The Webinar Blog

Is There Web Conferencing Outside America?

Of course there is, but sometimes you'd never know it given the single-minded emphasis on the US (and sometimes Canada, which gets treated as "America-north") in the media relations stuff coming out of the technology vendors. I was thinking about this because today I found a European-centric press release from WebEx picked up by an international portal site (Finextra.com). I think it's very important for the vendors to pursue the international market. Remote communications across boundaries are in their infancy, but the shrinking world view and multinational commerce makes them ever more important. Look at the entry I made about the president's State of the Union address. The State Department is going to make the speech available in eleven languages. Think they're doing that to support the importance of multilingual communications within the US? Not hardly, brother.

I have helped several clients with marketing and internal training webinars targeted at international audiences. One of the problems we often run into is how to effectively run the audio side of things. I still get a frustrating number of audio conference vendors who say that the people overseas can just dial a US number to join in. Nobody is going to pay for a one-hour call to America in order to hear a pitch! Audio vendors need to set up easier and more integrated networks of toll free or local numbers in major business and commerce centers around the world. VOIP (audio over the internet) is growing in acceptance, but still presents problems with areas that have slower or more congested networks and bandwidth, or typically work in open environments where computer sounds would be disruptive.

A vendor concentrating on these aspects to produce a smooth multinational communications experience is going to have a big leg up on the competition.

Nice Coup for Onstream Media

I see that Onstream Media got the Department of State contract to webcast the State of the Union Address tonight. That’s a chunk of online listenership! They are simulcasting in English, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Farsi, French, Russian and Spanish. Yow! Follow-on archive translations will be available in Portuguese, Swahili, Turkish, and Hausa. Hausa? What’s that? I had to look it up. With about 22 million native speakers and another 17 million second-language speakers, it is used across Western Africa, particularly in Nigeria and Niger. Huh... You learn something new every day. You can use the State Department main page to get access to the webcast in your preferred language.

Viral Marketing At Work

I've mentioned Seth Godin before as a dynamic speaker. I didn't mention his fierce advocacy of viral marketing and the value of growing your messaging and recognition through bottom-up groundswell instead of top-down acquisition methods. His latest cute branding of the concept is called "Flipping the Funnel" and he has written a very short eBook (okay... it's really an 18-page PDF article, but he wants to call it an eBook and why should I care?) under that title. It's available for free download from his blog.

Now I'd like to ask for your help in getting my messaging spread. I'm hoping you've found some good tips and suggestions in this blog so far. I plan to keep churning out news and information about webinars and effective web conferencing techniques. Help me get these pearls of wisdom to people who can use them. You know somebody who is involved in putting together webinars. Somebody in marketing, product management, sales, investor relations, public relations, corporate communications, training... The list is almost endless. Maybe inside your own company and maybe a friend or business colleague at another company.

I'd like you to email them the following link:
http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/

It's merely the main page of this blog. Don't tell them to hire me. Just tell them there is some free information on webinars they might find useful. I want to build my readership and get some comments coming in so we can get more interactive in this forum. If you want to use a pre-built email, I created some boilerplate you can use at this link. Clicking it will bring up an email in your standard email tool that you can send to an address or addresses of your choosing. At least it will on most systems. Some configurations might not support the format, in which case I apologize and ask you to go back to the manual approach.

Thanks for your help. Let's work together to make this blog a major interchange of ideas and experiences. I don't know of anywhere else on the web that is devoted to interactive discussions of web conferencing technology and techniques. This should be our communal playground.

Submitted As Exhibit A

This cracks me up. I was reading through this article by Louis Columbus on CRM Buyer and sure enough, he used WebEx as a generic verb.

- Populate roadmaps with products you can WebEx today showing integration.

A sure sign a company is solution selling with integrity is that they have reality-based roadmaps. Every application, whether licensed or hosted, can be demonstrated on WebEx, and the systems integrated with it can also be seen anywhere on the planet, anytime, through a simple WebEx window. That's impressive. It's solution selling and it's making many companies practicing this worthy of trust. Finally, prospects say to themselves, this is a vendor who "gets it" and shows me what is shipping.

I don't know if Mr. Columbus has an "association" with WebEx or if it's just an example of exactly what I was talking about in my Of Mouths And Money entry from yesterday. Synchronicity, baby!

The Podcast Debate Rages On

Wow. Lots of spirited discussion going on in a multi-blog roundtable about the subject of webinars vs. podcasts. I hit this subject on January 18 in my entry When Words Are All You Have. At the time, I hadn’t seen this January 11 entry by Brian Critchfield at BlueLine. His provocative article started a thread going at Church Of The Customer with Jackie Huba weighing in. That’s been picked up by the B2B Lead Generation Blog with commentary by Brian Carroll. If nothing else, this is a spectacular example of the pervasive nature of Internet blogging (and a clear view of the downside, since discussions are occurring in several places simultaneously with no good way to organize and manage them as a single thread).

The comments coming in are fascinating from many different perspectives. I came back to the whole thing because I was about to write an entry on live vs. archived webinars and how to use each more effectively. But I got sidetracked by the fracas and felt driven to contribute my two cents.

There is a lot of apples vs. oranges comparison going on in this discussion. One of the problems is the arbitrary nature of the coined terms that have come into use around the online communications media. Little did I know when I wrote my What’s In A Name entry how quickly it would come back to resonate. At the end of that piece, I suggested that the terminology wasn’t that important. I hereby change my opinion on the subject.

Webcasts and podcasts are the most similar terms and usages. They are one-way broadcasts of information and in practical use they tend to rely almost exclusively on audio content. If you sit at your computer and listen to the audio stream, you might call it a webcast (at least, this is what all the corporate investor relations groups are calling their quarterly earnings broadcasts). If you download the file onto a digital media player to take it with you later, you probably call it a podcast. There’s no difference from the source side. I contend that in these uses, the created products are completely interchangeable and neither is a great way to acquire new leads. Listeners are too passive and have to make an offline separate effort to contact you to follow up. Quality of anything you get is spectacular. Quantity will be in the dumps.

If you include imagery in your broadcast, I maintain that the computer is far and away the preferred platform. Adoption of portable video media players (like the newer video iPods) is still very limited. But beyond that, watching a 2.5” LCD screen for any amount of time is wearying and far too subject to external distractions. The argument about listening in your car while driving goes away. You’re left with your audio channel as the only reliable part of the communications bandwidth.

But a webinar should be a different beast. At least as used as a marketing vehicle to acquire leads, a webinar should be more interactive – including polls, Q&A, chat modes, feedback forms, and direct links to lead acquisition pages. It typically relies heavily on visual channels. These might be live video, PowerPoints, live product demonstrations, other types of application sharing, and so on.

I have read a number of comments about it being too hard to get people to attend your webinar, and that this is easier with a podcast because they can timeshift to attend at their leisure. I don’t buy the simplicity of the statement. Problems with acquiring leads occur everywhere from finding initial invitation lists to promoting the event to finding out who registered and who attended. The physical aspect of having the person sit down and listen to you is only one small piece of it. That’s why you should always record and make available your webinar for later access. Now you’ve overcome the objections of the podcast supporters. But not by magically turning a webinar into a podcast... You’re still creating a different media vehicle for a different purpose. You’re just letting people see it at their convenience. And that’s a lot different than saying webinars are history, podcasts are the only viable medium.

Of Mouths And Money

Yesterday a sales representative from WebEx sent me an email. Attached to the email was a marketing document entitled "Why WebEx: 7 Important Factors to Consider When Choosing an On-demand, Web Meeting Applications Company." At the end of his email was one of those signature blurbs with 22 bullets in bright blue listing the company's market penetration in various categories. Then he called me and enthusiastically ran through the salient differentiation points in the marketing document with facts and figures about their primacy in each category (naturally). I sat there, quietly listening with a smile growing ever wider on my face. Finally he came up for air and I asked him, "Did you just come back from a sales meeting?" He laughed and said yes, they had just had several hundred people brought together to hear the good word and get motivated about their products.

Let's pause for a moment. Where do you guess I am going with this piece? Am I going to disparage him and the company? Am I going to challenge their claims? Am I going to mock his enthusiasm? Am I going to promote them and tell you to buy the software? Nope. None of the above. I'm going to talk about all the things WebEx is doing right with their sales and marketing programs and why their competitors better get on the ball. Forget about the software, services, and support for a minute.

This was an example of an extremely effective sales and marketing program being supported across the board and I loved it. These guys had been properly supplied with pitches, angles, and facts. The company provided backup documentation and research. The salesmen were told to spread the word and this guy sounded like he BELIEVED it and loved the product, loved the company, and wanted me to be able to share the sheer joy of their offerings. I was thinking of the great scene in "Boiler Room" where Giovanni Ribisi gets a call from a bored telemarketer reading a script to sell him a newspaper subscription and lambastes him for his lack of salesmanship and drive, then steps him through a power sales call. My contact needed no such prompting.

WebEx spends more money and effort on their promotion and marketing than any other web conferencing vendor. Okay, that sentence is not literally correct, since Microsoft spends more as a vendor, but not on their Live Meeting product. I took a look at the last WebEx annual report, covering activities to the end of calendar 2004. Their sales and marketing expenditures for the preceding three years were on a steady rise from $58 million to $74.2 million to $84.2 million. And I know they made a big advertising push in 2005, so it wouldn't surprise me to see another healthy jump for last year's budget. If you go to Google and enter almost any search phrase you can think of pertaining to web conferencing or webinars, WebEx will come up with a paid sponsorship position. If you go to a portal site or general technology page talking about the web conferencing, you will probably see a WebEx click-thru banner advertisement (except on Webinar Success, which doesn't accept vendor advertising). And just from a personal perspective, they are the only vendor who regularly calls me to keep me informed of company news and product updates, even though I have contacts at all of the big guys.

If this keeps up, they are going to turn themselves into the de facto synonym for web conferencing. It will be like people saying they need to Xerox a document or get a Kleenex to blow their nose. Share of market perception and recognition (as opposed to volume market share) is a massive, powerful force in business. Raindance and Microsoft better take a long, hard look at what's going on in the public marketplace or they are going to find themselves the Betamaxes of the web conferencing world, where debates on quality and features may turn out to be less important than convergence upon a single recognized technology.

So good for you, WebEx. You have truly put your money where your mouth is and I respect that. However, this in no way absolves you from the need to keep enhancing features in your software until I am completely and 100% satisfied that every aspect of functionality is perfect. And that hasn't happened yet with ANY webinar software!

(And for my readers, here are the standard disclaimers... I don't own any stock in WebEx or any web conferencing company. I don't have any co-marketing or reselling arrangements with WebEx or any other webinar technology vendors. My opinions are my own and are never meant to influence investment decisions.)

Starting On The Right Foot

At the start of almost every public web conference, webinar, or webcast you will hear a voice welcoming you, giving some basic information about how to interact with the audience console and introducing the speakers. This voice almost always belongs to an employee of the vendor supplying the web conferencing software. They do it day after day, for dozens or hundreds of clients. And they are almost always TERRIBLE!

As a professional speaker and trainer of speakers, I shudder at the damage these people do before the first presenter ever has a chance to start talking and before the first slide is shown. It's not unrecoverable and most audience members don't really consciously note it or remember it, but it's real damage nonetheless. Your audience members are leery of spending their valuable time on your webinar. They are making decisions every second as to whether they should stay with you or sign off to do something else. They are juggling their attention between your webcast, their email, random Blackberry messages, people coming into their office, and a desire for a fresh cup of coffee. They are not bought in to your message and not sure whether they should trust you. Pretty daunting uphill battle for you, isn't it? So what is your opening salvo in this war? What is the first thing they hear? Typically it is a bored voice, unnamed, with poor diction, obviously reading from a script that ungrammatically mashes the title of your presentation, Mad Libs style, into a slot where it doesn’t fit. Then they proceed to give instructions for everything that might possibly happen anywhere during the proceedings, including listing full 10-digit telephone numbers for calling tech support. Oy. Do you think TV tapings set up their audiences with warm-up acts like that?

Do yourself a favor. Get ahold of the intro script from the vendor. Yes, they will give it to you. Edit it to remove ALL extraneous filler, welcomes from the vendor, and instructions that don't pertain to your meeting or that you can give later in the event when they are needed. Change the sentence announcing what the event is so it sounds conversational (usually this means NOT using the formal title you promoted the event under in the invitations). If you have somebody on your staff who speaks well on the telephone, get THEM to read the intro and do not rely on the "highly professional trained staff" the vendor offers. If you aren't sure about any of this, hire me to do it for you. I'll do just that one tiny portion of work for you as a one-off for a ridiculously low rate. Just to get you started on the right foot. You'll get something that sounds like a human being talking to your audience and primes them for a quality event. Give your presenters a break... they have a tough enough act as it is.

I'm offering this as a loss leader. Maybe you'll like what I can do for your webinars and find that I'm easy to work with and know what I'm talking about. I have other associated services. You can take me up on this and walk, or ask me to help out in a few other areas. Unlike most web conference service companies, Webinar Success never ties you to a bundled package of contracted services. Everything is a la carte and you pay only for what you need. Services are covered on the website of course. But this is a special mini-service I decided to offer just to rub the vendors' noses in how poorly they are assisting their clients. Let's at least get your event started on an up note.

Here’s Looking At You, Kid

Many web conferencing vendors allow you to display a live image of presenters on the audience's console during a webinar. Cute technology. Don't do it.

Okay, gauntlet flung. Now I can dig in to the topic a bit. Sure, you can use this feature if you are having an interdepartmental brainstorming session or business meeting with people you know. But don't use it for general webcasting of investor relations calls, marketing pitches, or introductory business sessions.

The short reason why can be summed up in a single well-known example. The 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential debates. For the whippersnappers in our audience who don't know the story, read this short summary. It's important and it won't take you much time. People who listened on radio came away with the impression that Nixon had clearly won the debate. 70 million television viewers said exactly the opposite.

When you video broadcast your talking head, are you ready to set up proper lighting? Use makeup to cover small blemishes and reduce glare? Create a professional non-distracting background? Keep the camera angle perfectly aligned so it doesn't shoot into your nostrils or off your gleaming forehead? Stay dead still so you don't move out of frame, out of focus, or weave back and forth giving your audience vertigo? Keep from blinking your eyes too much? If you think any of these items is trivial or shouldn't matter, you aren't ready to use video as a professional tool.

Let's say you do all of those things (and for all practical purposes, you CAN'T... not without a professional studio and experienced technicians). You now have to worry about how you look with your headset on or your phone held to your ear. Fairly silly is the answer. Then you are probably going to see your own image on the monitor. For some reason, most of the vendors don't have a way to turn this off for the speaker. Bad idea... you will start focusing on your image, trying to center your head and moving the wrong way, and losing track of your topic. (Tip: If you find yourself backed into a corner with this problem, use a post-it note to cover the image on the screen so you can't see yourself.)

Now we move to the ways that various vendors deal with multiple presenters for a webcast. Some use "follow the speaker" technology that automatically presents the head of the current speaker. If you get into a Q&A session with multiple comments, the image can flip between people so much that it causes nausea. Some vendors use multiple heads all presented in a row. This always reminds me of early music videos by the rock group Queen. An itty bitty corner of a computer monitor is no place for multiple talking heads.

The chief argument in favor of the talking heads (I know... I know... "Is that they have really great music." Just let the joke go.) is that your audience is more interested and involved when they can see who is speaking. This is literally true. Just not in the way you want. They are interested in poring over details of your face, your office, and your expressions and they are involved in deciding whether you look trustworthy or too young or too old or like their first boyfriend or something. They are NOT interested and involved in your subject material anymore.

If you feel you need video for your web conference, spend the money and book a professional video studio with professional cameramen. Otherwise leave off the video. Webcams are toys, not business tools.

The Price Is Right/Wrong/Indeterminable

Time for a Dennis Miller style rant today. The pricing of web conferencing and associated audio conferencing is insane and somebody has got to figure out a better strategy. I'm not talking about prices being too high... Heck, we all want more for less. And honestly, if you shop around there are some extremely reasonable rates available. No, I'm talking about the pricing methodology employed by most of the vendors.

When I work with clients who are just getting their feet wet with web conferencing, one of the first things they ask me is "How much will it cost?" And you know what? I have no idea! That's because the vendors have no idea. Most of the major vendors price on a per-seat basis, which is similar to banquet caterers pricing a hosted dinner based on the number of people served. All fine and well, except that a public webinar with open registration (typically used for general marketing purposes) doesn't have a set number of attendees. You promote the heck out of it and hope you get a large number of registrants. Then you hope that a significant percentage of them actually show up. If you are wondering, attendance rates these days are averaging somewhere around 30% of registration numbers. And some of your attendees will drop out after a short time.

Some web conferencing providers will charge you x amount per registrant, plus n amount per attendee with a minimum number of each committed to as a base rate. Then you pay an "overage" fee for each registrant or attendee over your basic commitment. If you commit to more people in your base, your price per person drops. This makes you play a guessing game as to how many people you are likely to get, raising your base commitment to reduce your overage charges. I hate this kind of gambling.

Then we get the even more fascinating pricing of associated audio for your event. If you use Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – that means sound coming out of the attendees' computer speakers – the pricing is usually flat rate per person. But if you are using telephone lines, watch out! You will pay different rates based on the types of services you use. Operator-assisted costs more than automated connection. Private audio areas for the speakers (often known as "green room" from the television industry's name for a guest waiting area) cost extra. Toll free numbers for in-state, US-wide, and North America are different. And then we get into the exciting area of international events. This is where it truly gets crazy. If you want to market to an international audience, you need to remove barriers to attendance. This means giving them local toll free numbers to dial into. Few people in Finland want to pay for a one-hour call to the US to hear you pitch your product. Most audio conferencing companies ask you to identify every country you will get calls from, estimate how many people will call from that country, and then quote you a per-person rate for that country. Forget reliable pre-event cost estimates... it's a complete roll of the dice. I did find one audio company that was willing to quote a reasonable flat rate for calls coming in from ANY European country with no pre-estimates needed and established toll-free numbers for all the countries. That was a major discovery I am proud of.

There are other means of pricing that involve campaign pricing (a bundled fee for multiple events), package pricing for a single event, and unlimited use contracts for large monthly fees (typically only appropriate for very large companies doing many events). And a few vendors sell their software and hardware outright so you can do what you want with it. I have also been successful at getting some vendors to work a "loss leader" deal that package-prices an event purely as a way to steal business from their competition. These guys have a lot of wiggle room in their quoted prices, and it's worth some negotiations to try to work a better deal. Resellers will sometimes undercut the main vendor on the pricing, taking a smaller percentage markup over the base wholesale cost in order to get the business.

It's a mess and a muddle and a headache for event managers trying to work out a real budget for their bosses to approve. Some vendor is eventually going to figure out a better pricing strategy that fixes costs or makes them understandable without an advanced mathematics degree and they are going to find themselves very attractive to the market!

Who Rates Among The Best?

There are a few people working the fringes of Corporate America who are so insanely good at public presentations that you ignore them at your peril. I recently located blogs from two of the best.

Guy Kawasaki single-handedly invented the job title of "product evangelist" in the early heady marketing-driven days of Apple Computers. He stood the high-tech marketing world on its ear by popularizing a combination of buzz and showmanship backed up with deep subject knowledge as a way to build consumer interest. He only started his blog within the last month and I'm tremendously excited. Already his entries have had spectacular tips and advice for anybody who is responsible for public speaking and company/product promotion. You can get to his blog through this link.

My other featured blog is from Seth Godin. Seth is a fascinating guy who concentrates on unconventional approaches to marketing. He doesn't spend a lot of time on the techniques of presentation and speaking (although, like Guy, he is passionate about reducing the amount of text clutter on PowerPoint presentations), but he is so good at it that you need to follow him just to see if he's given out any jewels of wisdom lately. In the meantime, you will get plenty of controversial views on how to promote your company/products/services by flouting standard practices and building a popular base of support. I have met Seth at a couple of conferences, but we are not buddies. I just like his stuff. You can get to Seth's blog through this link.

If you are a large corporate client with some money to throw at a webinar and you want to feature a tremendous guest speaker who brings enthusiasm, credibility, and name recognition to your event... both these guys do speaking gigs. Neither of them knows me (other than Seth having seen and forgotten me) and neither has solicited a recommendation in this space. They are probably expensive... I have no idea. But whatever they charge, they're worth it.