The Webinar Blog

Lead Tracking And WebEx

WebEx Event Center gives you a built-in ability to track the effectiveness of your web seminar promotion and marketing through various channels. You do this by adding a Source ID parameter to your registration URLs for a scheduled webinar.

Let's say you schedule a webinar and you want people to register for it in advance. WebEx gives you a web page address (aka: a URL) that everyone uses to register for the event. But how do you tell which people registered because they saw your press release, who came from your newsletter sponsorship ad, and who came because of an email sent through a rented list? Simple... You add a special code at the end of the registration link. The code can be different in each location that you use the link.

For instance, if your registration page is found at registerhere.com, in your press release you write it as registerhere.com&SourceId=PR. In your newsletter ad you encode it as registerhere.com&SourceId=NL. In your home page banner ad you code the link as registerhere.com&SourceId=HP. The codes can be any length you want (I used two letters to keep the examples short) and you can use as many different ones as you want to track.

When a person clicks through to register, the Source code is automatically stored along with the rest of their registration information. Your registration reports give you a way to check the numbers of people who came from each source, easily letting you see which promotional channels are effective and which aren't working so well.

I love this feature and I can't believe more vendors haven't built it into their registration systems. But WebEx needs to finish off the functionality so it works better in practical use.

For one thing (as I previously reported), the Source ID is only tracked if you send people directly to the registration page for a single event. If your promotional activities are designed to send people to a WebEx page that lists several upcoming webinars, when they click through to the registration for one of the listed events, the SourceId is lost. It would be SO easy for WebEx to build a pass-down feature that copies the SourceId for a listings page to the individual registration pages, but they don't do it.

The second design quirk is that registration sources are listed only on the registration report for an event, not the attendance report. There is a column in the attendance report with the same "Lead Source ID"  title as the one in the registration report, but it doesn't have any values next to the attendees' names. I thought this was a bug and got WebEx tech support to work on it. Eventually they came back with my favorite phrase from the world of software support... "That's Not A Bug, That's A Feature."

They say that the attendance Lead Source ID is reserved for sending people different links in the instructions to join an event. Considering that WebEx makes a big deal out of using their automated instruction email templates, which send the same text to every registrant, I can't see this getting used a lot. Do I really want to create a manual process to change the instruction email for each attendee? And then repeat that for reminder emails before the event?

WebEx says I should just use the registration report to track the Lead Sources by looking at the Yes/No field for whether they attended. But I get different names and information on my attendance report that aren't included in the registration list. I don't want to spend my time bouncing back and forth between the two reports, trying to match and merge data. The situation is not helped by the fact that the registration report lies... It will tell you a person didn't attend if they join the event by typing in their email address using different capitalization than they used upon registration. So if Joe.Schmo@xyz.biz registers and then joe.schmo@xyz.biz attends, your registration report says he didn't make it to the event. This is outrageous and has caused me plenty of wasted time in manually reviewing report lists.

I hope WebEx upgrades the lead tracking functionality soon. It's a tremendously valuable tool and it's a strong competitive differentiator. But it could be so much more useful with a little tweaking to match real use cases.

 

PS: [Attention -- This postscript is completely unfair and off topic, but I know that WebEx employees read this blog and I simply haven't been able to get my frustration up the chain through repeated comments to my tech support reps, so I'm going to use my blog as a bully pulpit.]

Hey, WebEx... When I call tech support as a paying customer with a problem, the last thing I want to hear while on hold is an overly enthusiastic voiceover giving me nonstop advertisements to buy more WebEx products. It's pretty safe to assume that I'm not in a receptive mode for purchase and benefit exhortations while waiting for someone to deal with my confusion or frustration.

And when I call repeatedly as an account administrator, it gets a little tiring to have to spell out my name, email address, and phone number before I'm allowed to say anything else to the support rep. I know I'm in your computer system. Can't you do a lookup on my info based on one identifying piece of information? Heck, I'll even write down a reference ID for myself and use that. I want to feel like you (the corporate You) recognize me and acknowledge the fact that we have an established relationship and history.

Ahhh... It felt good to get that off my chest. I'll probably regret airing these snide comments in a public forum, but you are the market leader by a mile and frustrations build up when I use you for so many client events. Thanks for listening!

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Technorati Tags: Event Center, lead generation, lead tracking, lead management, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, WebEx, webinar

New Audio Options For Your Webinars

I don't normally cover the teleconferencing (audio-only) space, as there is just too much news from too many companies and it's not my area of expertise. But I'm making an exception for fresh news from ConferTel. They just announced an audio service they refer to as Virtual Attendant. It allows companies to control many of the teleconferencing functions that have traditionally been reserved for operator-assisted calls. The features includes things I use in one-to-many webinars all the time.

The first feature is the ability to keep the event speakers and organizers in a private sub-conference where they can speak with each other without the audience hearing them. Sometimes referred to as a "Green Room" function (a term taken from the TV industry), I consider this a must-have for a formal event. It lets everyone check audio levels, cover last minute changes and reminders, get comfortable speaking on the phone, and prepare to go live. When it's time to start the event, the private line is merged into the main conference and the audience can hear the speakers. You can also use this for post-event debriefing, pulling the speakers back into a private "room" so they can chat about how things went without worrying that an audience member might still be listening in.

The Green Room function is so important that I have advised companies to pay the extra costs for operator assistance on their calls just to get this ability. Now ConferTel gives you the ability to run pre- and post-conference breakouts yourself, just using keypad commands.

The second function that applies to webinars is the ability to take questions over the phone. On a large event, you don't want to simply open the phone lines for two-way communications with your entire audience. People will talk over each other, you'll get somebody's hold music, and there will be other audio distractions in the background. So audio conferencing companies have created question queues that let audience members key in a request to ask a question. Then the operator can let each requestor in one at a time, opening only that person's line and muting it again when their question is done. Virtual Attendant now lets you operate a question queue yourself, without an operator.

Being able to operate these features yourself, without having to schedule an operator and without paying the extra operator assistance costs, is a spectacular benefit. I haven't yet used ConferTel conference calling, so I can't report on their call quality or reliability. But from a price/convenience perspective, this new service is a great addition to the tools available for webinar producers.

I also love the fact that they put their pricing clearly and unambiguously on their website, including rates for countries around the world. Nicely done, ConferTel!

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Technorati Tags: audio conferencing, ConferTel, green room, Virtual Attendant, teleconferencing, telephone conferencing, Virtual Attendant, web conference, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Watch Out For Hidden Limitations

I don't suppose I'll ever run out of material concerning implementation differences between web conferencing products. One of my more popular articles on the blog has been "How To Grill A Web Conferencing Vendor" in which I advise caution in looking at RFP responses and other summary lists of features from vendors. Just because a vendor puts a check mark next to "Audience Q&A" doesn't mean it's going to work the way you want it to in practice.

Understanding the details of how a web conferencing feature is implemented and how the design decisions will affect you is almost impossible from a written description. That is why I always advise test driving a product in a real conference setting with a presenter or two and an audience member before making a purchase decision. Vendors that don't allow a free trial period are doing a serious disservice to their potential customers and should join this common industry trend.

I have socked it to market leaders like WebEx and Live Meeting in the past for some strange operational aspects. Today it's Citrix's turn with their GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar product. I'll start out by saying that Citrix is my go-to choice (pun intended) for running live demos and anything else that requires you to show your desktop to attendees. If there is any other product that runs screen sharing more smoothly, I haven't seen it.

But today I ran up against one of those strange design choices that made me shake my head in wonder. GoToWebinar lets you accept typed-in audience comments in two ways. You can have them use a Chat window or a Question & Answer window. Excellent... That satisfies the check mark on the features list when comparing product functionality. Both of the features work just fine. Except that I took my practical use scenario one step farther.

Citrix has enabled Chat as a general audience communication tool. If you enable it for your audience, they can chat to the entire crowd... You can't restrict them to sending messages to presenters/hosts only. Okay, that's fair. Probably something you would use more for collaborative work groups than for large one-to-many presentations. I don't want my webinar audience distracting each other with the kind of chatter you find in open forums and chat rooms. Q&A works the other way... You can restrict the audience to sending in their questions so that only the event organizer/host can see them. The host can then read them off or "assign" each question to a named presenter. Very nice.

But when it comes time to end your meeting and prepare for your post-event actions, you can only save your Chat log! There is no facility to save questions that have come in through the Q&A window. No problem, I thought... I'll just copy the list of questions out of my organizer's Q&A window. No good... You can't select and copy the questions. So if I want a record of every question that was submitted during an event, I have to type them into a document manually, one by one. Not very friendly for a large event (GoToWebinar supports audience sizes up to 1000) where it is important to follow through on potentially many questions.

I called Citrix tech support and asked if I was missing something. Nope. That's just the way it works. You can't call this a bug, it's just a design decision that doesn't fit with my particular needs for this particular event series. Now I know about it up front and I can make decisions based on that knowledge. But there is no way I would know about it from looking at features lists or product documentation or a typical RFP response.

I used Citrix as an example here because I happened to be using their software for a client event and it was fresh in my mind. I should point out that the tradeoff in this case was a client who saw the screen sharing and exclaimed, "This is incredible! It's SO much better than what we were using!" But EVERY web conferencing vendor has similar design choices and tradeoffs sprinkled through their products. Something will come up and bite you when you least expect it. Make sure to think through your entire product use from setup to post-event follow up and make sure that your product satisfies your particular needs. I've spotted hidden design limitations in various products in areas such as event recording, audio delivery, slide conversions, question management, and lead tracking. If it's important to you, test it out. And never assume that something will work in the way you think is obvious.

UPDATE (July 26, 1:30 EDT): My face is red. GoToWebinar does indeed have a way to see all questions and answers from the event. It's not in the online dashboard console, but in the Attendee Report you can generate from your organizer Web interface afterwards. Each attendee has a text block with all questions and answers from/to that person. Unfortunately all dialog entries are run together into a long continuous stream for each person, so you have to do manual editing and reformatting, but all the vital information is in there. That just goes to show that sometimes there are hidden capabilities as well as hidden limitations! My apologies to Citrix (and a slap on the wrist to the tech support person who didn't tell me about it).

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A Look At Sonic Foundry Mediasite

I recently had calls from two different businesses interested in trying to expand their live, classroom-delivered training to a larger remote audience by offering their courses via webinars. In a bit of synchronicity, I found that somebody mentioned my blog on the Yahoo message board for Sonic Foundry stock investors, causing me to take a closer look at the company and its products.

I had known that Sonic Foundry was used by companies to deliver webcasts, but I hadn't spent much time looking at their offerings. That's because the company's technology model is a departure from the software-only approach that is more common in the webinar/webcast industry. They use a physical hardware device installed at the customer's location to capture the webinar content.

I had a chance to talk with Kristin Zurovitch and Erica St. Angel in Sonic Foundry's corporate and product marketing groups. They confirmed that they don't compete so much with hosted software solutions such as WebEx and Live Meeting. If your webinars consist mainly of narration over PowerPoint slides, Sonic Foundry Mediasite is probably overkill.

But if your primary need is to broadcast and archive a room-based presentation that includes video of the presenters and projected slides or video content (even audience shots if that's important to you), then Mediasite could be just what you are looking for. These kinds of setups are probably used more for training and public briefings than any other kinds of applications, although I could imagine other uses ranging from mixed media performance art to commentary and coverage of a chess competition.

The front end of the technology is a hardware device used to capture presentation content, referred to as the Mediasite Recorder. This comes in two versions: A rack-mounted unit for permanent in-room installation, and a portable unit for multi-location work. The recorder has multiple inputs for video sources, audio sources, and digital signals (such as output from a computer to show electronic slides or documents). Video inputs allow a variety of connection types that should satisfy techies with everything from handheld video cameras to professional studio cameras. The audio side has primary and secondary inputs, but for multi-source recordings (such as microphones in front of a panel of speakers), you will want to run through an external mixer and then feed a combined signal to the unit.

In reading the technical specifications data sheet for the unit, I see some fancy functionality that is nice to have when you need it, but I'll bet doesn't get used too often. You can set recording to start and stop automatically at scheduled times, you can crop the captured video, and manage the slides used in a digital presentation. (Kristin tells me that the scheduling capability is frequently used to automate and simplify the recording process, but my experience shows precious few events start and stop bang on their scheduled times!)

Once you have all the inputs connected, the live presentation proceeds as usual in the room and the recorder captures all the various components. It outputs an instantaneous synchronized audio/video digital stream that can be webcast live or saved to a digital file for playback on demand. One restriction to note is that the digital and computer side of things rely on Windows Media Server and captures the recording as a Windows Media file. Audience members can watch the live webcast on Windows or Macintosh computers through standard Web browsers and you can do an extra conversion step to export the recording to Flash format for additional portability. Mediasite also includes a "Publish-to-Go" functionality that creates a zip file with everything needed to play back the content without an active Internet connection... useful if you are distributing your content on CDs. It is also possible to publish the audio stream as a podcast.

Kristin and Erica emphasized the fact that recording the live content was only half the story. Sonic Foundry also has its own server software for cataloging and hosting events (both live and recorded). The Mediasite EX Server organizes your events in catalogs with your own choice of subdivision or folder titles (useful for corporate applications where you might have content applying to different products or operating divisions). Users can search based on keywords and administrators can customize the viewer look and feel with different "skins" to change colors, logos, and layout of the video/slide windows. Administrators can also specify access security and get reports on usage and views. The server software is designed to be installed on a dedicated Windows-based server (computer) at the customer's location, although options exist... Read on!.

Interactivity during an event includes the ability to submit polls for audience participation. I like the fact that there is no limit to the number of answer choices you can offer (some companies only give you five "slots" to put in the response options) and that you can choose to specify a poll as "one answer only" or "check all that apply." Unfortunately, if you choose to share results with your audience, they always see both percentages and absolute numbers of replies, which means you can't hide a small audience turnout.

If you buy a recorder for your company along with the server license, you're probably going to face a cost in the neighborhood of 40-50 thousand dollars. That may seem like a big chunk of change to some small businesses, but it's yours to use as often as you like for as long as you like, so the cost amortizes out over multiple events very nicely. For companies that only have one or two events that they want to broadcast, or who want to try out the solution on a test case, Sonic Foundry offers an event production package that costs around three to five thousand dollars. They will get a recording professional to your location with a portable recorder, camera, and sound equipment, hook everything up, record your event, and host the recording for an agreed upon period of time. You can also use a loaner Mediasite Recorder yourself and access the server software as a Sonic Foundry hosted service, eliminating the need to install and maintain the software locally.

Multimedia live event webcasting is a smaller niche than either software-based webinars or simple camera-feed webcasts. I was amused to read a thread on the investors' message board where everybody was competing to guess how many individual Mediasite Recorder units the company would announce they had sold in the third quarter. The guesses ranged from 170 to 210 units. That's not a massive volume, but considering that each represents a one-time purchase that can be used indefinitely by the customer, it's not a bad indication that the market is continuing to expand.

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Premiere Global Publicly Announces... Something

Premiere Global Services issued a press release today announcing that they spent about $19 million to acquire a web-based conferencing services provider. But they wouldn't say what company they acquired. Maybe the MBA's out there can advise me, but isn't that a little strange for a publicly traded company? A $19 million acquisition should be a significant financial event that deserves disclosure to the stockholders and potential investors, right? The acquired company is stated to have an annualized revenue run rate of $10 million, and Premiere says that it will boost their 2008 earnings. How the heck do you keep the name of your acquisition a secret through all of that? WHY would you keep the name of your acquisition a secret while announcing the deal itself? Is that even legal? And what conferencing solutions provider just got gobbled up?

I will find out. Somehow.

UPDATE: The Conferencing News gang quotes an Elliot Gold newsletter as guessing the acquisition must be Budget Conferencing. I'm working on getting some kind of comment from a Premiere person, but no luck so far. My favorite wrong guess was iLinc, which has revenues and market capitalization roughly (but only roughly) equivalent to the figures quoted in the press release. It still looks to me like they are ripe for a buy-out!

SECOND UPDATE: Premiere sent me an email stating that they will publicly announce the acquiree on their earnings call this Thursday the 26th. I quote: "It is an audio conferencing provider that sells through an online channel versus a direct sales force. They do not have a web conferencing solution of their own." Well heck... I'll leave this to the teleconferencing experts at Conferencing News. It ain't my subject area!

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Web Conferencing Is In Your Stars

... At least if you're a Gemini.

For some reason, this really tickled my funnybone. I'm hoping the link stays active for the old horoscope, but just in case it changes daily and you can no longer see it online, here is the horoscope for Gemini on July 17, 2007 as carried on newKerala.com:

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Travel and meetings figure prominently today. You may participate in more modern methods of teleconferencing or webcasting. You can get involved in mass communication and general alerts now.

Along with warnings about delays and accidents, sibling rivalry, and verbal duels, the planets can also advise on when to get involved in modern forms of advanced mass communications. So how about it, Geminis? Was it a good day for web conferences?

UPDATE - JULY 27, 2007: I got a very fun email from Joby James working at Cisco-WebEx. Joby originally comes from the state of Kerala, India (note the website name that I found the horoscope on).  Joby decided to become a detective and tracked down the source of the horoscope to D. Donovan Kinsolving on www.upi.com. Speaking in generalizations only, the Indian culture tends to take horoscopes more seriously than the mass American public does. Joby was impressed by the technical overtones of Dr. Kinsolving's forecast and the fact that even the stars are pushing for greater use of web conferencing... It sure doesn't hurt the business prospects of WebEx and its employees!  Thanks for the follow-up, Joby.

Technorati Tags: horoscope, newKerala.com, teleconferencing, webcast, webcasting

ON24 Update On Webcasting In Publishing

ON24 has published an updated report on lead generation webcasting trends in the B2B publishing industry (one of their larger customer sectors). The last time they looked at this area, they covered statistics from the first six months of 2006 versus the first six months of 2005. The new report covers a 12-month cycle. You can read my coverage of the last report at this link.

The full annual view of their webcasting data gave ON24 the chance to look at larger trend information. There are a few statistics that have great significance for companies using webinars or webcasts for lead generation. I want to highlight those results here.

There is a commonly stated rule of thumb that says you shouldn't produce lead generation webinars in the dog-days of Summer or in December. In the Summer, too many people are gone on vacations. In December, they are too busy with end of year business activities or too distracted by the holiday season. But ON24 found the flip side of this argument. The best months for registration-to-attendance conversion percentages were December, June, and August! So while you may not get as many registrations during those months (and that belief has yet to be proven), the people that do take the time to register are more likely to attend your event.

Another commonly held belief is that you should promote and market your event four to six weeks before its date, to give people time to check ahead and block out the time on their calendars. I have always felt this to be a fallacy, as the sad truth is that a webinar will almost never win out in a conflict of appointments, no matter how long in advance your audience has scheduled it on their calendars. Now ON24 reports that 47% of all registrations occur in the 10 days before a scheduled webcast, with more than ten percent registering on the day of the webcast! Maybe you should hold off on that email blast until closer to the event date. I think people view the webcast as a short term interest. If it's too far in the future, they put off registering and then forget all about it.

Of no surprise is the fact that most registrations occur on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I'm sure this is due in large part to the fact that companies tend to drop their promotions on those days (press releases and email blasts).

They also found that more than 15% of all registrations occur in the thirty-day period AFTER the live webcast date! So get that recording archived and available as quickly as possible... Your promotional materials are still working for you after the event is over (I can easily verify this from personal experience. My "upcoming webinars" page always gets page views well after the event I was promoting has passed. Make sure to keep making use of your landing page/registration page with updated information after the event is over. It will continue to draw views.

ON24 also reports that audience members spent an average viewing time of 47 minutes for a live webcast, versus 32 minutes for on-demand material. Make your recordings shorter and more concise than your live events. Cut them into shorter, more focused segments if you can. This is a service that Webinar Success offers, by the way.

There is a lot more information in the full report and I don't want to violate their copyright by giving it all away. You can get a copy of the report for free by registering on their website.

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Technorati Tags: lead generation, ON24, web conference, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, webinar

The Debate Over Recorded Live Webcasts

I just caught up with a bit of cross-blog discussion on the ethics and practicality of playing back recorded webcast content as if it were a live presentation. This tactic is not yet prevalent, but it may be growing in popularity. There is no hard evidence that I have seen giving a clue to the overall trend.

Howard Sewell brought up the subject on his Direct Connections blog related to direct response marketing. Then Dale Wolf picked it up on his Customer Experience blog. They don't have a lot of comments and feedback posted yet, so I thought I would give the subject an airing over here and see if we can get some more response from the crowd.

Certainly the technology side of things is not a barrier. Your audience can't see you and has no way of knowing who is on the other end of the connection. If you want to go the "fake live" route, you can do it in any number of ways. You can record an entire broadcast from start to end, including a faux Q&A session where you supposedly read off audience questions that are actually your own cleverly written queries. Or you can record a main content session, but use a live moderator and/or subject expert to do the lead-in and to answer live audience questions at the end. You could even have the majority of your webcast be live, with one of your speakers queued up as a recording.

The arguments on the two sides of the debate tend to boil down to:

• You are lying to your audience, so how can they trust you about your products or services?

and

• You are providing the exact content they signed up for. No harm, no foul. Who cares how it is delivered?

I see the validity of each side's viewpoint, but I think we are overlooking a few practical matters. Consider these purely pragmatic issues.

1. Murphy's Law is particularly active around webinars. Things go wrong, connections drop, software has glitches. It seems to me that relying on perfect operation of several technical aspects that have to mesh up correctly in order to bring off your deception is inviting disaster. Ask Milli Vanilli or Ashlee Simpson. They had more experienced professionals working on their broadcast technology than you will ever get.


2. Effective webinars engage and hold the audience's attention by involving them in interactive behaviors. Responding to questions or comments as you go along... Inviting audience feedback and acknowledging it... Running polls and questionnaires. If you take this aspect away, you are left with a long unbroken speech. There's no better way to bore and lose an audience on a webcast.


3. Some companies might use this technique to save themselves effort when running the same topic as a recurring lead gen activity. "Come see our live introductory webcast every week on Thursday at 10am." But people do sometimes attend the same event twice. Either because they missed a portion the first time or because they wanted to recheck something, or because they want to steal some of your information... Whatever. These people will figure it out pretty quickly if they hear the same words and the same coughs and the same intonations delivered at the same speed. In the age of open forums, it doesn't take much for them to expose you publicly and give you a very bad reputation for honesty.

All in all, I'm more comfortable with delivering a live performance when you say it's live. If you want to include recorded content on a scheduled event, go ahead and tell your audience, but frame it in terms of the benefit to them. "We wanted to make sure that everyone had the opportunity to benefit from our expert." Or "portions of this event were prerecorded to ensure the best possible quality." A little honesty can be refreshing.

That's my take. What's yours?

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Technorati Tags: communication, Dale Wolf, Direct Connections, Howard Sewell, lead generation, marketing, Perfect Customer Experience, recorded content, Virtual Event, web conference, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, webinar

WebEx Server Problems

In May I wrote about The Downside of SaaS, where I was working a client event using WebEx Event Center and they lost the server we were on, causing great commotion and panic on our side before getting things running again. I chalked it up to one of those rare but unavoidable glitches that occasionally occurs when you use technology.

But here it is two months later and the same thing happened today. Another client event on WebEx Event Center. I log in thirty minutes early as the host to set things up and I can't get start our session. Tech support does things in the background for a long time and five minutes before the scheduled event time suggests that we tell our attendees to use a different login URL (a long one, including parameter values) to get them onto a backup server. I don't hold out much hope for reading off long URLs over a telephone line and hoping that everyone will write them down and enter them by hand correctly.

In the meantime, both panelists and attendees see a screen that says simply "Event In Progress." Not very helpful. Except for the people who were caught somewhere in the middle of the server switchover. They can't log in at all. I got emails from attendees saying that some of them spent 20 to 30 minutes on the phone with WebEx tech support with no satisfactory resolution and were never able to join our session. Eventually the backup server kicked in and we were able to start our event less than ten minutes late.

I don't know what is going on with the WebEx data center, but I am astonished that as a single user, running a limited number of events under completely separate client accounts I should hit two half-hour downtimes in two months, directly impacting our audience and their user experience. If that's what I'm seeing at random times, how often is the server going down over there?

To quote Ricky Ricardo... "Lucy? You got some 'splainin to do!"

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The Death of The Small Group Web Conferencing Business?

Here we have a web warrior who posted a short slide show demonstrating how to build your own collaborative web conferencing solution using a combination of free downloads and no programming other than simple web page construction.

If the embedded slide show didn't display, you can watch it online at http://www.slideshare.net/ccosmato/conferencing-on-the-cheap-with-web-2

You can play with his final result at this web page: http://www.radford.edu/ccosmato/room/

Now this isn't going to win any awards for the most feature rich, nicely integrated piece of business/consumer software ever produced. That's not the point. View the result in the same way that you would view a concept car from an automobile manufacturer or wacky designer outfits in a high end fashion show. They are ways of demonstrating an idea, showing how elements can be brought together in new and innovative ways.

In this case, we see that chat features, file downloading, and slide presentation can be easily integrated and shared using completely free utilities. Chaz didn't include a live PowerPoint slide sharing utility, but he could have... they are available for free as well.

If I were a web conferencing software manufacturer concentrating on cheap forms of small group collaboration, I'd be shaking in my boots about the implications of this. Low-end collaboration is getting commoditized and provided for free to the masses. It is not hard to build a fully functional productized version and distribute it for free as a loss leader to gain market awareness or as a way to generate revenues from ad sharing or something similar. Yugma is an example of one vendor who is already doing this with a complete web conferencing solution that is free for groups of up to 10 people.

Yes, all you outraged vendors... I am glossing over some important considerations that are very real. These kinds of mashups are susceptible to incompatibilities that creep in as the various component products change in new releases. There is no centralized support possible. Formal QA and testing are unlikely. I wouldn't want to rely on a mashup like this as a vital tool for my business. But as a concept, it shows where small group web collaboration is headed. And that direction is not big revenues for software vendors.

Value add in collaborative web conferencing is increasingly important. Great service, additional features, or performance that is above and beyond what anyone else can do. Because the basics are going to be expected by consumers as free and universally available utilities, just like the instant messaging they use for free today.

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Technorati Tags: Chaz Maloney, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, Yugma