The Webinar Blog

A Taxing Problem

USA Today ran an opinion piece today talking about taxes on business travelers. This has potential implications for the webcasting industry in two key ways. The first is simply an extension of one of the key arguments for web conferencing since the start of the technology... Traveling for business is expensive and odious and should be avoided when possible. You don't need me to go over the laundry list of negatives to business travel. But let's add additional costs now for local and state taxes applied to doing business outside of your headquartered location.

The second issue this raises is much more worrisome for the webcasting industry. It showcases an inexorably growing grab for unjustifiable tax revenues by states looking to cash in on internet commerce. Let's say you put on a fee-based web conference and have registrants from around the country. It's entirely possible that state governments will start requiring you to keep records of where each registrant is from and pay sales taxes to that state because your revenue came from there. Of course you get zero benefit from those tax dollars, you enjoy no public services, and you have no representative voting rights in how those monies are used. The additional record keeping, paperwork, and profit diminishment could easily be the difference between financial success and failure associated with this business channel.

It is incumbent on all of us to watch for interstate tax creep and to fight it wherever we see it being broached by state legislatures.

Sucking Up As A Business Strategy

Sung to the tune of Duke Ellington's "A-Train":

You must bribe the "A"-List
To get your URL put in their blogroll
If you bore the "A"-List
You'll find you have no readers for your writing
Hurry - bring them gifts and praises
Lavish them with loving gazes (Oh Lord!)
Suck up to the "A"-List
Soon you will have a listing in their blogroll

Wondering what the heck that is all about? I'm responding to a post in Guy Kawasaki's blog about sucking up to the “A-List” of well known, well read, and well linked bloggers in order to get a mention in their blog that can boost your links and public awareness. This subject has been bandied about quite a bit in recent months, with some suggesting that there is no room for new, struggling blogs to develop a readership because everybody is bookmarked to just their few favorite names.

Now I would like to be known as the A-List blogger about webinars, webcasts, and web conferencing. As far as I know, nobody else on the web has a blog concentrating solely on this field. I write about the vendors, I write about news developments, I write about tips for using the technology more effectively. But I find it as hard as anybody to develop that critical public awareness. Thus you see occasional links where I put in references to blog utilities and other blogs.

We have to do much the same thing when publicizing a public web event. I have a client right now trying to do an initial public awareness webinar for the general consumer community. He has a mortgage product that could be great for anybody buying or refinancing a home. Heck, even if you weren't thinking of refinancing, you might after you see this concept! But how do you let people know about a subject they might not be actively looking for? He can't afford to send emails or direct mails to everybody on the West Coast of America (his area of coverage).

This is where web blogs, search marketing, and sponsored links come in to play. I'm helping him come up with a strategy to get the word out, and I'll be referring back to this blog entry when we go to full registration. In the meantime, I have effectively peppered some search engines with the fact that I'm talking about mortgages and refinancing just by mentioning them here. A few readers might even be intrigued enough by this teaser to write and ask for more information.

Don't overlook the power of viral marketing to help with single-event publicity. It should be a regular weapon in your overall arsenal.

In the meantime, do me a favor and help spread the news about this blog. Send somebody a link. Or tell Guy Kawasaki to mention me in his blog!

Integrated Collaboration – Who Will Win?

Jonathan Katz writes in the online edition of Industry Week about the convergence of conferencing solutions. I talked a little about this recently in reviewing this week's announcement of cooperation between AOL and WebEx. The smart money says that only three major players have the oomph at the moment to make this convergence work. AOL through its lower-end market dominance and ubiquitous AOL Instant Messenger is in the game as we have seen. Microsoft is putting a lot of development power behind its Office Live solution suite (as mentioned in my entry Something's In The Air). And IBM keeps trying to figure out how to integrate its acquisition-fed mishmash of Lotus Sametime, Domino, Workplace, WebSphere, etc. to create a unified enterprise solution. I could see Google, Yahoo, or MSN getting peripherally involved in this space, but they don't have any real collaboration power right now, so we'd need to see some more mergers and acquisitions before they would be contenders.

A few web conferencing companies have pursued the integrated collaboration arena as their niche. SiteScape offers an entire set of tools to help employees integrate web conferencing with document management and workflow. I haven't seen anybody else competing on that particular combination of specialties. Groove Networks meshes internal web meetings with file sharing, meeting and project management, data and process sharing, calendaring, and messaging.

This is a huge application area just waiting to be tapped. It's going to be interesting to watch developments over the next few years.

Web Conferencing – The Series

I saw this press release from CRMXchange today. They point out that they are seeing a marked increase in companies putting on an integrated series of webinars, rather than single one-time events. I agree with their perception. Many of my clients organize training, education, or marketing topics around a group of webinars instead of a single webcast. Putting together a series has a number of advantages. If a participant can't make one of the events, s/he can try for another one. You can grow familiarity and trust with your audience over time, rather than having to do a hard sell in a single shot. You can dedicate time to serious coverage of a topic, rather than hitting high-level bullet points about a lot of things at once. And you get an indication of people with high interest level in your subject simply by looking at how many events they signed up for and attended. You can also usually simplify and speed the registration process by allowing people to sign up for several events at once.

Some companies schedule a regular weekly day and time for their webinars and adhere to it for consistency. I prefer to shake things up and try different days and times. You may have picked the same time as someone's weekly staff meeting, or their regular lunch hour, or their time for rounds. Who knows? Give yourself the opportunity to catch them at another time more convenient for their schedule. If you have the potential for international attendees, make sure to consider their time zones and see if you can throw in something more comfortable for other locales. I see that CRMXchange puts a link on their webinar listing page to my favorite online time calculation utility: TimeAndDate.com. This site is indispensable for figuring out local times anywhere in the world. If you go to their Fixed Time World Clock page, you can enter the date and time of your event and produce a quick reference guide with local times for attendees anywhere in the world. People appreciate not having to do the conversion themselves.

WebEx In India

More WebEx news. I apologize for that. This blog is not intended to concentrate on any one vendor. I worry that I've been mentioning WebEx too much in recent entries. But honestly, they are the ones pumping out news lately, and I report what I see. I'd really appreciate it if some of the other web conferencing technology vendors would give me a substantial story to comment on.

But back to our entry… I have an interest in how webinar technology is doing around the world. Many of my clients target international audiences, and the overwhelming concentration on the North American market by the vendors here sometimes makes that global access frustrating.

Today I tripped across this story about WebEx Communications India (I didn't even know they had an Indian subsidiary!). According to the story, WebEx added 432 Indian customers in 2005, for an annual customer growth rate of more than 33 percent. It says WebEx now counts around 1700 Indian customers in its portfolio, with a market presence of just three years there. It sounds impressive to me. I have to believe that the vendor that gets its software established and accepted in the major computer-literate countries of the world is going to have a massive advantage in the multinational business arena. When putting on a webinar, the less you have to introduce and explain to your audience, the better your chances for success. I wonder how the other vendors are doing in pursuing international market share?

Sure, It's Nice... But Is It Art?

I've been going back and forth on deciding whether to include the recent WebEx/AOL partnership story on my Webinar Success industry news page and whether to bring it up in this blog. Is the news about web conferencing? It's a little hard to tell at this point. Although the story got picked up by a surprisingly large number of online news portals, the details are pretty sketchy and this is just a "statement of direction" announcement. As far as I can tell from the press, this is really a venture to spice up AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) service with a fancier front-end, while offering some abilities to share slides and do some other primitive webcasting through the AIM interface. I don't know if I count that as real web conferencing (it certainly doesn't seem to fit the model for interactive one-to-many webinars). WebEx must not see it as a competitor to its full-featured enterprise technology either, since they wouldn't do anything to harm that market. So this is a niche application that may get more people comfortable with the concept of using the internet to share information. AOL likes it because it gives them an entry into the big-money enterprise business market. WebEx likes it because it gives them an entry into the much larger consumer and small/home business market.

So far, the use of Instant Messenger services as a launching pad for webcasts and web conferences has been fairly weak and mostly ignored. It will be interesting to see if this latest venture changes that picture at all.

Welcome, BlogBurst Readers!

I would like to greet my new readers courtesy of BlogBurst. This service syndicates selected blogs by invitation, publishing them on various electronic portals and internet editions of major periodicals. I am proud to have been selected as a blogger for this new channel.

As a quick overview, I exclusively cover technology, topics, and tips related to web conferencing (aka: webinars, webcasts, web meetings, etc). I try very hard to keep my entries timely and updated at least once a day. If you have a subject you would like to see covered, please feel free to leave me a private message or public comment.

Do take a moment to scan through the blog archives. There's lots of stuff in there already, and you may find something helpful!

A Shot Of Adrenalin

I saw a news story today about a new venture called Adrenaline Nation Television. The idea seems to be another attempt to bring underexposed music videos to the public (now that MTV and VH1 have morphed into standard programming content TV stations). They have obviously set themselves up to have a hip, edgy website for the broadband-connected youth market.

I was intrigued, since they are talking about how they webcast their content. The "station" has only been on the air for 10 days, so I didn't expect too much, but I have to say I was surprised at the paucity of content. There are dozens of stubs for blogs about various music subjects, but none contain any entries. The shows are simple streaming video feeds. I couldn’t find feedback channels for their audience to participate in the action. In short, they weren't taking advantage of the unique nature of the Internet for boosting collaborative participation.

A while back, I wrote about how webcasts weren’t being applied to the entertainment field. Here's an excellent opportunity. Show a webcast of a new music video and then let viewers ask questions of the band, submit polling answers to give their opinions, and generally get them involved. An Internet TV channel should be able to do more than a televised TV channel. I hope these guys see the possibilities and start expanding their offerings to get the fans connected. It could be a real shot of adrenalin for the entire web-based communications industry.

Something's In The Air

Something's going on over at the Microsoft Live Meeting camp. I've seen some unsubstantiated messages on other companies' stock message boards and I've done a little bit of digging myself. Keep an eye open for developments. Microsoft could be finally be pulling in the reins on the Placeware operation they bought in Mountain View, CA and bringing control a lot more tightly under the corporate belt in Redmond. Could this have anything to do with the publicity push we're starting to see from Microsoft surrounding their Office Live product suite, including collaboration? I wouldn't bet against it. In the meantime, I can't get to the Microsoft Office Live website as I write this. Their server is down. Not a very good sign for an entire product offering built around web accessibility!

Stay tuned...

The Party Of The First Part...

It seems to me that this conference must be important to both vendors of webcasting technology and users of the software. It's especially timely given my last entry about the struggle for ownership and usage rights of a webcast being fought (rather unilaterally) by SYS-CON.

Reading through the proposed treaty text is the usual exercise in frustration, since the whole thing is written in international legalspeak. I am rather fond of their formal umbrella term for recorded broadcasts, which is "phonogram." It sounds so charmingly old-fashioned! I'm now waiting for a company to invite prospects to "an old-tyme country phonogram, featuring product demos, animated slides, and remote presenters live via streaming video. Just like grampa used to put on for Veterans Day!"

The proposed treaty declaration jumps right into the fray with an argument over how to define the term "broadcasting" for use in international law. One camp wants it restricted to wireless signals only. So they have defined "cablecasting" as using information over a wire. This strikes me as ludicrous on the face of it, since broadcast seems by definition to talk about content distributed broadly and does not mention a medium in the word, while "cablecasting" is entirely wrapped up in the medium. Isn't a cablecast one type of broadcast? Then they go and say a cablecast doesn't include information transmitted over computer cables. Yeesh... It gets worse and worse.

They are staying on safe ground by explicitly stating that the treaty refers to rights surrounding the signal itself as a container of content. They are not doing anything to affect normal copyright and content ownership laws.

Article 6 is where it starts getting interesting. This is effectively trying to widen the scope of protection for organizations that send out a signal containing some specific content. Sports fans will recognize it as that phrase they hear every time they watch a game on TV: "...no rebroadcast is permitted without the express written permission of the league..." The treaty is trying to make sure that computer distribution is covered. (This would probably not help SYS-CON in their argument, since CMP just put a link to the SYS-CON broadcast rather than retransmitting it themselves on their own domain.)

Articles 7, 8, and 9 play with specific extensions of the rebroadcast rights. Then in Article 10, we find the piece that would help SYS-CON: An organization has the rights to authorize or restrict distribution of its own content in its own form, whether somebody tries to hawk the original or a copy. So others can't decide to simply make it available as they wish. Watch out, CMP!

Those are the big pieces for me. There is a lot more content in the document, but it's mostly mechanics and special case definitions that aren't as sweeping in impact.

I'm no lawyer (as you'll see from my tortured simplifications of the long-winded definitions in the document), but I can spot serious legal impacts when they are so beautifully tied in with a real-world case. And I'm happy to see they are making the meeting available via live webcast. I just hope they can figure out who has the rights to the broadcast... cablecast... webcast... whatever.