I think any great tool, scratches an itch the creator of that tool had. In the case of Melissa Kwan, she thought she was wasting a lot of time, doing the same presentations, and trainings over and over again. She thought that many other people had the same problem. She wanted to give those people their time back. The tool Melissa created is eWebinar.

You might recognize the name, “Melissa Kwan”. She was also the creator of Spacio, a beautiful app designed to help capture and market leads at Open Houses. I wrote a glowing review of the app a few years back. Melissa’s design taste is second to none. The app is clearly laid out, beautifully designed and so easy to use.

Same goes for eWebinar. It’s just a pleasure to use.

So what is eWebinar and why am I so excited about it? And why do I think it might be a game-changer for the MLS organizations?

eWebinar is everything Zoom is not.

What I love about webinars is the live nature of them. The interactions. Ask questions, take a poll, download some content, and vote on topics. Those interactions in a webinar drive engagement. Unlike passively watching a video you are asked to interact. That’s a better experience.

What I hate about webinars is also the same “live” nature of them. First I need at least 3 people to pull them off, one to give the presentation/training, one to handle the questions/chat, and one other to handle any technical difficulties. That’s 3 people time and energy for an hour presentation. And even more time for setup. Yikes! And then their Murphy’s Law. The connection might be glitchy, the audio might cut out, or the slides don’t work. There are just too many variables and one of them is bound to fail, and it all happens live.

What eWebinar does is lets you record the best demo/presentation/training you have ever done. The audio is great, the video is great and the slides are perfect. Along with the video you can record interactions like asking for questions, taking a survey/poll, or downloading content. You can time where those interactions go in the video. You can even take a video you’ve already created in Zoom and upload that and add the original interactions too.

So what happens when someone asks a question? You can have those questions go to a designated person/queue via email or an alert on the website on even Slack. So your entire sales/support/training department can answer those questions in real-time. And those answers will appear on the screen as the eWebinar is playing…live. It’s truly is the best of both worlds.

Also, the metrics eWebinar gives you are super helpful.

To really understand it you should go to eWebinar and try it. Signing up for an eWebinar is exactly like signing up for a regular webinar. Registrants will even get an email after the eWebinar to “replay”.

How will eWebinar help MLS organizations?

I think this will solve a big problem in our industry. Many MLS organizations focus a lot of their training resources on their primary MLS systems, and not on the other software solutions they provide. Many MLS organizations have a lot of products they provide as a member benefit but limited staff/expertise to onboard/train on them. The beauty of eWebinar is that they can record an eWebinar once, and deploy it site-wide, saving tons of hours. This will help give parity to onboarding and training resources to the primary MLS system.

I made one for Cloud CMA. You can check it out here.

We have begun reaching out to MLS organizations with the hope of adding it to the training section of their websites and promoting it to their membership. I hope this will help increase adoption without putting any more strain on our MLS partners’ staff.

Check it out and let me know what you think!