The Webinar Blog

Webinar Piracy

Yow. SYS-CON Media throws down the gauntlet publicly and accuses CMP of content piracy!

Seldom do you see such a clearly worded and unambiguous journalistic diatribe against a competitor. Of course I'm interested because the valuable content in question is a recorded webinar that was provided with free, no registration, anonymous access by SYS-CON. CMP seems to have picked up this content and advertised it with a misleading link suffix indicating that it is a PDF document and then requiring a registration to view it that can be used by CMP for lead generation. Pretty shady dealings, considering that the two companies are direct competitors in the publishing world.

I have to concur with the statement in the SYS-CON article (which gets progressively more strident as it lays out the facts supporting its position) that "every corporate website and every media company must now provide video content to remain competitive, not to mention live and interactive video Webinars and on-demand Webcasts." If you're not participating in this communications medium, you're neglecting important channels your customers and prospects expect of you.

But if you plan to make content available, perhaps it's best to use your own...

Be Our Guest

Holy freakin' heck! (I try to keep things clean for the business world)

This column from New Zealand's National Business Review should give readers pause. Francis Till points out that ICANN - the international body responsible for IP addresses, domain names, and most of the rest of the mechanics that keep the internet organized internationally – is holding a major meeting in New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. It turns out only four of the hotels chosen as officially-sanctioned delegate lodging have broadband access at all. And the ones that do have it tend to charge on the order of NZ$30 per day (more than US$20).

Think about that the next time you complain about internet access at your New York high-rise.

Business convention planners have a real impact on prices and conditions at major hotels. They need to step up and start using some of that power. ICANN should certainly not pick a city and hotels that can't or won't support serious internet access for their members. And they need to let the city government, the convention and visitor's bureau, and the hotel chains know exactly why they are going somewhere else.

I would urge individual readers to do the same. When making a booking, inquire about internet broadband access availability and price. The simple act of making the request, repeated in large enough numbers, will influence the hotel's decisions about what it needs to do in order to be competitive. If you have the option and other factors allow it, don't patronize places that don't provide broadband access or overcharge for it. We need to speak with our wallets in order to be heard.

My Valentine

I’ve posted some negative entries lately. Bad examples are a powerful descriptor and I’ll be the first to admit that picking holes in other people’s work is easier and more entertaining than doing it right yourself. I’m not a professional critic and sometimes I take the easy way out when making fun of something that doesn’t work right. When I’m working with a client, my philosophy is not to criticize what is wrong, but to focus on all the things that need to be accomplished in order to make sure that everything will be right.

So today, with love in the air, let me write a Valentine to the things in the industry that I like:

1) Fellow independent trackers of webinar technology, Robin Good and David Woolley. Yes, today I will give full props to the competition and say that both of these guys have very valuable resources and a demonstrated understanding of the industry and the players. Robin works out of Italy and has a unique focus on international aspects of web collaboration that I find refreshing and educational. David is based in Minneapolis and has a spectacular online compendium of online communication and collaboration tools. He has great insight into the “smaller size” vendors and cost-effective technologies for small business owners and individuals. I tend to work more frequently with big enterprise clients and technologies, so I make reference to his site to stay updated on the plethora of additional tools on the market.

2) The growth of support for PowerPoint animations and slide transitions in online presentation sharing. I hate having to turn dynamic slides into static ones so we can show them in a webinar. More and more vendors now support PowerPoint dynamics. Thank you.

3) WebEx’s incredible marketing drive. This company has really driven up public awareness of the technology and its usefulness. I realize this isn’t altruistic on their part, but I’m glad they decided to really dedicate some hard dollars on advertising, marketing, and coordinated messaging.

4) The audience feedback panel in Microsoft Live Meeting. Originally invented by Placeware before the acquisition, this is still the finest presenter feedback display around.

5) iLinc’s configurable authority and feature access for up to eight levels of administrators, presenters, assistants, moderators, and so on. I love having that much control over my presentation environment!

6) The WebEx recording editor. It’s not perfect, but it is the only tool even attempting to give post-event manipulation capabilities to the client. And it’s free!

7) Vcall's ability to support multiple responses and type-in answers on polling questions.

8) KRM Information Services’ unique concentration on audio quality by supplying presenters with headsets as part of their package and by maintaining a professional audio mixing/sweetening studio at their headquarters to improve the audible part of the presentation.

9) The friendly folks at Encounter Collaborative who were willing to quote my client flat-rate international phone access, simplifying budgeting and expense calculations.

10) Readers who pass along my blog to their coworkers and friends. My stats show that my readership is growing every week. Thank you. I’m glad you are finding it useful or educational or controversial or something.

And ten is enough for now. This has already grown into an alarmingly long piece. I think I hear the Academy Award Orchestra playing me off stage. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Genie, Grant Me These Wishes

This one goes out to all the webinar technology vendors out there. You didn't ask, but here is a list of features I want in my ideal web conferencing software. I've seen many of these sprinkled around in various systems, but I haven't seen enough of them in any one product. This set of features concentrates on the needs of marketing presentations given to large groups of people, usually involving lots of slides. Training uses and in-house collaborative meetings are a different subject area.

1) Support the full set of PowerPoint animations and slide transitions.

2) If notes are present in a PowerPoint presentation, display them to the presenter as each slide is presented.

3) Allow immediate self-service upload/availability of presentations or slides without requiring an offline conversion process by the webinar vendor.

4) Allow uploading and addition/replacement of a single slide in an existing presentation deck. This allows fast last-minute changes without forcing a reload of the entire presentation.

5) Allow upload of multiple slide presentations to a single meeting room, with fast and easy switching capabilities between presentations.

6) Allow multiple presenters to advance and annotate their slides without requiring passing of control from one to the next. It adds technical training requirements that guest presenters should not have to worry about.

7) Allow a "guest presenter" option that hides all presenter controls other than slide movement and annotations.

8) Eliminate the "laser pointer" dot for slide annotation. At the least, don't make it the darned default! It never displays smoothly on audience screens and is a nervous crutch for novice presenters.

9a) Give me a mode toggle when annotating slides that sets new annotations to either replace existing ones or add to existing ones. I often want to call attention to one thing, then erase it and put a marker somewhere else. This takes too many steps and too much concentration now.

9b) Let me drag and drop an existing annotation on a slide to a new location. Another way of accomplishing the above task. I could just slide my arrow marker to point the audience at my next bullet.

10) Allow easy single-click erasing of all annotations. Don't hide this under a submenu and don't put up a confirmation window! When I'm presenting, the last thing I want to do is read popup windows and interact with them.

11) Allow easy right-click interaction with individual annotations. If I point at an existing annotation and right-click, I should get a standard edit menu allowing me to cut, copy, paste, and delete that annotation.

12) Let me display poll results to my audience in percentages without letting them see raw numbers of votes. If I have a small audience, I would prefer not to advertise the fact.

13) Let audience members set a feedback indicator and let me see the entire room at a glance. Microsoft Live Meeting does this perfectly. You can see seat colors throughout the room, giving an instant indication if something is wrong, if you need to speak up, etc. However, this display must be viewable for presenters only... not the audience. Oh, and Microsoft? Cultural psychology in the Western world dictates that red is the color associated with trouble. Fix your default associations.

14) Presenters should be able to see who is in the audience without letting audience members see the list.

15) Allow presenters to set priority levels or other indicators on queued questions that have been typed in by the audience. This lets moderators know which questions to select for asking during the public Q&A session.

16) Allow presenters to selectably answer typed-in audience questions with a private answer to the questioner or public display of the question and answer.

17) Allow audience members to have more than one question in the type-in queue at a time.

18) Allow multiple choice polling with multiple responses per respondent ("Click all that apply").

19) Create a default feedback form template like the one mentioned in my entry Creating A Feedback Loop.

20) Support synchronized viewing of media files so everyone is finished at the same time and ready to continue with program content.

21) Allow multiple modes of web page sharing: Presenter interaction only (audience can't affect display); Presenter resynchronization (audience members can interact with their page, but Presenter actions force display back to a synchronized mode); and Full audience interactivity.

22) Allow application sharing by named application, full desktop, or configurable screen region (a sharing frame on the presenter's desktop).

Security Vulnerability In Webinar Software

Here's an interesting advisory from Secunia, a European firm that monitors security risks in commercial software applications. One of their contributors reports that it is possible for hackers to insert a string of HTML script code into a web conference title in WiredRed's e/pop software so that when it is displayed in a user's browser, the script could be triggered.

Secunia labels this a fairly low-risk problem and I would have to agree. It seems like a convoluted way to deliver your virus. But it's interesting that somebody was thinking in those terms and decided to check it out in a web conferencing product. We don't see e/pop much in North America, but I wonder whether the corresponding commonly used programs here in The Colonies have built in filters to forestall this possibility? I've never heard the subject mentioned by a vendor.

It Certainly Impressed Me

Wow. I watched a web conferencing vendor's public webinar yesterday promoting a new product offering of theirs. I have decided to be nice and not name them publicly because I happen to know their software is better than the rest of this entry is going to make it sound. Their webinar was almost a picture-perfect example of how to screw up everything at once. No honestly... it was terrible and should have convinced any attendees never to use their services. It began with the pre-conference hold music, which I can't remember the specifics of, but I remember thinking: "This doesn't sound appropriate for a business to business professional sales presentation."

When the call started, there were immediate audio glitches. We heard the tail end of the operator's instructions to the speakers in the pre-call session. Then we heard long dead space. Then some fumbling and poor diction on the intro speech.

Then the moderator went through company information and agenda slides, doing nothing more than reading the bullet points verbatim.

The company presented polls without ever indicating how the audience could benefit from the information being collected. This is an old pet peeve of mine... Your audience is not made up of test subjects for your benefit. At least not in their minds. You have to spin the polls for them.

Then we launched into immediate technical difficulties with the software itself. It stopped displaying slides to the audience. They were obviously working furiously behind the scenes, as my display shifted once to another slide, then stuck there through most of the rest of the session.

I sent in a couple of typed Q&A comments and received no acknowledgement of my entry.

One of the main presenters – a manager within the company – definitely needed speaker training. Lots of "um" fillers and an inability to sound spontaneous and interested in the subject. He also couldn't adjust to the fact that the audience wasn't seeing the slides. He would make verbal references to columns and positions of items on a graphic only he could see.

Later when the slides started working again, they used screen capture snapshots that were too small to read, even after I expanded the slide to its maximum possible size.

During the Q&A session, I amused myself by saying the moderator's insincere lines before she did after each answer. "Great! Really good question! That's excellent!"

To find more information on the subject, audience members were given an email address verbally, unsupported by a visual reminder. And although this was for a new product launch, the company website was uncoordinated with the timing of the webinar and there is no information available for the product online.

I'm sure they won't archive this one, which is a pity. I could use it as an example case study for why you need proper planning, rehearsal, and experienced assistance if you want to make your webinars beneficial for your company instead of detrimental. The fact that it was a major vendor failing in all these areas is doubly sad. People sometimes ask me why they should pay Webinar Success for services when many vendors offer it as a bundle with their software. If only I could point in the direction of this seminar. Webinar technology vendors are in the business of making software. I'm in the business of helping you use that software effectively, which is a different concentration entirely.

Another Resource For What's Web-Worthy

I got a nice mention in David Strom's Web Informant blog, which means a lot to me. David is a long-time technical journalist who has been mass-distributing articles on technology since 1995 (by email, natch, since there were no blogs then). He writes well, understands what's important in the internet-connected world, and keeps his blog up to date. I have used his short-form reference page for Web-based Conferencing Services in the past, although he professed lately to being overwhelmed by the sheer volatility of the market and turned over the reins to others. I can heartily recommend adding David to your blog reading lists.

Who's The Fairest One Of All?

Thanks to The Uber-Review for this wonderful wacky innovation from Japan. Yes, it's a webcam that makes you look better onscreen! How does it perform this magic, I hear you ask? Apparently by making the image brighter. Wow. Regular readers know my opinion of using cheap home webcams as part of a webinar broadcast. Don't do it. But if you feel you must play with webcams, here’s another must-have... a webcam that integrates special effects with your image. So (as the marketing copy says) you can broadcast 'live' from the Eiffel Tower or add psychedelic effects to your movements. That should impress a sales prospect!

Survey, Survey... Who's Got The Survey?

Well, dang. WebEx beat me to it. I had started organizing questions about web conferencing for a general survey that I was going to post on the internet. My goal was to figure out who is really using the technology, what they are using it for, what are prevailing popularity and opinions about different vendors and products, what features are important, and so on.

Now I see this press release stating that Wainhouse Research did a similar survey of WebEx Event Center customers last year as a sponsored exercise. Most of the results are unsurprising to people involved with the technology. Companies are using web events to replace in-person events. Results make it financially advantageous. Leads increase. That's all good. (By the way, you can request your copy of the report with survey results from WebEx at this address.)

I'm a little concerned that the survey is made up entirely of Event Center customers. Even WebEx has other products targeted at other uses. I'd like to find out more about webcasts/podcasts, training uses, customer support, and so on. I'd also like to see a wider cross-section of vendors and include people who haven't yet decided on a product to see what they are thinking about.

So what do you think? Would it be valuable to you to see an independent survey, not sponsored by a vendor? What questions would you like to see addressed? I’m looking for feedback here!

Creating A Feedback Loop

In my entry yesterday (When You've Got Em, Keep Em) I mentioned the use of a feedback form as part of a webinar. I'm a big believer in this practice. While many of the webinar vendors have ways for audience members to communicate with presenters during the course of a web conference (such as Q&A or chat panels or polling slides), they don't have the advantages of your own feedback form on a web page.

For starters, you can completely brand the look and feel of the form to be anything you want. Second, it doesn't matter what vendor's technology you are using... they can all push a web page to your audience. There is no panel or console interactivity required. So even in the simplest webcast format, you have a feedback loop. Third, the page can be used by people who are viewing an archived recording of the event. Fourth, you can get feedback routed directly to any individual or group of people you think should see it – it comes in as an email message with your choice of recipients, subject line, and structured content areas.

For an example of what I'm talking about, try this link. I branded it to look like the rest of my website. It has direct links to other pages in my website. I get the submitted information as an email message. And I can reuse it for multiple events with any changes I want to include – all independent of my web conference vendor.

You are welcome to view the source code for my form in your web browser. If you would like my help in creating a feedback form for your event, don't hesitate to use my form to request it!