Google’s announced a new series of “Learn with Google” webinars for digital marketing this morning, focused on helping small, media, and large businesses grow with digital branding, social media, multiscreen marketing, and, yes, online advertising.

That is, after all, how the search giant makes its money.

The topics range from the basic — How to use Google+ and make social work for you — to a little more expert-level, with webinars on video remarketing and dynamic retargeting technologies. Other topics include Google Analytics, mobile advertising, video ads on YouTube, and Google Adwords.

Of course, despite the fact that 30 billion ads run daily on Google sites and networks, earning the company $100 million a day, there is just a little bit more to digital advertising than Google.com. Facebook ads and Twitter promoted tweets are just two examples of important digital marketing options you won’t learn about via a Google webinar.

Nevertheless, the search and mobile giant is putting together a very good lineup of introductory courses. Here are the courses, with dates, all of which will be available at Learn with Google’s webinar site.

Build Awareness

02/12 [Multiscreen] Brand Building in a Multiscreen World
02/20 [YouTube] How to Build your Business with YouTube Video Ads
03/05 [Social] How to Use Google+ and Make Social Work for You
03/12 [Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
03/27 [Wildfire by Google] The Call for Converged Media

Drive Sales

01/29 [Analytics] Google Tag Manager: Technical Implementation *today*
02/07 [Search] Your Shelf Space on Google: Get Started with Google Shopping
02/26 [YouTube] From Awareness to Sales: Making the Most of Video Remarketing
02/27 [Search] What’s New and Next in AdWords
03/06 [Display] Biggest Loser: Digital Ad Spend Edition
03/13 [Mobile] The Full Value of Mobile
03/20 [Display] Getting Started with Dynamic Remarketing

photo credit: World of Good via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Online meeting service MeetingBurner has launched out of beta with free meetings for up to 15 people, paid meeting options for up to 1,000 people, and mobile support, the company announced this morning.

MeetingBurner faces steep competition in the online meeting space, including competitors like Cisco’s WebEx, Adobe’s Connect, Citrix’s GoToMeeting, and AnyMeeting. So it has done what is natural for an underdog — undercut the competition with strong pricing and features. The company debuted in beta this past August and gave its service away for free to help it “build good will and word of mouth,” President John Rydell told VentureBeat at the time.

But with its full launch, the company is taking a big step toward being a profitable business with paid online meetings. The company’s goal is to offer the most features at the lowest price, and at a glance, it is winning that race. Its three pricing tiers are as follows:

• MeetingBurner Free – Free. Up to 15 participants in online meetings, integrated phone conference line, email support, and no advertising.
• MeetingBurner Pro – $39.95 a month. Everything in Free model + up to 50 participants, full telephone support, meeting recording, enhanced security encryption, and more.
• MeetingBurner Premier – $99.95 a month. Everything in Pro model + up to 1000 participants, telephone support, autopilot meetings, PayPal integration, meeting analytics, and more.

By comparison, WebEx, Connect, and GoToMeeting do not offer a free a version of their software for small businesses. AnyMeeting offers ad-supported presentations for free, but it also added paid ad-free options recently. On the fully paid side, WebEx costs $49 per month for a max meeting size of 25 participants and GoToWebinar (GoToMeeting’s larger version) costs $99 a month for a 100 participants. When you move over to the 1,000 participant level, the contrast becomes especially noticeable — WebEx doesn’t have an established price for meetings of this size and makes you call for a quote, while GoToWebinar costs a staggering $499 per month for 1,000 participants. MeetingBurner provided the following chart that sums up the 1,000-person level well:

“About 75 percent of our small business clients come from GoToMeeting and WebEx,” MeetingBurner CMO Chris Van Dusen told VentureBeat. “Our pricing structure beats the crud out of the big boys.”

Some of the best features MeetingBurner offers include not having to download any software, fast start up speeds, Skype call-ins, and an analytics tool to get real-time feedback on how well the meeting is going. The company also has a brand-new iOS app for iPhone and iPad that allows participants to attend meetings on the go. The company’s interface is also optimized so that most Android device owners can attend via the browser.

Ladera Ranch, Calif.-based MeetingBurner is a division of larger company Networx Online and has ten employees on its team.

Business group in online meeting: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock

The funding comes from North Bridge Growth Equity for a minority stake in the company.

Webinars are inherently a dry topic. You watch or listen to a person talk about their product or company for a half hour and look at PowerPoint slides in the meantime. Technology today allows for collaborative, exciting ways of presenting knowledge, even in consumer entities such as Google+’s Hangout feature, but webinars seem to remain in the Stone Age of static earnings call hell.

But BrightTalk sees a future for webinars: marketing.

“The platform we’ve built is a webinar video platform that’s used by marketers so they can get their content … distributed to the widest possible audience,” said Paul Heald, chief executive and co-founder of BrightTalk in an interview with VentureBeat.

The product is thus a place where company leaders can upload their webinars, show off their “thought leadership” and supply context for their industry wisdom. Currently, BrightTalk allows these leaders and their marketing arms to add in supplemental materials and distributes the full package amongst the community of business folk who make up BrightTalk’s audience.

BrightTalk will soon introduce social features to the mix with the goal of providing rich and engaging content. Webinar participants will be able to interact on what was once a very unidirectional piece of content. Heald hopes that with the social and supplemental materials along with the webinar itself, BrightTalk will become a content distributor as opposed to just a webinar distributor.

Heald says the biggest industries BrightTalk serves are the technology and financial services industries.

“These are industries where the knowledge frontier is moving very quickly. Companies need to get their thought leaders on their feet … and talking to their audience on a regular basis,” said Heald.

BrightTalk was founded in 2002 and is located in San Francisco, New York and London.

[Photo courtesy of NinaMalyna/Shutterstock]