The Webinar Blog

Good God!

Headline of the day: Is Jesus The Next Killer App?

CNET news writer Greg Sandoval reports on the growing use of media technology in organized religion. I have been noticing the same thing in my regular surveying of webcast and webinar announcements. Not a week goes by when I don't see a notice of a church service or sermon being webcast or podcast.

Most big name sermonizers are very good at public speaking and presentations. If you are a tech person studying how to engage an audience, it might not be a bad idea to watch a high powered evangelist (yes, the term was in use before Guy Kawasaki and Apple) and see how to use your voice rather than PowerPoint slides to grab, hold, and persuade an audience. Forget about the subject matter... The technique is transferable.

Looking For Mr. Goodanswer

I just read an InfoWorld blog entry by contributor Matt Asay. He covers the world of open source computing, but this particular item happened to start out with his frustration in dealing with a remote (outsourced) support person at WebEx. He found the experience frustrating. Amen, brother.

While WebEx is not alone in this area, they are one company that has exemplified the problem for me as well. I have dealt with WebEx on quite a few client engagements. Not surprising, since they have significant market share and one of the leading web conferencing suites for large scale enterprise use. I have run into the same problems as Matt, dealing with overseas support personnel who are working off a script, taking me through each stage of preliminary questioning before being able to dig into the specifics of the problem. I sometimes get snippy with these people because I know enough about the software to have tried the obvious level-one stuff myself. I'm not proud of my attitude in these cases and I try to watch out for it... they are just doing their job in the way they are trained and evaluated. But gosh... sometimes you just want a tech support person who can get his/her hands dirty, knows the insides of the product, and if they don't know, can call across the room to an internal guru. At WebEx, I eventually got the magic phone number for in-house level-two tech support, which is a closely guarded secret. I made it my direct line for help when working on tricky situations and I've been much happier.

Note that this isn't always the way it goes... I called the folks at Macromedia (now Adobe) Breeze to ask some pre-sales questions on behalf of a client. I got shuttled around to a few in-house numbers and eventually they dumped me off on a reseller - Clarix. Expecting the worst, I was delighted to find that my contact at Clarix knew everything I had questions about and provided good support that the Breeze folks seemed to have trouble fielding.

My best vendor support experiences so far have been with Raindance. Even though they were recently acquired, the support team handling their enterprise webinar software answers the phone directly and every person I've dealt with has been able to help me without a transfer. Oh yes, I also got a followup email from a client services rep to make sure that everything had been taken care of to my satisfaction.

Many of the serious enterprise-level large audience webinar software vendors (Microsoft, WebEx, Breeze) offer their products through resellers as well as direct. It's worth checking out whether a reseller offers direct technical support themselves and finding out if they have better access and better knowledge than the front-line teams at the vendors.

When you are doing vendor selection, support should be a significant consideration. Call the tech support line. Do it a few times. Find out how many hoops they make you jump through on qualification questions before getting to your question. Find out if they know the product themselves or are following a numbered script. Ask them if they have direct access to engineering if you manage to stump them.

Finding the parties who will be best able to serve you and answer your questions in a hurry will head off a world of frustration later on.

PowerPoint In The News (& Observer)

I sat down at the breakfast table this morning with my cup of coffee (What's that? Oh, Larry's Beans Single Origins Decaf Mexico. Organic and fair trade. Why do you ask?) and opened up the newspaper. There on the front page, first column, top left, was the important and earthshaking news story: "Software can't repair sheer hot air - Yet PowerPoint is trendy way to say little at great length."

Kind of a slow news day in Raleigh.

The staff writer points out the fact that putting bullet point text on 44 slides in a row and reading them verbatim to your audience is unlikely to make you a persuasive or effective speaker. Seems obvious, doesn't it? So why do we have to keep SAYING it?

On behalf of audiences everywhere... Please don't read to us, please minimize the use of text and bullet points, please stay on topic with real information we need to make a decision, and please be animated and interested in your own topic.

Thank you. You may now turn to page 2 and see if we have gone to war with anybody new overnight.

Listen To My Effective Webinars Presentation

I just realized I never posted the link to the recording I did last week with ON24. If you would like to hear my tips for how to make your webinars more effective, you can click through to the ON24 event recording. Sorry for the delay in getting you the link.

Preparation Is Its Own Reward

Today I acted as moderator on a client's webinar. There were two speakers at the presenting company, each working from their own PC. I was on another PC at a separate location. We went over the standard preparation checklist, including having a hardcopy printout of the slides handy.

Sure enough, half way through the presentation, the client lost their ISP. Both computers had no internet connection and they couldn't flip or see slides. But since they had their handout, all they had to do was say "Next Slide" and I moved the presentation for the audience. The speakers finished the event using their hardcopy as reference. The audience was unaffected by the technical glitch. This could have been a complete show stopper. Instead it was a minor inconvenience. Which will it be when it happens to you?

It Works!

Here's a story from the Canadian HR Reporter talking about a recent survey of Canadian professionals. It says that they identified a need for better technology to improve productivity, reduce costs, and boost revenue. When asked to pick types of tools from a list, forty percent said they want the ability to share documents within a common workspace, allowing colleagues to check documents in and out and work from one central version while enabling everyone to communicate about the project in real time.

On the same day, I saw this writeup from Laboratorytalk about how CI Systems installed new dispensary management system software (whatever that is... it sounds complex) in a pharmaceuticals factory in Singapore. The interesting part? I quote:

All aspects of implementation, training and integration were performed remotely via teleconferencing and web conferencing, with nobody from CI Systems ever required to visit the site in Singapore.

How's that for communicating in real time, collaborating, reducing costs, and boosting productivity?

Vendor Comparison Available

Sometimes I miss a good resource the first time around. I just discovered a very nice comparison of several web conferencing vendors. It was conducted by Network Computing and posted to the web on April 7. You can read the article on several pages online or download a PDF version of the whole thing.

They went at the comparison with the needs of educational meetings foremost in their minds. I might argue some details from my experience, but I acknowledge that from meeting to meeting and release to release you can get quite different impressions of these software packages.

It's definitely worth a read, especially if you need web conferencing for applications within a university setting.

The Curse Of Automated Advertising

Pity the poor marketing gang over at Infinite Conferencing. I was browsing through this online article about new ACT partners at CRMBuyer.com. Go check it out. It's a fairly standard transformation of a company press release into a little story. Five new development partners announced add-in products for ACT users. Fair enough.

Now scroll down to the second bullet point under "The 3 C's". There is a mention of Infinite Conferencing with a double underline in their name in a different color. "Oh, that's nice... They built in a link to the company." But nay! Hover your mouse over that link and you'll find it's a popup advertisement for a direct competitor to Infinite Conferencing! You can click through to find out how Microsoft Office Live gives you web collaboration tools including sharing documents and information between users. Of course Microsoft also markets Live Meeting, which competes on the webinar software front.

I doubt that Infinite is overjoyed about their company name being a portal to a competitor's advertisement. But there doesn't seem to be anything they can do about it. CRMBuyer.com signed up with the company IntelliTXT (I'm just reading the link off the popup ad) to get another revenue stream, and in the process they screwed over a company mentioned in their content. As the IntelliTXT site says on its front page, "IntelliTXT ad units are delivered in real-time and deployed after the article has been published by the website. This is an automated process that cannot influence, or be influenced by the Editorial Team at this website or any other partner publication."

Wow. Nobody's in charge. The computer is driving and nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong...

No I'm Not!

I just received an email invitation to a webinar from a web conference software vendor. The email started like this:

Ken:

You're a product manager. But are you the janitor or the president of your product?

I stopped reading right about there. First line. I don't really care what they are promoting, since they started with an incorrect declamation about me and then followed it up with something that doesn't make sense.

I'm not a product manager. Haven't been for many years. Certainly not under the email address they used. So why would they send such a specific statement to a general audience? Yes, I get the fact that some percentage of their recipients will turn out to be product managers, but couldn't they pitch things so that the other people on the distribution list might keep reading anyway? And then that second sentence is simply mystifying. They just said that I'm a product manager. Now they are equating that to an either/or of janitor or president?

Cast your net wide, people. When you send that shotgun email blast, phrase it to speak to many recipients or get a proper list that limits recipients to the ones you want. Then get a benefit statement up front. You have a few seconds of reader attention at the most before s/he decides whether to hit the delete button and move to the next exhortation in the Inbox. Make it count.

Sharing Slides With A Team

I received an email today from Patrick Thomas in Munich announcing the launch of teamslide by telepark. A quick note to my grammar-checking readers... both teamslide and telepark are branded as lowercase words, even at the beginning of a sentence. I'm following their example, although I HATE that marketing trick! It makes all my copy look wrong. And this from a country where common nouns take capital letters all the time in the native language. Maybe that's why they branded it that way... It stands out from normal capitalization in a sentence. Anyway, I digress. Back to the news.

teamslide is a very simple and inexpensive way to show PowerPoint slides to one or more viewers over a web browser. You use a PowerPoint plug-in to convert your slides to a set of JPG image files. These are zipped and uploaded to a server. Then the teamslide presentation wrapper lets you step forward and backward through the images as web pages. You have the ability to send out invitations to email addresses to have participants join you in the meeting space through a URL.

The company's website says it is designed to handle a typical viewing audience of 5 participants, although they have peak-load tested it to 20 people at a time. The advantages are obviously that participants can be on most common browsers and don't have to download viewing software. The interface is as simple as one can get. The disadvantages are non-support for PowerPoint animations and slide transitions.

This software obviously isn't meant to compete with full interactive webinar software packages. There is no audience Q&A facility, no polling, no annotating slides, no registration pages, and so on. I'd say the analogy is closer to instant messaging in the text world. If you need to share some graphical information quickly, this lets you kick your stuff out to a small audience in real time. I didn't have a chance to try out the conversion and upload process, so I don't know how long it takes. It seems to me that for this kind of application, the speed of getting the information from PowerPoint to the server for viewing would be a prime concern.

At a glance, I'd say telepark has to worry about competition from the companies pursuing integrated web collaboration with web conferencing, IM, and calendaring functionality. If those companies make an easy way to include PowerPoint slides in with their IM wrappers, teamslide will have a tough time as an independent entry in the field.

The company sells you the software in packaged numbers of seats (how many presenters can show slides). One presenter costs $99, while a 10-pack costs $799. The software is yours once you install it -- no restrictions on number of slides or presentations. The company also sell support and update packages on a monthly basis.

You can see a demo of the software online.

Good luck, Patrick!