The Webinar Blog

Are You Using Personas Correctly In Your Webinars?

Are you involved in sales or marketing? Do you create, promote, or deliver webinars as a part of your process? Perfect! You fit the persona of someone who would benefit from a free webinar this Thursday, September 15.

I will be speaking about the use (and misuse) of personas in sales and marketing webinars. The one-hour free session starts at 9am California / 12pm New York and you can register at this link:

https://www.smmconnect.com/events/3261?gref=kenm

• If you haven’t used marketing personas before, I’ll explain the concept and why they are so useful.
  
  
• If you know about personas but could use a deeper dive into ways to apply them to your sales and marketing webinars, this is right up your alley.
  
  
• If you are an old experienced hand at using personas, I’ll give you a few eye-opening tips into some bad habits you may have picked up, with ways to make your personas and your webinars more effective.

The session is being hosted by Adobe Connect and Sales & Marketing Management as part of the online SMM Connect community of professionals. I’ll answer your questions live on the air and you’ll get an e-book version of the presentation afterwards.

I look forward to seeing you online!

Technorati Tags: persona,marketing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,SMM Connect

WhatsApp With Webinars?

I hardly ever use WhatsApp. That tells you two things about me…

1. I’m an old man
2. I live in America

But even with these limitations in perspective, I know that the mobile messaging platform is incredibly popular worldwide. Heck, even in the USA it has over 75 million users – primarily 45 years of age and younger. And it’s far and away the most popular messaging app across Mexico, Central and South America, India, Russia, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Why bring this up within the context of a blog about webinars?

My last post mentioned the problem of getting your webinar-related emails seen amid the clutter of overloaded inboxes these days. And yesterday I read an article by Dave Michels on the No Jitter website about adjacent services that improve the value of meeting platforms. These put me in mind of an interesting utility I recently looked into.

Webinar Booster is a specialized community builder designed to use the WhatsApp infrastructure to increase communications between webinar hosts and their target audiences.

The concept is centered on the idea of a WhatsApp channel associated with your webinar. Webinar Booster creates a short URL that lets people join the channel with their WhatsApp userID (they can also create a display alias if they don’t want to expose their actual WhatsApp name). You might include the join link in the confirmation email that shows up when they register for your webinar, or you might include it in initial promotions and landing pages.

Once they join the channel via Webinar Booster, they can type in questions, comments, and requests through their normal WhatsApp interface. Messages are seen only by the host’s account. The host can then decide which messages to share with the group at large, along with their own replies.

I spoke with Tomer Saar, the CEO and Founder of Texuto, the company that created Webinar Booster. He told me that the app has been in general availability for about one year and has had its greatest initial adoption in India and Europe. It is not designed to replace in-session chat inside a webinar platform, but has the greatest utility before and after the live event.

Webinar Booster may be best used to help stimulate interest and boost attendance by encouraging active participation in the days leading up to a webinar. The host can request topics of interest or questions that people would like to see the presenters address in the webinar. As people see questions asked by others, they can chime in as well. Since the chat is moderated by the host, you don’t risk a free-for-all open discussion with people promoting themselves or sidetracking the conversation. Users never see contact information for each other, so they feel safe in contributing to the conversation. And the host can use it as a broadcast channel to send out reminders and incentives for attendance.

After the webinar, the host can use the channel to collect additional questions related to the topic and to provide answers to everyone without having to create and share documents or email chains.

Tomer said that Webinar Booster can extend the sales nurturing pipeline after initial contact in a webinar while letting registrants maintain a sense of connection and interaction with the hosting company. I rather like having an alternative to email for keeping the communication channel alive with your targeted audiences, especially if you are working with demographics that already use and trust WhatsApp.

I’ll be interested to track Webinar Booster’s popularity and usage. What do you think about the idea?

Who Do Your Webinar Emails Come From?

What can you do to make sure your webinar communications have the best chance of breaking through email overload and clutter these days?

You work on crafting pithy, concise, and informative subject lines. You’re careful about writing persuasive body text. But there may be another overlooked factor that is dragging down the effectiveness of your webinar emails. Let’s talk about the “FROM” field.

When someone fires up their email app and finds a hundred new unread messages, their eye scans the list looking for familiar landmarks. That’s why all your webinar emails should ideally come from the same name.

There are four primary categories of webinar emails (although each category may have more than one instance):

• Invitation
• Confirmation
• Reminder
• Follow Up

If all the emails associated with these categories come from the same sender, it makes it easier for recipients to mentally connect them as part of a single cohesive communication chain about the same subject. This increases the chance that they will be spotted in the overflowing inbox and opened.

Unfortunately, practice is not always as easy as theory. Invitations may be sent from a house mailing system or a third-party bulk mailer that has a hard-coded sender name associated with it. In smaller companies, invitations may go out under the name of someone working in the marketing department. I can tell you that when I see an unexpected email coming from an unfamiliar “Dave” or “Julie” it tends not to get a lot of attention.

Registration confirmation and reminder emails are most commonly sent automatically via your webinar software. Different products deal with the sender name in a variety of ways. My favorites are products that give you complete control over the displayed sender name. But look at GoToWebinar and Zoom – two of the most popular lower priced webinar platforms on the market. Confirmation and reminder emails sent through those systems come from whatever name is associated with the master account. This may be an employee in accounting, or someone in a central IT department, or a generic name that was chosen arbitrarily. Sender names cannot be customized on a per-webinar basis.

The final category is follow up emails sent to attendees and registered no-shows. These may come from an individual working on the webinar (an admin or one of the presenters), they may be set up in the webinar software and come from the account holder, or they may come from a central marketing group using CRM or bulk mailing software.

If you can figure out a way to achieve consistency in the displayed source for all emails associated with your webinar, you boost the chances that your recipients will notice the emails and recognize that they relate to a webinar they are interested in. It’s worth the effort to get a little extra psychological advantage wherever you can.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,email marketing,web event,online event

Has WFH Killed Presenter Professionalism?

I saw a tweet that was later removed by the author, so I won’t attribute it out of respect for their wishes. But I thought the concept expressed was provocative and want to explore it. Paraphrasing rather liberally, it went along these lines…

The pandemic made working from home standard procedure. Will a lack of professionalism be the thing that ends WFH?

Now, there are a lot of potential ways to interpret “a lack of professionalism.” I don’t know what this particular author had in mind in that short tweet. You could focus on behaviors in team meetings and group video chats, or allowing inappropriate things to be seen on camera or in screen shares, or not joining meetings on time, or not muting your microphone, or all kinds of annoyances in group conversations. Peer-to-peer web conferencing is not my focus in this blog. But I believe it’s worth thinking about how universal WFH may have affected professionalism in outbound webinars.

Allow me to use a specific example to make some points.

Earlier this year, I attended a corporate conference. It was hosted by a big name in webinar/webcast software. Instead of booking a physical location and flying everyone in, the company produced the entire event online using their own web event software. Easy to attend, easy to host as many breakout sessions as they wanted with no incremental event costs.

The software worked very nicely. It was a lovely testament to how web presentations and virtual events can fill the needs of outbound communication to large, geographically distributed audiences.

The keynotes by company executives were produced at high quality in a controlled environment with professional sound, lighting, and camera operators. They started the event off nicely.

Then came the breakout sessions led by company employees. Each employee presented from home. I saw half-shaven employees wearing rumpled hoodies. I saw presenters sitting in their garage, surrounded by bicycles and lawn gear. I saw people on weak wifi with stutters and freezes. I saw overexposed and underexposed images, framed improperly. I saw laptop webcams on desks, shooting up into the presenter’s nostrils. I heard microphone scrapes, thumps, and volume changes as speakers moved their heads. In other words, exactly what you have seen for years in webinar after webinar.

It didn’t make the shared information any less valuable. But as an attendee, I felt like there was a lack of professionalism on display. It colored my perception of the company. Especially since the keynotes showed that the capability was there… they merely lacked the will to bring the entire event experience up to the same level.

It would have been less convenient for the employees. It would have cost more for the company. But they could have provided backdrops, lights, microphones, or broadcast rooms/studios in locales central to multiple presenters. They could have coordinated dress codes and branding for all presenters. They could have provided advance A/V checks and suggestions for each presenter to optimize the way they were perceived online. Or they could have demanded that each person come into the office for their breakout session presentation.

In other words, they could have dedicated the same kinds of oversight and comprehensive corporate standards to the online event that they would have done for a physical event. But that didn’t happen.

--- HAS WFH CONTRIBUTED TO LOWERED STANDARDS? ---

I don’t want to minimize the strains that COVID-related lockdowns, lockouts, and distancing placed on everyone. Companies, managers, and employees deserve kudos for making it all work as well as they have overall. Homes were forced to serve makeshift duty as offices and broadcast studios while coexisting with the demands of home life, partners, pets, and children.

Home wi-fi networks were suddenly tasked with bandwidth loads they were never built to handle… Simultaneous contention among kids doing remote schooling, family members streaming movies, multiple workers on video conferences, large “office-sized” documents being downloaded in email messages. Add to that the limitless wireless interference sources found in homes.

So we have all made allowances. Sometimes people are just going to have little freezes in team web meetings. Sometimes kids and pets are going to interrupt or add their presence on camera. Sometimes the background environment isn’t going to be pristine. Sometimes the neighbor’s leaf blower is going to make background noise.

Now we come back to that loaded phrase about “lowered standards.” It sounds accusatory or judgmental. That’s not my intent. I’m not belittling employees who have had to deal with the pandemic-enforced reality of life. You tell me what the alternative is for a single parent living in a New York studio apartment with a kid who isn’t allowed to go to school!

But there is an objective reality to face… We used to expect a given standard in work communications conducted in and between office environments with IT-managed networks and equipment and dedicated meeting rooms or office spaces. The new standard includes the allowances I mentioned above. It’s a lower standard.

And you know what? I don’t care. Internal business operations seem to be ticking right along, and if I see a coworker’s cat or kid while we’re talking, it’s kind of cute and doesn’t make me think any less of them. We’re all in this together.

--- THE IMPACT ON PRESENTATIONS ---

But! …

Now we switch our attention to the matter of presentations being made to customers, prospects, press, and analysts. Or donors. Or association members. Anyone we are trying to influence or drive to a course of action.

Once we face the world outside our corporate walls, we become ambassadors for our organization. The information we share is only one part of our job. We also have a duty to help create or reinforce a positive image of our company, to create goodwill, to build a sense of trustworthiness and reliability. In short, to show that our organization and the people in it have a sense of professionalism that makes us a desirable organization to work with.

And this is where the lowered standards of remote communication we all agreed to accept during the strict lockdown years is hurting companies. If every public-facing presenter is a spokesperson for our business image, then every public-facing presenter deserves proper support, training, equipment, and setting necessary to represent the organization in the best, most professional light.

That means corporate management needs to define and communicate a different set of standards and expectations for outbound presenters. It means asking presenters to come to controlled environments or studios when making their public presentations, or agreeing to set up home spaces that adhere to corporate A/V standards.

This is how I choose to interpret that original tweet way back at the beginning. Because most home environments cannot meet the standards for professional presentation that companies need to project, it creates a strong impetus for managers, executives, and event organizers to demand Work From Office rather than Work From Home when making presentations.

It’s not so much that employees are not acting professionally themselves, it’s that they are physically unable to create the impression of professionalism demanded by the company. So maybe “a lack of professionalism” won’t kill WFH overall, but it may well kill it for company webinars and conferences.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web event,online conference,online event,webcasting,webcast,work from home

Are We Asking Too Much Of Video Presenters?

Take a quick look at the video below. If it doesn’t play in your feed reader, you can find it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/1oh9fkwDCGg. The video is only 55 seconds long:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? It really is… I’m not being sarcastic or derisive. At least not yet. This is a teaser announcement from Prezi showing a concept feature enhancement that would allow presenters to use hand gestures to control display, orientation, and placement of graphic objects on the screen along with the presenter’s live webcam video.

The YouTube date associated with this video is October of 2020. As far as I can tell, the feature never made it into public beta, much less into general availability. In my research, I found a much earlier article from August of 2013 looking at a similar capability using the third-party Leap gesture controller.

I like looking at these kinds of cool tech applications. But I remain cynical about their use in practical business scenarios.

Zoom and Prezi have both built some rather nice features for integrating webcam video with presentation graphics. Zoom lets you appear on top of a slideshow, effectively using the slides as a sequence of virtual background images.

Prezi lets you embed your video as a live component integrated with your slide graphics. Rich Mulholland blew my mind in a presentation where he demonstrated this in a fun and engaging manner. You really should register and watch the replay. The carefully thought out design of graphics and smooth integration of live video is a marvel.

Advanced presenters who do this kind of work on a daily basis can use these technologies to really stand out. It’s great that the tools exist and offer the additional freedom and flexibility to create exciting next-gen presentation effects.

BUT… Now I need to play devil’s advocate for a bit. The sad reality of business presentations is that most of them are terrible. That’s why there’s an entire industry of presentation trainers, consultants, and designers.

We still can’t get people to put enough light on their faces to keep them from looking like members of the witness protection program. We see laptop webcams shooting up from desks into the presenter’s nostrils. We see slides thrown together as last minute obligations, written like white papers with text sentences spelled out in bullet point lists. Graphics get stretched out of proper aspect ratio. Presentations are completed an hour before presentation time, without a single run-through of the content.

I’ve written in the past how this is more the fault of management than of the presenters. There is not enough incentive and reward for making a quality presentation to warrant the extra investment in time and labor by employees.

Now imagine asking these same overworked, time-constrained business professionals to plan out graphic layouts and designs that feature their webcam image as an integral part of the visual presentation. White space for where their head will be. Component graphics that will move in and out of the presentation to highlight carefully plotted and rehearsed movements. Monitors, lighting, camera position, controllers all placed to allow presenters to look like they are interacting with the audience while they actually are tracking their own video and content placements at the same time they are delivering the actual message.

It CAN be done! Look again at Richard’s presentation. Done well like this, it will blow your audience away. But WILL it be done by more than a handful of people? Are YOU willing to put in the planning, the careful construction, the technical setup, and the rehearsal necessary to pull it off so the technology is a value-add rather than a distraction that makes you look unprofessional?

Perhaps that’s why Prezi gesture control never made it into production. While it was technically possible, the pragmatics of actual use were too daunting for the public to employ it. We need to make it as easy as possible for video presenters to achieve basic professional-looking results as part of a solid, effective presentation before we start asking them to add bells and whistles that cause even more task-related overload.

I’m glad tech companies are testing new features. But if you are a business presenter, never forget that bells and whistles don’t create a great presentation. YOU create a great presentation. With or without tech. Take care of the basics. Don’t let software manufacturers sway you into thinking that their latest bright ‘n shiny new feature is necessary or even beneficial. Think about what makes you most comfortable and effective. You can always add fancy stuff later.

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentation technique,slide design,Prezi,videoconferencing,video conferencing,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,online meeting,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,Richard Mulholland

Pop Culture References In Presentations–Where’s The Beef?

Today I saw a tweet from a presentation trainer whom I know and respect. They wrote that in a training call, they used an analogy referencing a 1980s Sally Struthers ad campaign about feeding children. It landed flat, leaving the audience bewildered.

Last night on the Oscars, quite a bit of attention was paid to the Will Smith/Chris Rock altercation. But I wonder if younger viewers had any idea what Rock was talking about in his joke when he referenced “GI Jane 2?”

My adolescence took place during the 1970s. There was no internet. No smartphones. No DVRs or VCRs or home video. There were three network TV stations, carrying 99% of the programming that people regularly watched.

My point in bringing this up is not that things were BETTER then… Just that things were DIFFERENT then. If you consumed a piece of popular culture, you consumed it in the same way at the same time as everybody else in the country. We saw the same commercials because there was no way to skip them. We saw the same episode of the same popular TV shows on the same night and then talked about them the next day at work or at school.

As a result, we shared media-generated cultural touchpoints in a way that is almost inconceivable today. So many people watched the same things and discussed them at the same time… Then they took on even more staying power based on the references ABOUT the original moments, as comedians and parodists used them to connect with their audiences over weeks, months, or years.

It’s very easy for people who came of age pre-internet to communicate in a series of catchphrase references, simply expecting others their age to understand not just the source, but the underlying meaning expressed by use of the quote.

• “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
• “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”
• “Where’s the beef?”
• “You’ve got spunk!”

A very gradual weakening of this homogeneity started happening as more TV channels became available, with more programming choices. By the 1980s, home video rentals made a wider choice of movies available from a wider timespan, and home recorders made it possible to time-shift viewing. But it’s the growth of the internet and social media that has undermined the entire concept of a time-based shared cultural experience.

Nowadays, nobody is expected to have seen anything at the same time. “Don’t mention anything about that show or movie… You’ll spoil it for me!” Cultural touchstones may indeed pop up, but they have far shorter lifespans. I get an email each week covering the top memes of the preceding week.

News and entertainment is concerned with collecting instantaneous clicks and views, which means they have to constantly move on to the next “Shiny New Thing.” There is precious little time for things to settle in and collect cultural resonance by comedians and parodists using them as a base point over a long period of time. If Colbert or Kimmel or Fallon makes a joke reference about something, it’s unlikely to come back for another reference the following night… They’ve moved on to the next item that has briefly caught public attention.

Earlier in this post, I referenced the Oscars broadcast with an oblique reference to Will Smith and Chris Rock. The global viewing audience size and amount of coverage the incident received makes me fairly comfortable that you knew what I was talking about today. But would I embed the reference in a presentation I planned to deliver in a month? Probably not… I don’t trust it to have that much staying power in the minds of the general public.

What does all this mean to you as a presenter? You need to watch out for assumptions of shared knowledge, experiences, and memory among your listeners. You’re dealing with different ages, different time-shifted consumption of media, different niche interests being served by online micro-communities. Things that were briefly popular may have faded from memory before you ever deliver your presentation (or may fade over the lifespan of an evergreen presentation that gets reused over time).

And this doesn’t even address the international multi-cultural problem presented by our globally-connected world. I used to give presentations to people primarily in my own country. Those days are long gone. Now even if I find an audience my own age, they may be located in countries that never saw the same programming or wildly popular movies we all experienced together here in the USA.

In most cases, for public presentations where you don’t know the makeup of your audience I recommend staying away from popular culture references. If you really feel it’s important to your message, give a little context for the people unfamiliar with your source reference. And ALWAYS explain the meaning or point you want people to take away from the reference… Never assume that they know what you were trying to communicate by making the allusion.

After all, you want to end up like Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra, not Shaka when the walls fell! *

Technorati Tags: presentation tips,presentation training,presenter training,speaking tips,speaker training,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast

* The closing line is a reference to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that postulated a culture that communicated entirely in references and allusions to shared stories. It means you want to gain understanding and cooperation with your colleagues rather than failure in your presentation.

Could ON24 Be Next?

Come, let’s engage in a little blue sky speculation. This is going to be one of my infrequent posts talking about financial considerations, so disclaimers are important:

• I have ZERO insider information or informants providing any facts or rumors that would contribute to anything mentioned here. This is just my own personal musings.
  
  
• I have no financial stake or investments in ON24, their competitors, or any companies mentioned in this post.
  
  
• Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, should make any investment decisions based on anything I write. I’m not a financial analyst and I probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

With all that out of the way, I found myself thinking about ON24 today and wondering if they aren’t an awfully attractive takeover candidate at the moment.

The company went public on February 3, 2021. The IPO was officially priced at $50/share and the stock opened for trading at $77/share. They sold around 8.6 million shares to the public and had a first-day market capitalization of more than $3.42 billion.

Thirteen months later, the stock price closed on Thursday under $14, up from a low of $11.20. The current market capitalization is around $655.5 million. The company is facing a class action lawsuit claiming that the IPO Offering Documents were false and misleading.

Would this be a good time for a larger entity to scoop up ON24 at a bargain price? I can think of several companies that could conceivably see it as a canny move.

ON24 is not interested in the peer-level web meeting space. They aren’t going to compete with low priced Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams meeting offerings. ON24 is a big-ticket offering designed for large enterprises to offer large audience webinars and webcasts. The company has made a definite push over the last year to play up a larger “digital experiences” story combining the delivery of web events with marketing, customer relationship management, lead tracking and development, and digital resource management.

So who might want to acquire that sort of technology stack?

I doubt that Microsoft would want to muddy the waters and try to integrate ON24 with its own Teams play. They tried buying a webinar offering years ago and it didn’t go well for them (buying Placeware and renaming it to Microsoft Office Live Meeting).

I discount most of the other existing players already in the webinar/webcast space. If they have enough capital to make the purchase, they don’t need the technology. They’d be buying ON24 purely for the customer list. And those customers would eventually end up angry at being forced to switch their product licensing. PGi is maybe the only vendor that might consider it. They were on an acquisitions kick before the pandemic, and their own GlobalMeet Webcast platform seems to me like it never developed the public recognition and awareness enjoyed by ON24.

But my top candidates are Salesforce and HubSpot. Salesforce has been talking about plays to boost its performance, with co-CEO Marc Benioff telling Jim Cramer recently that “there’s no finish line when it comes to making acquisitions.” They already bought Slack for peer-to-peer collaboration and might want to add a large presentation offering to keep enterprise customers tied into an end-to-end Salesforce technology stack. Salesforce has a market cap of more than $208 billion and wouldn’t even blink at the purchase price for ON24.

HubSpot has a smaller market cap, at $22.2 billion, but their stock price is very high and they have made lots of integration plays with webinar/webcast vendors. They might want to more closely tie enterprise customers into an end-to-end play with promotion, delivery, tracking, and follow-up of digital event attendees all taking place within their own technology stack.

Who knows? Maybe this is all just intellectual game-playing for my own amusement. But I have to say that the possibilities are tantalizing, and if I heard about ON24 being acquired this year I certainly wouldn’t feel surprised.

Are there any other big players you would think of as potential contenders for scooping up ON24? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: ON24,Salesforce,HubSpot,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event

Planning International Meeting Times

Well, we’re getting towards that time of year again… The “danger weeks” when locations start changing between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. Here in the United States, some states (or even localities within a state) may choose to use DST while others won’t. Meanwhile, standard offsets that you have memorized between cities you use a lot (like New York – London) will be wrong for two to three weeks as the US makes its shift two weeks earlier than UK/Europe and three weeks earlier than Australia.

But the challenge doesn’t just apply to March. In our globally connected world of online meetings and webinars, planning session times is a critical planning step. What time(s) should your webinar be held in order to reach the attendees in all your target locations? What time should you make your prep session in order to accommodate your presenters in various countries?

Never assume you know what time it will be in another location on any given date. Localities can adopt their own time zone and use of DST and change it at will. I have long relied upon www.timeanddate.com for its great collection of global time utilities, such as the Event Time Announcer that lets you copy a link with worldwide time equivalents for a given day/date.

Here’s a great way to keep a handy global time chart available to help you with planning an international meeting or webinar. It’s really just a way to speed access to the World Clock Meeting Planner on the above-mentioned website.

Start by setting up the cities you work with the most or that give you the best quick view across your target geographies. Feel free to start with my list of cities covering lots of time zones (apologies to Central/South America, Africa, and other areas not included in this list… It’s just a starting point!). Pick some date in the future. Save the resulting reference grid page as a bookmark in your web browser. I use mine so much, I put it right on my quick access bookmarks bar in Chrome, as highlighted at the top of this screen shot:

Now any time I want to plan an event, I can click the bookmark and change the date in the quick selector I highlighted in the middle of the screen shot. Voila… I get an easy to read chart that properly accounts for all local time zones and DST offsets in each location for the given date. No guessing and no assumptions.

No browser should be without it.

Technorati Tags: Meeting planning,web meeting,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,online meeting,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,timeanddate.com,event planning,Daylight Saving Time

Goodbye LogMeIn, Hello GoTo

LogMeIn rebranded today to better reflect their primary product line. The company is now known as GoTo. Product names that we care about on this blog remain largely the same, but now get a space in the name. So GoToMeeting is now GoTo Meeting and GoToWebinar is now GoTo Webinar.

You can compare the old and new versions of the product lists as presented on the company home page by clicking on the following two thumbnail pictures. Old LogMeIn branding is on the left and new GoTo branding is on the right.

   

For those of you keeping track, the GoTo products started out as collaboration utilities from a Santa Barbara company called ExpertCity. GoToMeeting was announced in early 2004, around the same time that Citrix acquired ExpertCity. Citrix continued to develop and market the product family, introducing GoToWebinar in 2006.

In 2016, LogMeIn took over the GoTo collaboration products from Citrix in a merger agreement that separated them from the rest of Citrix’s business. Since then, the products have continued to evolve under the LogMeIn corporate name. They have benefitted over the last couple of years from the worldwide boost in remote work spurred by COVID response.

Today’s press release introduces the new company branding, but also highlights a new “simplified product portfolio with a single application and two flagship products.” GoTo Resolve will handle IT management and support, which isn’t the focus of this blog. GoTo Connect will now be the universal umbrella encompassing all the company’s collaboration solutions, including GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar.

The announcement says that GoTo Connect also gives customers access to additional features such as cloud telephony, messaging, contact center capabilities, Facebook integration, website chat queues, and more. It’s an attempt to offer a full Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution suite.

I asked whether GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar would continue to exist as individual product offerings, and received confirmation that they could still be licensed as standalone products. Existing customers of these products will access them through the new universal administrative front end, but should not see changes in their operation for running meetings and webinars. GoTo Webinar remains an added-value, added-cost option for those who need to run structured, presentation-oriented web events.

The third major part of the press release announced a new GoTo Partner Network to help stimulate global sales growth via Managed Service Providers, resellers, and distributors. It’s obvious that GoTo wants to leverage the current momentum and awareness of remote work solutions that has lifted the collaboration market in order to increase their penetration into multiple channels and geographies.

I just logged into my existing GoTo Webinar account to check on a customer event scheduled for later today. As of this morning, everything looks exactly as it always has inside the GoTo Webinar product itself. It still shows the old LogMeIn branding, GoToWebinar name, and the same administrative layout and functionality as before. So the new corporate branding change seems to be functionally transparent to existing users with no impact on operations. I would presume (or hope!) that the company will put out notifications and banner announcements before changing the operational interface so that hosts and administrators are not blind-sided by any new look-and-feel that might be coming up.

I use GoTo with customers on a regular basis, so I’ll stay on top of any future changes that impact operations and report if I see something you need to know about.

 

Technorati Tags: GoToWebinar,GoToMeeting,LogMeIn,GoToConnect,webinar,web seminar,online collaboration,web collaboration,web meeting,online meeting

A Look At Current ON24 Lawsuits

I’m going to write about ongoing lawsuits involving webinar software vendors. I should start with a disclaimer that I have ZERO legal training and no firsthand knowledge of the case specifics. I am an unbiased external observer interested in what’s going on in our industry. I should also point out that I have no fiscal or business relationship with the vendors mentioned in this article and no investments in any companies involved.

ON24 is a long-established major player in the webinar/webcast space. Its history stretches back to 1998, starting with streaming news content over the web and morphing to a DIY platform for hosting web events. The company went public roughly one year ago.

The stock price has not had the explosive growth that investors were hoping would mirror the financial success of Zoom. It briefly hit $81.98/share on opening day and has been on a downward trajectory ever since, now trading under $17/share.

This has spurred a class action lawsuit against the company alleging that “representations made in the registration statement and prospectus used to effectuate the Company's IPO were materially inaccurate, misleading, and/or incomplete because they failed to disclose, among other things, that the surge in COVID-19 customers observed in the lead up to the IPO consisted of a significant number that did not fit ON24's traditional customer profile, and, as a result, were significantly less likely to renew their contracts.”

I don’t really have anything to say about that. We’ll see what happens. My cynical side says that when the dust settles the lawyers will get richer and the common investor won’t see much benefit from the lawsuit either way.

I’m much more interested in a lawsuit that ON24 has filed against webinar.net (Yes, the latter is one of those company names that includes a period and no capital letter. It makes sentences look very strange).

Part of the suit claims that webinar.net infringed on a technical patent held by ON24. The rest of the suit alleges “intentional interference with contractual relations, unfair competition, and false advertising.”

Technical patents get challenged all the time in our high tech world. I’m pleasantly surprised to see a suit pitting first-party developers against each other rather than the usual “patent troll” harassment suits that are brought purely as a financial gambit.

The current stage in the rather standard process for such things is that webinar.net has challenged the validity of ON24’s patent. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board will do a review of the merit of the original patent itself and then decide whether the suit can proceed to look at whether webinar.net infringed it in their software code. These things tend to play out over a protracted timespan.

At issue is the user-controllable webinar console that I have praised on my blog in the past. ON24 originated a unique way for webinar attendees to have their own control over size, placement, and expanded/collapsed status of different content windows on their own screens. It effectively makes the entire webinar window work like a modern operating system GUI, where users can dynamically view whatever content pieces they want in any way they want.

I was so impressed with the design concept and execution that I wondered why other vendors weren’t going with the idea. It is instantly intuitive. Now I know why… ON24 patented it under US-9148480-B2: “Communication Console with Component Aggregation.” 

webinar.net started up in 2018 and introduced their software platform in November of 2019. The key executives had previous work experience with other companies in the industry, as might be expected. Most germane to the suit, co-founders Mike Nelson and Michael Henry both have LinkedIn profiles listing 11 years acting as Sales VPs at ON24 through the first decade of the 2000s. That makes the interference and competition parts of ON24’s suit more interesting. Could they have used previous familiarity and relationships with ON24 customers as an entry point to getting their new product into those companies? I have no idea and no insights into this part of the suit.

From a technical perspective, webinar.net certainly took the same conceptual approach as ON24 in creating a user-controllable webinar console. They let webinar administrators select which content pieces should be present as windows in the console. You might elect to show slides, webcam videos, public chat, private (moderated) Q&A, presenter bios, headshots, or something else. Then attendees can expand, collapse, resize, and move those content windows independently.

There is no question that the operational end result for users is similar in the two products. The question is whether the implementation in code violates a protected methodology. That’s not anything that we can see from the outside. If the Patent Office decides that the patent itself is valid, the investigation into the specifics of the coding will be quite a challenge.

There’s little else to report at this point. Things need to play out and we’ll see how all parts of the cases progress. I’ll try to check in from time to time with updates as I see them. I think it’s an interesting glimpse into a world where webinars are increasingly significant from a business and financial perspective.

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