The Webinar Blog

Webcast tips from politicians

My search for all things webcastish led me to a website/blog for and about the city of Boston. I have no association with Boston other than having presented there a few times to the many industry analyst firms in the city. I also dated a girl who lived in Boston, but it didn't work out well and I'd rather not talk about it.

Anyway, The Bostonist mentioned that a couple of candidates for governor of Massachusetts have created websites showing off audio and/or video podcasts. The columnist gave a quick review of one of the candidates' sites. I decided to take a look, as this is going to grow more and more important in political communications over the next few years. By the 2008 presidential election, you can expect masses of carefully produced webcast material.

I'll start with Christy Mihos, an independent candidate. His podcast page lists four entries. Two of them are basically radio ads. One is a fake interview carefully set up to let him make his pitch points. And the fourth is a strident direct pitch for "Why I should be your next governor." Mihos suffers from the Al Gore syndrome... He lays out factual point after point, beating them into the listener's head with the subtlety of a jackhammer. These kinds of presentations appeal to a minority of the general public. It turns out facts are boring. Especially when presented over a depersonalizing mechanical device like a PC or iPod.

Contrast this with the spots featured on the website of Deval Patrick. One is a man in the street interview with "a normal Joe." The guy reaches for words and seems to be passionate about his support for the candidate in a real way. I fully acknowledge that this could be good acting-- I'm about as cynical a guy as you can find when it comes to political persuading. The second speech is called "Pass It On" and is so heartwarming and perfectly delivered that it instantly makes me both syrupy happy and mistrustful. Patrick relates an anecdote, makes it personal, and turns it into an emotional pledge of service to the crowd. They go crazy. No facts, no proposals, just a general feel good group hug. It must drive Mihos absolutely crazy.

Remember when Gore produced fact after fact during the last presidential campaign and Bush kept repeating "Freedom! Liberty! Family! Country!" Guess who is president today. Given a choice between Mihos and Patrick, guess who I would put my betting money on.

The point, my friends? If you are producing material designed to reach out to a mass audience and persuade, enthuse, and motivate them, don't forget a bit of showmanship and a call to base emotions. Successful presenters know their subject, but they also know what makes audiences pay attention.

Freepath Review - Presentation Management Software

I came across a press release a while back talking about a relatively new piece of software called Freepath from Grass Roots Software. It was intriguing enough for me to download their free trial and test it out. I also talked to Lou Douros, President of Grass Roots Software and Sales Manager Shane Lapp at the company when I had some extra questions.

The software is designed to help presenters navigate smoothly through many different types of content in front of an audience. You can create a storyboard where you drag and drop things like PowerPoint shows, image files, Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, video clips and Flash movies. Then as you stand in front of your audience, you can see the overall show on your personal monitor and move back and forth among different items while the audience sees only the content of each piece presented in order or as you choose on the main projection screen. So they don't have to watch you fumble through icons in your task bar or hit the Alt-Tab key in an attempt to find the application of interest.

Support for the Microsoft and Adobe applications is native and handles all the things they normally do. For instance, there is no conversion of PowerPoint slides to static images - so you retain slide transitions and animations.

That is all very slick and I can easily see the value. But while I do a lot of live presentations myself and might use Freepath to make them smoother and easier to manage, this blog is about web conferencing... Where's the link?

Just this... Grass Roots boldly proclaims in the header on their website that Freepath is the "Easiest COMMUNICATOR'S TOOL for Managing FACE-TO-FACE and WEB Communications" (the strange capitalization choices are theirs, not mine). That makes it fodder for The Webinar Blog.

I quickly found that the software expects you to use a dual-monitor setup when presenting over the web. In this way you designate one monitor as your control panel and one as the presentation space (in the same way you would when hooking up to a projector in a live conference). The web conferencing software has to support desktop sharing. It grabs the "desktop" of the presentation monitor and you can safely jump around with the controls on the other screen.

Naturally you are subject to the inviolable laws of memory and CPU usage and overhead. The software adds some work for your PC and everything going out to your audience is being redrawn through the desktop sharing interface. Slow or limited bandwidth networks (or large audience events) might not like this very much. But in a single presenter/viewer event I did not notice any significant delays except when trying to watch a full-motion video clip. Those really aren't recommended for any vendor's desktop sharing mode!

When I talked to Lou and Shane, I pointed out that not many business users have two monitors on their desks. Lou reminded me that it's common to find laptops in docking stations hooked up to an external monitor. Pull the laptop out of the docking station and hook the monitor cable directly to it and you suddenly have a dual monitor system. Of course he is right.

Grass Roots likes working with Citrix GoToMeeting for web conferences. It turns out that GoToMeeting has a little-known feature that lets it select which monitor to display to the audience when the presenter has a dual monitor system. That certainly is convenient for Freepath. But even if you have another vendor's software and it initially grabs the wrong monitor for display, Freepath lets you click a switch and swap the monitor displays, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I can see this being useful if you use a lot of different file types or interactive applications in your online presentations. Being able to quickly navigate between multiple PowerPoints, spreadsheets, documents, and web pages is a nice feature.

One thing I asked for that they can't do quite yet is to let you designate individual slides from different PowerPoint files that should be shown in sequence. You pre-load PowerPoint file A and PowerPoint file B into your storyboard. Then when you are ready to show slides from one or the other, you single-click the “cue” to open that PowerPoint and navigate to your desired slide. You can't load slides 1-3 from file A, slide 12 from file B, and slide 7 from file A into your presentation sequence and have them flow smoothly from one to the other. A pity, because this would eliminate your having to create special versions of PowerPoint files just for a single presentation (with all the associated hassles of trying to retain different templates and masters for the different slides).

But my wish list is not everybody's, and you might like to take a look for yourself. Grass Roots offers a free trial from their website, and you can even combine it with a free trial of GoToMeeting to test the full operation within a web conferencing context.

The New Vyew Review, Coming Right At You

There's a new web collaboration offering on the market as of last week. Called Vyew, it is designed more for interactive/collaborative meetings than for one-to-many public webinars. The distinguishing features are low cost, quick loadup, no client software to install, and easy interface.

First of all, big kudos for the name alone. They figured out a word that is short, indicative of the concept, and was available for a domain name. Brilliant!

The software does come up very quickly, as advertised. It is browser based, using Flash. The company admits that it hasn't broken the Macintosh/Linux barrier yet, so you'll have to use it on a Windows-based system. I also read comments on Guy Kawasaki's blog saying users had trouble with browsers other than Internet Explorer.

My single favorite thing about the software is the little Flash demo they show you upon request to introduce you to the concept. You can see a personal or business use clip with audio. It nicely shows through a real-world example why you would want to use software like this.

The program seems to be best at sharing photos from your collection. They have a cute little slideshow (excuse me, SlydeShow) application that lets you load in a bunch of photos and click through them. You can also share MP3's, although I haven't tried this out myself.

I uploaded a PowerPoint presentation with lots of graphics. Everything is converted to static image files and it took around four minutes to upload my 45-slide, 6.75Mb file (I said there were lots of graphics!). Of course the software doesn't support animations or slide transitions. The interface to move between slide images is a simple forward/backward clicker. There is no way to direct-jump to a specific image.

The drawing/annotation tools are easy to use. My biggest complaint is that the pointer faces from right to left. That makes it inappropriate for those ubiquitous bullet point slides. The arrow covers up the sentence you are highlighting. I do like the fact that you can drag the pointer from one spot to another.

There are some "toy-like" extras you can use, including checkers, a calendar display that lets people at least see what dates are when at the same time (no "calendaring/scheduling" functionality though), and the ability to display an interactive Yahoo! Map of an address. Unfortunately the map starts at the national level and you have to keep zooming in a bit at a time to try to get to a detailed street display. It's a bit too work-intensive. Zooming is also inconvenient on uploaded/displayed graphic images, as you can't quickly return to the original size.

Slides and other images are not rescaled for different screen resolutions, so viewers could potentially have trouble with tiny images or big ones they have to scroll to see.

You can change your room settings to let viewers have interactive presenter control or just viewing permissions.

A nice little extra is the ability to click a button and get a toll charge teleconference number that all participants can dial into. Nice if you don't have a teleconference service.

I can see this being useful for quick pick-up meetings. It's not going to compete with enterprise-level webinar or webcast software, but it's not supposed to.

Oh, by the way, I didn't review the desktop application sharing mode, as the company is still working out known bugs. It's listed as a "coming feature."

Definitely worth checking out if you want a quick and easy way to get a few people together online to let the computer facilitate a discussion. Citrix GoToMeeting should be very worried.

More Web Conference Trends

Two days ago I wrote about the Larstan Business Reports survey on web conference users in the financial services industry. Today we have the latest quarterly report from Wainhouse Research on general web conferencing trends. Wainhouse spends a lot of time covering the web conferencing industry. Their full reports are a little pricey for me (they're geared for major enterprise purchasing decisions and for the technology vendors to understand the market), but you can glean a lot from the freebies they publicize.

Wainhouse uses a self-selected panel of 174 buyers and users of web conferencing technology. Vendors are not allowed to participate.

One of the encouraging statistics in the latest survey (finished last month) is that respondents guessed that use of web conferencing technology within their own organizations would increase over the next 18 months from a current average of 34% of the worker population to 51% by fall of 2007.

The rest of my findings are from the previous survey, completed at the end of 2005. Here are the nuggets of information I found particularly noteworthy:

1) WebEx was the unquestioned leader in brand awareness in the industry (no surprise). Microsoft was number two, with a significant but narrowing gap.

2) Many more people are using webcam video in their web conferences than I would have guessed. Of course I tend to concentrate on outbound public events more than in-house collaborative meetings.

3) Enterprises are looking for more integration of web conferencing with instant messaging and workflow applications.

4) There was growth in the use of the technology for internal meetings, but a decrease in its use for product demos and prospect, marketing, and sales presentations! I certainly wouldn't have guessed that.

5) Audio integration (VoIP) is a big deal for many respondents.

6) After WebEx and Microsoft, the up and comers in terms of ad recall are Citrix and Macromedia. (I listen to the comedy channel on XM Radio and I hear two or three Citrix ads every hour. I'm sick of the danged things by now!)

Reminder: Don't forget to visit the new WebEventSearch.com to list your upcoming, streaming, or recorded webcasts! It's all free and we need your comments and feedback.

Microsoft Dead Meeting?

Here's a ZDNet blog entry by George Ou, TechRepublic's Technical Director. It is an angry diatribe relating technical problems he encountered when trying to attend a Microsoft Live Meeting webinar.

He doesn't like the initial software download and installation for his client-side viewing experience. A fair comment and one that is common among the big enterprise-level webinar vendors. There are vendors who get around this, most commonly by handling everything as an in-browser HTML/Java application. It's faster and easier to connect, but you always lose something in functionality (support for slide animations, support for desktop sharing, interactive Q&A, attendee chat, slide annotation, or something else).

He then had a series of problems connecting to the event, with windows disappearing and such. Very frustrating indeed. One of his blog readers commented that they thought it might be a conflict with Skype, supposedly known for its port usage. Ou mentions that he got a Skype message while trying to watch the event, so I guess this is a possible contributor.

I certainly don't know what the underlying problem was and I'm not going to try to remotely diagnose it after the fact. But it does point to a few important points:

George extrapolates his problem into a general condemnation of Live Meeting as compared to "the mature web conferencing veteran WebEx." He mentions that Microsoft bought Placeware when it was at a substantial technological disadvantage to WebEx and that it may have caught up a bit, but "its usability is as bad as or worse than it's ever been."

My personal take is somewhat different. I used to far prefer the old Placeware product to WebEx at that time. I think they were behind WebEx in terms of marketing, but not technology. The minute Microsoft bought the product and reengineered its interface, I had complaints. I think WebEx is the one that has moved forward technologically.

But George and I can fight about history all day. The fact is that he had a really bad technical experience that was not taken care of immediately. As a result, he will probably never again use Live Meeting for anything he ever has an option on. I worked with a client recently who had the same bias against using WebEx because they lost their video connection during a big WebEx event. In both cases, there is a good chance that the problem was not really something implicitly deficient in the vendor's technology, but rather a combination of specific factors on one person's PC.

I run so much antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and browser plug-in software on my PC I don't know how anything manages to work together. I also have installations hanging around of most of the web conferencing technologies on the market. Every so often something hangs up and I try to remember that I am giving the software a permutation of factors that the developers could not even theoretically have tested. The average webinar attendee will not be so kind.

What do you do about it? Make sure that the vendor will directly support your audience with level-1 technical support before and during your event. Put a technical support phone number on the login instructions email and on the screen (Microsoft errs by not putting this phone number on the launch page that says "Lost your connection? Reconnect to meeting here").

If somebody has problems getting to your event, notify the vendor. Even if it is afterwards and too late to do anything about. The vendor should want to call them and displace the vitriol with a reasoned attempt to diagnose the problem, make sure it doesn't happen again, and express apologies that there were technical difficulties. This takes some of the onus off you as the event content provider for the attendee's frustrations and puts it back on the vendor (where it belongs). I'll bet Microsoft would have liked a chance to talk to George before he published his entry!

In my entry on Web conferencing survey results I pointed out that only 8% of respondents said that they didn't use the technology because it was too difficult. If we see more blog entries like George's and Ben Grabow's, public perception is going to shoot that number a lot higher!

New Webcast Search Engine!

Oh boy, I’ve been waiting for so long to be able to write this blog entry! Today I’m taking the wraps off a new service offering from Webinar Success. WebEventSearch.com is the first online search engine dedicated solely to web-based communications. It brings together the producers of webcast content with the audiences looking for that information.

If you create webinars, webcasts, podcasts, or streaming feeds, you know that your biggest challenge is publicizing your event and letting audiences know that your content is available. If you view or listen to webcast material, you are frustrated by email bombardments telling you about events of no interest to you, while having no way to find events you would be interested in. A standard search engine like Google can’t handle these needs… They are built to scan web pages for keywords in the text. Webcasts come and go too quickly and never make it high enough in search rankings.

WebEventSearch.com attacks the problem by letting event producers list their event with key information that searchers can use to narrow results to just what they are interested in. You can search the database for events occurring within a date range. Or with content in a particular subject area. Or presented by a certain company. Or featuring a speaker you want to hear. You can look for fee-based or free events. Events that require you to have Microsoft Windows on your PC or those that support multiple operating systems. You can even search for events made available as downloadable podcasts.

The database automatically removes event listings after the event date. So you never see obsolete results cluttering up your search list. Of course you can also find on-demand information that is available at any time. These might include archived webinar recordings, internet radio streams, webcams, or podcasts.

Interested in a particular subject area? You can subscribe to an RSS feed to get automatic notification when an event listing is added in the category you chose.

If you provide audio/video information over the web, this service is an entirely new way to let your target audiences find you. Now there is an alternative to sending out random email blasts, press releases, and mailings, hoping that some small percentage of your recipients will be interested in your message. Your target audience is self selecting, actively searching for the information or entertainment you offer. You can promote fee-based courses, marketing/lead generation events, streaming feeds, investor relations calls, customer communications, and so much more.

Are you a webcast services or software vendor? Want to offer a value-add for your clients? Get them a listing for their events. Put in your company name as a keyword. Let people see how many events your company supports. (By the way, you can also advertise your company on the site. This is the first time Webinar Success has accepted vendor advertising on any of its online services.)

Are you an industry expert or regular guest speaker on multiple webinars? Get your name in the system so people can find your events no matter who produces them.

The site is up and running right now in Beta test mode. The obvious hurdle to big success is getting the initial traffic from both the supply and demand side. So to make it easy, during Beta test all listings and advertisements are 100% free for providers. You have absolutely nothing to lose. At the very worst, you have another incoming link on the web for your event landing page. As traffic picks up, we will compile statistics of viewership and clickthrough conversions to prove the cost effectiveness of the site. Even when we eventually go live, listings will be incredibly cheap. I want to build volume, not margins. This should become the one-stop shop for any online user looking for webcast content.

If you are a viewer of web events, please come to the site and try some searches. Sure, at first there won’t be as much content as we would like. It’s going to take a while to build up the database of listings. But it’s tremendously important that we can show visitor use so providers will want to place their content there for your convenience. Come back and try again to see the latest content that has been added. I also need and encourage your feedback on what works well for you, what you wish we would add, what is frustrating, and so on. Beta test isn’t about debugging… That was Alpha test. Beta is about making refinements based on user activity and feedback to validate our ideas and to make sure that the site works for its users… not its designers.

This is big. There is nothing else available on the web to handle this functionality. And you are among the very first people to read about it. Please visit and supply your feedback before we go live with publicity, promotion, and marketing for the site. Providers, remember that even though our initial Beta audience may not be huge, they are going to be tremendously interested and performing lots of searches. And you are going to have relatively few events to compete with. Early content listings are really going to pop out and be seen! Get your stuff in there. It’s all free during the Beta.

Let’s get viral with this information. Email your friends and coworkers a link to this blog entry so they can read about it for themselves. Or just forward on the web address of the new site. That’s www.webeventsearch.com

When you start reading about this in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired, you’ll be able to say “I knew about it first!”

Web Conferencing Survey Results

I'll get to the survey results in a minute. First I should give appropriate credits. I received an email from Macromedia Breeze advertising a white paper entitled "Return on Marketing: Increasing Lead Generation at Lower Costs Through Web Events." It is obviously written to help publicize Breeze, but contains some nice basics for those of you wondering what the draw of web conferencing is for marketing purposes. You can get a copy of the report from the Macromedia website using this link.

The report was written by Larstan Business Reports and references a survey they did. You can access the survey results summary (in chart format) from the Larstan website at this link.

There is no information online about details behind the survey (I sent Larstan an email asking for info, and they told me it was originally commissioned by WebEx, which makes sense, given that there is a quote related to WebEx on the website. Nice repurposing for another vendor!). It was conducted in Q4 of 2005 and given to "top managers within the financial services industry." The white paper states that there were around 287 respondents, which isn't a bad sample.

Here are some of the results I found particularly interesting:

Only 22% of respondents said they use web conferencing to deliver product training, while 64% said they use email. Only 8% said web conferencing was their most used method. Live road shows are still popular methods of delivering product training.

87% of respondents said that "real-time internet communications technology plays a key role in supporting field operations" for their company. That sounds like a big winner for online conferencing, but let's remember that the statement would include instant messaging technology and probably some respondents threw in email, not thinking that it isn't truly real time (although on instant send/receive internal server networks, it's about as fast as IM).

When asked "If your company doesn't use web conferencing as part of your product rollout process do you expect to deploy the technique within x months", 51% of respondents said they expected to use it within a year (nice growth expectations!). However 40% said they have no such plans at all. Hmmm.

The responses for "why aren't you using web conferencing now?" were all over the board. 27% said it's too expensive. 8% said it seems too difficult to use. And 22% said they don't know enough about the technology. Yowza! We've got to reach these people. Have them call me, would you?

My take on this is that the vendors still have some education and proselytizing to do. There is healthy room for growth in the industry. It's easy for those of us already sold on web conferencing to remember that there are still people who need to be made aware of the technology and convinced of its utility. As a provider of services in the industry, I often find that when people ask me at parties what I do for a living, I have to get into an explanation of the definition and basics of web conferencing.

WIPO Excludes Webcasting From Rights Treaty

Back in February I wrote an entry referencing an obscure conference covering international copyright/property law and how it might affect webcast ownership and rebroadcast. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has continued debating the subject for the past few months.

One of the most contentious issues has been about rebroadcasting rights for webcast content. The question is whether a non-copyrighted work can be held as proprietary property just because an entity broadcasts it. When the president gives a national address, the content is public domain. But is the CNN online webcast of it owned by CNN so that nobody else can use it?

Now extend the example to your webinar, which you happen to deliver using WebEx (or Microsoft or Raindance or ON24 or some other third-party hosted web conferencing software). Under the proposed terms of the treaty, you might have no rights to your own content, which would be entirely owned and controlled by your software vendor because it went out as part of their broadcast stream.

The United States, prompted by intense lobbying from the big content carriers such as Yahoo, was pushing hard against a popular front by many other smaller countries to get Internet broadcasting included in the intellectual property coverage. For a while, the fight got nasty, with accusations of internal sabotage against grass-roots lobbyists (back in 2004 during the early days of the hearings).

Today the organization announced that webcasting will not be covered in the course of the main talks about broadcasting rights and will be pushed out as a separate topic area to be examined and legislated at a more leisurely pace.

So it's temporary good news for webcasters. You can still use and reuse your own material!

Breathing New Life Into A Webcast

There are certain webcasts for which I don't give training or coaching. Here's a woman who delivered her subject online and even without having seen it, I feel completely comfortable in saying that I couldn't have done it any better. Heck, I couldn't have done it at all!

Nice job on your production, ma'am.

Cutting Edge Webcasts Delivered With Surgical Precision

Two news stories in two days from two different markets talking about live webcasts of actual surgeries. The links can be found, as always, on the Webinar Success Industry News page. But I'll be nice... For easy access, you can link to the stories about knee surgery and spinal surgery.

I talked about this back in March with Marketing The O.R. But I got reinterested when I read one of the stats in the knee surgery story: More than 2,300 distinct users clicked on the surgery webcast. Yowza! Can we find out how they are marketing that thing?

This should make you think seriously about how you choose a subject for your events. Are you trying to pick something nice and generic that could possibly interest a wide range of people? Or are you willing to try going after a more narrowly defined niche market with information and content they simply can't get anywhere else? The success of surgical webcasts seems to indicate that you can do quite well indeed with the latter approach. Think about it.