The Webinar Blog

omNovia Web Conferencing Review

I have been using omNovia web conferencing on a number of client projects lately and I suggested to the folks at Publicare that they give it a look on their test list of web conferencing products. Publicare published their mini-review of omNovia with a fairly low test score and highlighted several negatives.

I was interested, as I tend to look at products from a different perspective than they do and I have a technology preference list that would be substantially reordered from theirs. That's not a slam against their testing procedures or results. It's an acknowledgement that products can be suited for different purposes and the user's priorities will determine which comes out in the lead.

Publicare tends to concentrate on suitability for collaborative, participatory web meetings. I concentrate on more formally structured large web events that are primarily a "one to many" or "few to many" information dispersal mechanism for large audiences. My clients have different priorities for the software functionality and I'll use omNovia as an example to highlight some of the differences in focus. This should prove useful both as an examination of concepts and as a mini review of the product, since it is not well known in the industry.

By the way, I should state disclaimers up front. I am not a reseller of omNovia and I have no financial stake in their business, including advertising. I have worked alongside them as an independent service provider on a couple of client projects where they supplied the technology and I supplied the client support services. They also hired me as an outside consultant on a single project to perform an internal product review and test in order to point out areas for product enhancement. This gave me a chance to dig into all areas of product functionality in a much more comprehensive fashion than I might otherwise have been able to.

omNovia uses Adobe Flash technology as the underlying platform for operation. That means it is largely unaffected by choice of operating system or browser for each user. But users must have a fairly recent version of the Flash Player installed on their computer - release 9.0.28 or later. As Publicare points out, presenters who want to use screen sharing or session recording must be on a Windows operating system, as those functions use locally-installed EXE programs.

I am a big fan of Flash-based web conferencing for the instant access it allows when joining a session. Presenters and attendees use a web browser link to access the server-hosted Flash application and they are almost immediately in. There are no wait times for software programs to download and install.

Inside the meeting room, controls are simple and mostly intuitive. I have had great success working with guest presenters who don't have time for more than a quick familiarization run-through before a conference. They can easily find the forward and backward arrows that let them advance through their slides sequentially. There is no preview, thumbnail, or table of contents list for loaded slides, although you can jump directly to a slide by entering the slide number.

(Basic screen layout, reduced in size)

PowerPoint slides are uploaded to the meeting room (on the server) in advance of the meeting and go through a conversion step for use in the session. The upload and conversion speed is average for this kind of software approach... Give yourself ten minutes leeway for a large deck and you should be fine. You have a choice of picture quality to use during the conversion and I find that Medium is sufficient for all but the most demanding photographic images. Transition effects when moving from slide to slide are not shown to attendees (strangely enough, the presenter can still see them), but other PowerPoint animations are retained - both on-click and timed. Both .PPT and .PPTX files are allowed, but you can't upload Macintosh Keynote slide decks. My PowerPoint Torture Test passed with flying colors... All color gradients, complex animations, nonstandard fonts, and small text were reproduced faithfully. You can have multiple slide decks uploaded and waiting for use, with a simple mouse click selection process to choose the one to display to the audience.

There is a chat pane below the slide area and a participants list to the left of the slide area. You can change the relative size of the panes, including a single click icon to expand the slide display to full screen. But you cannot change the relative location of the panes. The moderator can select whether the chat panel is private or public - meaning whether audience members see comments from other participants or whether comments are seen only by presenters. Presenters can answer chat entries privately or publicly. Moderators can also set up another chat tab for presenters to use, where their comments are not seen by the audience (perfect for team support and private notes during a session). Presenters can also initiate private chats with any audience member, which open in their own named chat tabs. This is useful for managing an interactive troubleshooting session with an individual.

Presenters can annotate on top of slides with the usual assortment of boxes, circles, lines, text, or red dot "laser pointer." You can change colors and line widths at will. Individual annotations can be dragged to a new location on the screen or deleted. You can also delete all annotations.

(White board annotation examples and toolbar)

Presenters can also upload documents or web links that attendees can access during the session.

There are a few unusual features that deserve mention:

• Moderators can choose to display an alert message to all attendees that shows in a pop-up window, accompanied by your choice of highlight color and an optional audio alert. You can have the message disappear by itself after a set time, or remove it manually.
• Presenters can click an icon to display a world map showing the approximate location of all participants.
• My favorite is a countdown timer that can be displayed to all participants or to presenters only. I use the public one to note when a break time or local discussion session will end and I use the private mode to remind my speakers how long they have left for their presentation section.

omNovia does include audio streaming as an integrated feature, and is set up for VoIP operation where presenters and optionally attendees can plug in computer mikes or headsets to speak through the conference. This is controlled through Flash recognition of your local devices and I have run into setup and configuration headaches when trying to get everybody online and speaking. My preference is to use their optional iBridge feature. This lets me run a telephone audio conference where my presenters call in on their phones. The moderator then uses the conferencing software to dial in as another participant on the audio conference (you hear prompts through your computer speakers and enter any necessary codes using the computer keyboard to connect). From then on, all telephone audio is broadcast out to the audience on their computers. This gives participants the option to listen through their computer or over the telephone, which makes everybody happy. The iBridge integration is more convenient than using a hardware patch cable to connect a phone to your computer microphone input and it works with any third party audio conference you care to use.

 
(iBridge audioconference connection and countdown timer)

The software includes polling functionality of course, but this is somewhat limited in comparison to other implementations I have seen. Polls can have a maximum of five answer choices and you cannot ask a question with "Select all that apply" functionality. The presenter cannot close the poll window for all participants when it is time to move back to the slides... Each person must close it on his/her own machine.

You can show Flash movie clips to the audience by uploading them or by using a link reference to a URL. Movies are shown in their own tab and you cannot include videos that are embedded in PowerPoint slides.

One of Publicare's negatives concerned "transfer of presenter from one attendee to another." This is one of those areas where I didn't find the proper functional control on my first review. Participants tagged ahead of time as "presenters" all come in with their own ID and password and each has full control over the conference, with the ability to advance slides, show movies, review and answer attendee messages, etc. Attendees come in with lesser rights and capabilities. But a presenter can click on an attendee name in the participant list and grant him or her speaking rights via VoIP microphone or "Images Control" to let them advance slides, show a movie, or run application sharing. Another click and they are back to normal "view-only" attendee status. That seems like a reasonable transfer of power as needed.

One area where I think Publicare really missed some functionality is the one where I spend most of my time... Setting up formal events as a moderator. There are a lot of configuration controls and capabilities that the moderator has access to as a separate function outside the meeting room. Some of these are implemented particularly well and deserve mention.

You can schedule events in advance, with tremendous control over the event specifics. This includes an integrated registration system, where you can set up custom registration fields that include dropdown responses, checkboxes, radio buttons, and text entry. You can distribute links to the registration page with a custom parameter that may be used to track the registration link source (for instance, to monitor the effectiveness of various promotion channels). You get to control when attendees can start entering the room and can even place a limit on whether people can enter after the event has been going for a certain duration (maybe to prevent students from getting attendance credit by showing up for the last five minutes of a course?).

Registration can be open to the public or restricted to those in a pre-set list of email addresses (if you are holding a private group meeting for instance). Publicare missed a feature here, as passwords can be created for a single event, rather than being generic for a meeting room that gets reused.

Email customization is a strong point. When you create an event, omNovia creates a sample email invitation text with the registration details, but you have to copy it and send it through your own choice of email delivery system. omNovia does not want to be in the business of bulk mailings to the public, as this opens them for spamming abuse. But once people register, you can customize the registration and reminder messages that they get automatically from the system. In an unusual bit of flexibility, you can create both text and HTML versions of the automated emails and omNovia will attempt to send the HTML with the text as a backup. You can schedule up to two reminder messages to be automatically sent at specified times before your event. You also have the ability to create followup messages for all registrants, for attendees, or for no-shows. These are not sent out at a set time after your event... You need to go back into the software and click a button to send them out.

omNovia also recently integrated their system with Twitter so you can send a Tweet about your event ahead of time or you can send Tweets during your session.

Some unique setup features include the ability to configure a banner display click-through in your meeting room that can be used for advertising or to send people to your website. You can place a graphic on your registration page, and you can even show people a video after they register. You can also set up a link to a web page that gets shown when people exit the meeting session (I often use this to link to a SurveyMonkey survey to capture attendee feedback).

There is no direct integration of payment processing, but omNovia has a published API that allows a web programmer to take a payee from their shopping cart system and ship the data to omNovia to be entered as a registrant in the desired event. The registrant then gets all the appropriate confirmation and reminder messages from the omNovia system.

Attendance reporting covers the basics, with the ability to see who registered (and when), who attended, and custom fields.  A separate room report has more details including IP adresses and time spent in the meeting by each attendee.

For me, the weakest aspect of omNovia at this time is its recording feature. As I mentioned earlier, recording is run as a local Windows application on a presenter's machine. There are quite a few setup and configuration choices that could be confusing for nontechnical specialists who don't know about things like frame rates and codecs. You do get the choice to record the entire screen or a selected rectangular region, but audio is picked up from your computer's sound card, with the potential setup confusion that entails. They also made a strange decision to always capture the cursor with a big fuzzy yellow glow around it. Since you can only record as a presenter, your recording captures private presenter-only displays. I would rather have it capture things as my attendees see them and use the broadcast audio straight off the server feed. To be honest, I usually end up using Camtasia to do the recording on a separate attending computer. [I added an important update on additional capabilities after writing this - please see bottom of article]

For my uses as a professional administrator and moderator of structured public webinars, omNovia has been very satisfactory. I like the setup configuration flexibility it gives me, my guest speakers have been very happy with the simplicity of operation inside the meeting, and attendees usually appreciate the fast access to events and choice of audio when integrated with the iBridge phone connection. I'd be happier with greater flexibility in polling and a serious reworking of the recording feature.

I can understand why it might not suit the needs of small group collaborative sessions quite as well as other software designed for that purpose. You can't promote attendees to presenter status and screen sharing is operating system dependent (as well as suffering in performance in comparison to the leaders in that functionality). I believe omNovia's strengths lie in setup of formal events with predetermined speakers, where registration and structure of the overall event is a priority. Its ability to work with complex PowerPoint animations, Flash movies, registrant communications, and unique features such as countdown timers and Twitter integration make it a contender for an enterprise platform where a dedicated administrator can learn how to drive all the configuration options.

UPDATE (July 3): I just tried out a new option for recording events in omNovia. Known as "Recast", it is currently in beta, although generally available to customers upon request. Recast records an event directly from the broadcast server as an audience member would see it and saves it directly to the omNovia server under your customer account. Upon playback, all interactive features of the event are available, exactly as if the viewer was watching the live session. They can answer polls, enter chat messages, etc. This would be valuable for companies who want to make viewers think they are watching something live while avoiding the time commitments of running multiple sessions. A free option during the beta, omNovia plans to charge for usage based on the number of people who watch the recorded recast. The downside of this recording option is that the event can only be run from the server... You can't download and distribute or re-host the movie file. You also can't edit it to clean up the recording... It faithfully captures everything that happened during the live meeting session and plays it back exactly as it occurred. That may be a good thing for legal discovery and formal archival, where you have to prove you haven't manipulated or edited your archive. If you can live with having your archive exactly as it played live, this takes care of my recording concerns... It doesn't show presenter-private information, it doesn't show unwanted cursor controls, and it does record the audio cleanly from the broadcast audio stream.

Technorati Tags: omNovia,Pulicare,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast

Social Media and Webinars

Today’s topic comes from Bob, who asked a question through the Web Conferencing Community Forum:

I'm in the Healthcare space and regularly host live webinars with physicians and other healthcare professionals. The meetings can have a number of objectives, marketing and training being the most frequent. Obviously, there are lots of smart folks in these rooms with plenty of knowledge and insights. And I believe a value of our webinars could be for the audience to share amongst themselves.

That said, I'm wondering if some aspects of Social Media could help. We're doing polling and using chat and have Q&A sessions.  Have you seen/used any other techniques to engage the audience and make them active contributors during a webinar?

The only attempt I have seen at linking Social Networking with a live webinar during the actual session is to have a Twitter discussion running at the same time. As a matter of fact, I wrote a post about this on Webinar Wire (You Got Your Twitter In My Webinar!) last year.

Since you are already using an open chat session in the webinar room to stimulate group feedback and discussion, I don’t see Twitter as offering any particular benefits for the attendees. The one thing it might do is open up the discussion in real time to people who can’t attend or choose to not attend the webinar. You could potentially expand the discussion to a larger community if they happen to be following the Twitter thread and contributing during the course of the event.

But generally, social networking is better at extending your reach before and after the live session. You can help promote the event to your network of contacts ahead of time, collect questions and topics of interest from them that they want to see covered during the session, and keep the conversation going after your live event is over (probably posting a link to your archive recording as well).

Getting more interactivity during an event is usually a case of cutting down the amount of lecture material you prepare and planning to open things up, acknowledge your audience, and work with them more during your time together. You will find that this is a double-edged sword however. A small percentage of your audience will tend to contribute heavily, perhaps skewing the perception of important items or swinging the conversation to their private concerns. Some members of the audience who prefer a more passive learning experience can get frustrated if they feel another viewer is monopolizing the conversation and taking time away from your brilliant words of wisdom. It’s a bit of a balancing act.

If your conferencing software has a strong whiteboarding tool, try running some “brainstorming” exercises during your talk. Write down responses from your audience and then use those as a jumping-off point for additional discussion. Remember that the amount of interactivity you can control and manage goes down as your audience size goes up. With 400 people on a conference, it is unlikely that you can even read all the messages coming in from an enthusiastic participatory group, much less respond to them. Be sure to have a plan for dealing with concerns that don’t get addressed… Which can be a great way to tie in social networking again. Post the questions and comments to your network and invite responses or commentary, along with your own answers.

I’ll mention one last caveat about polls. To make them effective at stimulating participation and interactivity, they must be presented in terms of the audience’s self interests. If your polls tend to be demographic in nature, or self-serving for you as a presenter, your audience feels that they are being treated as experimental subjects, providing you with value, but getting none themselves. You should be able to accompany every poll with a statement of “By answering this question, you will benefit in the following way…” Possibilities include knowing more about how they compare to the community of their peers, or getting you to focus your remarks on areas of greatest importance to them, or getting you to talk to their level of expertise and prior knowledge, or helping to determine what webinar topics you should present in the future.

I hope this gives you a few ideas you may not have considered already.

Readers: If you have a comment on this topic, please add it using the Comment feature on this blog. If you have a question you would like me to address publicly, you can post it at the Web Conferencing Community Forum, just as Bob did.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Web Conferencing Community Forum,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast,social networking

VoIP Gives Me A Headache

In recent weeks I have fought with VoIP difficulties on webinars using three different web conferencing technologies. Is VoIP truly ready for prime time?

A bit of background first for those unfamiliar with the terminology and concept. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. In our particular niche - looking at web conferencing – it refers to letting participants use a microphone or headset connected to their computer as a way to let other meeting participants hear their voices.

This is subtly different from “broadcast audio” or “streaming audio”, which deals with the transmission of sound out to participants’ computer speakers. The sound in that case may come from a telephone call patched in to the web conference or from recorded audio clips being played as part of the meeting content.

VoIP is a great concept. When it works correctly, it offers several potential advantages:

• It removes a separate technology (telephones) from your meeting equipment requirements and places focus solely on the computer.
• It reduces the complexity of instructions you need to send out to participants, since there are no telephone numbers and codes to remember.
• It can reduce costs by eliminating telephone connection charges.

Unfortunately, VoIP is prone to several disadvantages as well:

• Not everyone owns a computer headset/microphone. If your participants don’t have the right equipment, they are helpless (I think it’s fair to say that everyone has access to a telephone).
• Computer-connected headsets require configuration for use. Many web conference participants are not experienced or patient enough to go through the right steps. You are dealing with a computer peripheral that has drivers to load and interactions with Control Panel settings. Simply getting your computer to select the headset as the input/output audio device to use can flummox users on occasion.
• The interaction between the conferencing software and the headset can potentially be confusing (to use a charitable term). I have had cases where the order of connection can mean the difference between success and failure. I’m not saving myself any time in connection instructions if I have to tell participants to connect their headset first. Then select it in Control Panel. Then start the conferencing software. Then confirm a popup box that lets Flash recognize the device. Then run a test step to set audio levels.
• This isn’t a fair ding against the technology itself, but the nasty fact is that most of the computer headsets I’ve come across out there in the general community are of appallingly low quality. Businesses all too often seem to tolerate purchases of VoIP headsets as a lowest-possible-cost toy rather than as a valued business asset.

Even when everything else works, computer headsets in webcasts sometimes exhibit random behaviors that are nothing short of mysterious. I was on a webinar yesterday where my headset worked fine until I had to replug it right before show time. Then it switched to a feedback mode where my audio was picked up by the mike and rebroadcast. I sounded like I was talking in a giant tin can. I had an event where my client as the primary speaker could use her VoIP headset right up until I connected mine on another computer under a different login, at which time she was blocked out. The vendor couldn’t explain it at all. I gave a training session where we used collaborative participation with audience members on computer headsets. One person could never get his headset to broadcast through the software. One person’s mike was live the entire time, even when explicitly muted in the webcast software.

When these things happen, you can easily spend long, frustrating periods of time trying to diagnose and repair the setup by long distance. And that’s a recipe for disaster with your audience. As soon as they start concentrating on the technology rather than your topic and content, you have lost the battle for effective achievement of your goals in holding the meeting. With my training class, I spent a short time trying to solve my audience’s problems, but ended up rescheduling the session with the promise of a telephone dial in.

All in all, I’ll reserve VoIP participation in webinars for internal business sessions with coworkers I know. Ones where I can tolerate some fumbling and frustration if things get muddled. But for public sessions and webinars where I need to rely on voices actually making it all the way into the web conference without exception, I’ll stick with the telephone as the input device of choice.

Technorati Tags: VoIP,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

One-Stop Webinar Consulting

Business Expert Webinars is now offering webinar consulting for individuals. This is an innovative new approach to services in this space. It is designed for subject matter experts, service providers, trainers, consultants, and others who want to expand their business through fee-based webinars. You determine the specific area where you need help and sign up to spend an hour working with an expert in that particular niche.

Do you want help with positioning your offerings and figuring out how to put together the basics for your first webinar? Lee B. Salz is your man. Do you need advice and direction on how to market your webinar? Sign up with Jenny Hamby. Maybe you would benefit from an hour of consulting time with Susan Stoen on ways to improve your PowerPoint slides. Dan Janal is available to help with PR and publicity for your event. And who’s that down at the bottom of the page? Why, it’s yours truly! I liked the concept so much, I offered to provide my individualized consulting on speaking techniques and vocal delivery.

The great thing about this is that you get focused help at a fixed price (pretty darned low for one-on-one consulting with an expert), you’re in and out in an hour, and nobody is trying to upsell you to a package of services you don’t want or need.

Each of us is an independent business person who has been through the same concerns you face in using webinars to enhance your business and your revenues. We understand the issues and have the experience to give you straight-shootin’ advice, feedback, and recommendations to improve your success with business webinars.

Take a look at the offerings and sign up for your consulting slot today!

Technorati Tags: Business Expert Webinars,BEW,Ken Molay,webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

AirPlus Survey On Travel Alternatives

AirPlus International released a survey of 192 travel management professionals in North America and Europe, conducted in April of this year. Their first question seemed a bit ambiguous to me: “Types of travel alternatives implemented by your company in the past six months.” The options were Specialized virtual conferencing technology (such as TelePresence), Web-conferencing technology, and Increased teleconferencing. Here are the results:

It seems to me that the question specifically excludes companies who already had a stable solution in one of these technologies and didn’t have to implement it in the last half year. I also wonder how often the travel management department is aware of what virtual conferencing technologies are in place in various departments and locations in a large enterprise. But even with those doubts, the numbers were awfully high – with web conferencing surprisingly close to classic teleconferencing.

The survey concluded with this question: “Do you feel that remote conferencing is as effective as meeting in person?” Asking that of a travel management professional seems like it could possibly be influenced by conflicts of interest, but more than 70% said “Sometimes” or “Almost Always.”

This begs the question of what constitutes “effective” – which relates to my own survey on the subject. For instance, lead generation and public information dissemination would probably have much higher response figures than for socializing and team building.

For details, you can read the published PDF of the survey results from AirPlus.

Technorati Tags: AirPlus,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,virtual meeting,remote conferencing,webcasting,webcast

Yugma – Not As Dead As They Say

Publicare (owners of www.webconferencing-test.com) just put out a press release today saying that they had removed web conferencing provider Yugma from their vendor list because the company was being shut down.

Publicare quotes a letter from Yugma CEO and founder Lingaraj Mishra dated June 2. The letter says that the company’s board of directors decided to wind down the business affairs of the company.

This surprised me, and I called Lingaraj at Yugma’s offices. He says he is going crazy answering phone calls and dealing with the false story of the demise of the company. Mishra says that while there were definitely financial difficulties and management discussions of how to handle operations, the company and the product are both ongoing concerns. He wouldn’t go into details of the internal situation (Yugma is a privately held company and does not have to expose financial or operational data), but made reference to the fact that the board had brought in an interim CEO who was there for one year, leaving in April of this year. Mishra is back in charge now and is working on stabilizing financing and ownership concerns.

Mishra points to the fact that the company just put out a new release 15 days ago and has another release slated for the very near future (possibly as early as next week). He says they certainly would not be spending money on development and support of new releases if they were shutting down.

So it’s a strange story indeed, but I would advise against putting any nails in this particular coffin until we see more developments and see a public announcement from the company.

ADDENDUM (June 18): An anonymous emailer sent me a JPG of the notice that was sent and referenced in Publicare's press release. Click on the thumbnail to see an expanded version.

Technorati Tags: Publicare,Yugma,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,webcasting,webcast,Lingaraj Mishra

Survey Results – Are Webinars Effective?

I have had a public survey open for a couple of months asking for people’s impressions on webinar effectiveness. I collected 50 responses, which is not enough to be statistically representative of anything, but is interesting anecdotally. Let’s take a look at the results.

First of all, I should mention that I left the interpretation of “effective” up to each respondent. Different webinars have different goals, and companies set their own reasons for holding virtual events.

I also left open what people wanted to include in their definition of “webinar.” I assumed one-to-many or few-to-many presentations delivered live, possibly with a recording available for review. But I recognize that some people may have included collaborative team web conferences or recorded-only webcasts in considering their responses.

Almost half of the responses came from the US Eastern time zone. Interesting. The rest of North America made up the majority of the remainder, with a smattering of other countries contributing as well.

Responses reflected webinars targeted at many different industries, with good representation in education, technology, financial business, and services. They also included webinars used for training and education (included in 71% of responses), marketing and lead gen (included in 37% of responses), and customer communications (included in 29% of responses). Respondents could pick more than one use of webinars, and they also mentioned sales, employee communications, and industry communications in roughly equal numbers.

Adobe (Connect), Cisco (WebEx), and Citrix (GoToMeeting) were represented strongly, but responses came from users of many different technologies.

I was surprised that about half the respondents said they always or frequently formally measure the effectiveness and results of their webinars. That could possibly reflect a self-selecting population on the kind of people who answered the survey:

 

When asked what reasons could cause them to not formally measure the effectiveness of their webinars, the most common response was that it was too hard to establish measurable criteria, closely followed by not being able to link results solely to the webinar. It’s interesting that the third most common reason was that “Nobody has asked for it.”

 

Now we come to the crux of the matter… Do the benefits of your webinars outweigh your costs? This seems to me to be the only generic question that makes sense on a bottom line basis and should apply to any business decision. The results were overwhelmingly positive, but strangely, those who used real cost/benefit analysis were more likely to say “unknown” than those who answered based on “gut feel”:

It’s worth mentioning some of the comments associated with this question:

• Compared to face-to-face meetings, yes.
• Compared to the costs of travel for in-person training, etc… WAY Cheaper!
• The benefits outweigh the costs—but only over a long period of time. “Benefits” tend to be defined as “sales leads” and while we’ve found that webinars definitely produce these, they are typically longer tail leads which require additional nurturing over time.
• Webinars are provided as a a member service. They are highly rated, in high demand, and have very low incremental cost.

I’ll finish up with the general comments that people provided, not associated with a particular question:

• It saves tens of thousands every month, my customers accept this is the best form of formal communication, it’s easy for them to use, it’s cheap.
• We were just using this for student orientations and seminars. Now we have just started using this for Faculty Development and everyone loves it.
• Asking if Webinars are effective for generating sales/leads and image of a company is like asking if the Bravo series "Inside the Actors Studio" in NY helps Pace University increase their student numbers. Students attending this University enroll for many different reasons but I am sure this TV series, (where they interview famous actors and all the students are sitting in the audience) is a major reason why the Performing Arts Program is the fastest growing of all the University courses. The results perhaps were difficult to measure 12 years ago, but they are obvious now. I host and produce a Topical Webinar series for the education of real estate agents. Just this past Webinar we were able to measure 12 direct sales.  This is the first time we have had an actual person tracking sales from the Webinar.
• It's often hard to measure the ROI or effectiveness of a single webinar.  But, when integrated into a comprehensive marketing plan that includes email marketing, print marketing and other communications, webinars are a vital component to the overall success of any campaign.  I consider them to be the "closer" that supports these other communication methods.
• We run 5 webinars per week on average. We actively seek feedback regarding our webinars.  I can say that our webinars are effective and profitable.  My gut feeling is in the proper hands, webinars are very effective and in the improper hands, well . . . they are probably not effective at all.

What can we glean from this survey? If you are on the fence about whether webinars make business sense for your company, this should give you a little more confidence based on the experiences of your peers. Web seminars seem to be worth the effort and the money across a wide variety of industries and locations. If you haven’t taken the plunge, maybe now is a good time to try out the concept.

For those who like their data raw, here is the spreadsheet with all collected responses and summary charts. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Web Conferencing Community Forum Update

The following post was just added to the Web Conferencing Community Forum:

I have been turning to this forum for help and advice. It is sad that most of the posts have turned into self-serving advertisements. Which, in my opinion, is equal to Spam. It seems to me, with the economy in the condition that it is, this forum should be a wealth of advice and encouragement. I know Ken is doing what he can to help, but can’t we as a community put this forum back on track and make it a truly valuable resource?

I administer the forum and I have noted the same thing. It is sad. I am trying very hard not to impose censorship on posts. I have deleted a few phishing posts and deceptive entries, but I’m trying to let the community have a completely open venue for sharing opinions, advice, concerns, and questions. Vendors are a part of the community and their contributions are welcome, but watch out companies… You can easily create a backlash against your own products (and integrity). We’re not naive… We can spot the difference between a helpful, informative contribution and an advertisement.

I hope that end users will “take back their turf” and overwhelm the board with real collaborative discussions. It’s a useful place for newbies to solicit help from more experienced hands and for experienced users to engage with others experts outside the boundaries of a vendor-sponsored and vendor-controlled support forum.

Are you thinking of switching technologies or looking for your first web conferencing product? This is the place to ask others for their honest opinions. Have you had good or bad experiences with service providers? Let others know. Do you need some help and tips on best practices? There are probably people out there who have been through the same situation.

Let me go over a few quick facts that can help you use the board more effectively.

Address: www.wcc-forum.com

Most useful link: The very last line in “Forum Statistics” on the home page. It lets you “View the 10 most recent posts of this forum”

(That’s a terrible location and prominence for the link, but I can’t figure out how to change it in the board templates!)

Posting: You must register as a user to make a post.

I did this purely to eliminate random automated spam postings. The list is NOT used for ANY marketing purposes. You will not receive any promotional emails from me or anyone else.

Have fun!

Bad Press For Webinars

Two articles caught my eye on Friday. Here’s a personal take on a social networking webinar written by Jaimy Marie. Check the first sentence of the article:

“I sat in on an ExactTarget Marketing Webinar earlier this week, and, although WebEx kept freezing my computer trying to get the audio to work (quite obnoxious), I thought there were a few good takeaways to share.”

The rest of her article talks about the content and value of the presented material. But she felt strongly enough about her technical experience to make it the lead sentence of her piece.

And in a California story written by Scott Sabatini in the Examiner, the technical difficulties are highlighted right in the title: “Schwarzenegger’s webcast technical difficulties don’t stop dissatisfaction from pouring in.”

The live webcast seems to have broken down and they couldn’t get it working even after 30 minutes. It looks like the technical platform was “CoverItLive,” which I am unfamiliar with.

I’m not pointing out these situations to embarrass the companies or to say that you shouldn’t use them. It was coincidence that I saw the articles on the same day. No webcasting technology is foolproof. There are too many variables outside of the control of the vendor. The quality of the experience is affected by local computer issues, network issues, conflicts with other software, and more.

What can you do as a host to help minimize frustration on a public event?

1) If webcasting your audio (streaming the audio over attendees’ computers), bridge in a telephone audioconference line and offer the number as a backup for attendees to use. You cannot diagnose attendee sound problems during an event. Don’t even try. Just tell them to call in on their telephone.

2) Plan to record and/or transcribe your event and make it available as quickly as possible. Your fallback position for attendees who tell you they couldn’t connect or couldn’t see/hear is to get them on-demand access ASAP. If it is critical information, you might want to consider two modes of recording. I have taken to using my audioconferencing vendor’s recording feature to record the audio separately from the main event audio/visual recording. If I need to, I can reconstruct an audio/video playback file using the original slides and the audio file.

3) Have multiple computers set up on the hosting side, all running as presenters. If one computer fails for whatever reason, you can switch to another one. In a “simulcast” where you are remote webcasting a local event this can be quite a technical challenge involving switches and patch cables. Get a professional involved.

4) Have a dedicated person assigned to answer attendee technical problems by email and telephone during the event. You can’t deal with problems if you are a presenter or on-air moderator. Make sure attendees have emergency contact information as part of their login instructions. If your vendor will cover this front-line support for connection problems, that’s great!

5)  This is impractical for all but the largest and most critical events, but consider having an entirely separate technology set up to webcast the same meeting. If your first technology fails catastrophically (as in the Schwarzenegger webcast), tell people how to switch to the secondary login. I recognize that this is very hard to do… You have extra costs, extra technology licensing, and extra communication channels to support. It’s the equivalent of booking another convention center in case your primary building loses power!

I ended up using option number 5 recently myself, but I’m a special case… I have access to more webcasting technologies than the average corporate user. I gave a presentation to a room full of convention attendees in the Philippines via webinar. Their primary web conferencing technology wouldn’t work, so I pulled in a backup technology I had available. Then I couldn’t hear the sound from their side while I was talking, so we hooked in a Skype VoIP line on a second computer and I ran an earphone to it.

When I work as a guest speaker or moderator, I typically use two computers and two phone lines. It’s ridiculous overkill and seems silly… Right up until the first one fails. That doesn’t happen very often at all, but if you do enough webcasts, it eventually will.

Your goal is to make the technology transparent. If your audience is concentrating on technical problems instead of your wonderful content, you’ll hear about it. And so will many others.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Webinar Vendors: Does Size Matter?

When looking for a webinar technology vendor, you need to look beyond the software to the company itself. Let’s examine the typical kinds of sales/marketing stories you may hear from big and small companies to see whether they hold up in the real world.

[I have worked successfully with the biggest, longest-established players in the business and with small startups. And I’ve been frustrated by both as well. I’ll tell you my answer up front… You’re going to find something you like and something you don’t like about every vendor. How those positives and negatives match to your priorities will determine whether it is the right company for you.]

• The big players will tell you: “We have the stability and resources of a huge company behind us. You aren’t going to be left holding a license for useless software when your little private vendor suddenly closes up shop.” True or false?

Larger organizations are typically more stable than smaller companies. True. But size is not a guarantee of stability. Ask car dealers around the US. Are they happy they signed up with GM and Chrysler for the stability it guaranteed them? The opposing argument to the “big company” message is that it is easier for a big company to cut personnel, investment, or support for a web conferencing product that is just a small part of their overall revenue mix. The bottom line rules, and it can be ruthless.

• Small players will tell you: “We will give you personal attention and flexible support for your special needs that a big company can’t.” True or false?

Cisco is unlikely to modify their two-year development plan for WebEx and throw in a new feature next month just because you say you need it. True. But the opposing argument is that the big companies with many thousands of business customers and many years in business are more likely to have seen your business need and addressed it already. I am sometimes surprised when I point out areas for feature improvements for smaller vendors and they say “Huh! I guess that could be valuable. We hadn’t thought of that.” Do you want to be the test case that your smaller vendor learns from?

• Big vendors may say: “We have a huge support department that is available around the clock. A smaller vendor can’t give you that kind of support.” True or false?

In a literal sense, this statement is probably true. How useful that support is might be another matter. A few of the largest vendors (names withheld to prevent lawsuits) send you straight to “first level support” when you call or email. This is all too often an outsourced company in a country far from the developers, working off scripts and asking you to recite your name, email, customer ID, phone number, and shoe size before they will even listen to your problem. I work with several small vendors where I call in and know the developers who answer the phone by name. And I bless the small size of the company when they answer my question or fix the problem instantly themselves.

The aspect of support where the big players really can shine is in providing technical assistance for attendees having trouble joining a meeting. Usually a script and set of troubleshooting steps is all that is needed. If I know I can rely on my vendor to take on that role, it relieves me of tremendous stress. And if they offer it around the clock, and have local support offices speaking Chinese, Japanese, or a few European languages, it can boost them to the top of the list for my international webinars.

As you can see, just about any argument in favor of a vendor based purely on size can be countered with an alternate hypothetical scenario. Instead of concentrating on size as your determining factor, look at the specific issues that are being rolled up in the size arguments. Decide which are the most likely to affect the success of your events and the ease with which you can carry on your business.

And definitely ask other users for their experiences with the vendor. Don’t rely solely on offered references. Put out open-ended requests for comment on forums, blogs, or other public access sites. One place to try is the Web Conferencing Community Forum (www.wcc-forum.com). I built it as an open exchange area free of vendor sponsorship, advertising, or censorship. Lately it’s been collecting far too many self-serving marketing messages from vendors (which I also try not to censor, as long as they aren’t deceptive or inaccurate).

Technorati Tags: web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,webcasting,webcast,Web Conferencing Community Forum