly available, quality content that our employees can access at any time to learn more.

For example, Heather Lytle of HVM Solutions has seven presentations on business social media, with topics ranging from Twitter for business to brand monitoring. Gil Yehuda posted a presentation defining The Terminology of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media. Ken Okel shared presentations on Twitter for Business, and how to Boost Your Business with YouTube. The community collaboration gives our employees the tools they need to succeed in social media, without incurring the cost of an entire division devoted exclusively to it.

For us, learning through myBrainshark makes sense because our employees know it inside and out, but this type of informal learning might not be the best bet for every brand.

How do you train your employees in social media? In the context of limited resources, where do you focus your time and energy? Does a certain department receive training and others are neglected, or are your employees self taught?

Spreading the word through Affiliate Partners

 myBrainshark is not only focused on offering a free, easy-to-use content authoring tool, but we are also focused on promoting your content through various avenues. myBrainshark's Affiliate Partners include leading business-oriented websites, professional associations and organizations who are spreading the good word about myBrainshark and your expertise. 

We'd like to welcome the following Affiliate Partners:

Professional Associations such as Sales & Marketing Executives International (SMEI), American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP), New England Technology Sales Executives Association (NETSEA), Bank Insurance & Securities Association (BISA), America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and Boston Product Management Association (BPMA)

Websites such as BusinessKnowHow.com, HR.com, GlobalSpec, JobCentral.org, and CollegeRecruiter.com

Publishers such as TechWeb, Cambridge Who's Who, and Go-to-Market Strategies

We'll continue to announce and welcome our latest Affiliate Partners here, and feature them in the lower right-hand section of the myBrainshark home page.  We encourage you visit their sites.

And if you know of or are involved in an organization with a large audience of business-oriented professionals who could benefit from myBrainshark, be sure to let us know!

Tips & Tricks - Before You Land Them, You First Have to Hook Them...

In traversing myBrainshark over the past few months, I've noticed that almost all presentations start with some form of "Welcome to Title of My Presentation. I'm Presenter Name". This may work for instructional presentations with a captive audience, but for venues like myBrainshark, where people are browsing or searching for impactful, relevant content, try opening with something more engaging than these fact statements if you want people to stick around even until slide number two. To be blunt, unless you're famous, prospective viewers searching for content don't initially care who you are as much as they care what you're going to do for them. To use a fishing term, you have to "set the hook". How can you do that? Here's a 2-minute tip on one sure way to get those tire kickers into the driver's seat!

BNET says myBrainshark Best Online Sales Tool for 2010

How many social media tools are you using to help you prospect and sell on a day-to-day basis? How many web-based applications are you effectively using to streamline your business?

New cloud and social media tools are cropping up each day focused on improving your business, leveraging your network and empowering you and your staff. If you're going to invest your business time and effort, it's important to select the ones that fit your budget and get appropriate endorsements to stand the test of time.

Geoffrey James at BNET took a look at what online tools should be used this year - both pros and cons - in his Sales Machine blog. His focus for this article is on the 10 Free Online Sales Tools for 2010 (Geoffrey alludes to the potential of similar articles to come.)
We're proud to have been picked as #1 in his list amongst some impressive, reliable and extremely useful brands. He references myBrainshark as: "It's like cloning yourself and putting the clones on the web."

1. myBrainshark
2. Firefox SuperSearch
3. EDGAR
4. Google Analytics
5. Xobni
6. Jigsaw
7. Dun & Bradstreet's Hoovers
8. BNET's The Ultimate Cold Calling Tool
9. Zoho CRM
10. DemandBase Stream

BNET, a CBS Interactive site, calls itself "the go-to place for management...[where] managers find practical, trusted resources for the business challenges they face every day and effective techniques for moving their companies and careers forward."

We'd like to thank Mr. James for including us in his review.

About.com sees Benefits of myBrainshark as Job Search Tool

In one of our previous blogs, we focused on using myBrainshark as a Job Searching tool. Well it looks like About.com is on board as well with this method. A recent article articulates the features of posting "talking resume." Read How to Create a myBrainshark Presentation for Job Searching by Alison Doyle to also get some great insight and tips from our CEO, Joe Gustafson on creating that perfect professional myBrainshark presentation to master the formula of looking for a job.

About.com is a popular article-based site covering a diverse range of topics, including job searching and career advice. It yields a tremendous amount of traffic to its articles written by a network of writers, or "Guides."

Thank you About.com for recognizing myBrainshark to be a valuable asset for those seeking their next employment.

Tips & Tricks - You've got their attention - now make them DO something!

Once you've created great content for myBrainshark , don't miss the chance to make it work for you by encouraging your viewer to take a next step in engaging with you. It's makes sense that if someone's watched your whole presentation, they are probably a good candidate for more, and you'd probably like them to DO something, wouldn't you? I'm always amazed at how many people miss this "low hanging fruit". Watch the 60-second presentation below to get some ideas and then go check out how others are doing it.