The Webinar Blog

Why Use A Web Conference Moderator?

Most people who work on creating webinars for their company break down responsibilities into two main areas. One function is carried out behind the scenes, setting up the technical side of the event, promoting it, managing registration, and so on. The other side of the coin is the “on air talent”, as the TV industry would put it. This refers to the person or people delivering the material during the event.

But there is another important function that is often overlooked. This role provides assistance to the presenter and to the audience during the live webcast. Often referred to as an event moderator, the term may be a little misleading, as it conjures up images of someone asking questions to a group of panelists. Admittedly, a moderator may well keep things rolling during a Q&A session, but there is much more to the function.

A good webinar moderator starts working even before the event goes live to the audience, helping the speakers get comfortable and making sure that preparation is complete for a smooth event. He or she makes sure that all presenters are logged in with working audio and runs a checklist of reminders for the little details that contribute to web seminar success. This includes making sure that everyone has backup printouts of the presentation materials, that they have liquid available to combat dry mouth, and that all noise distractions are turned off. A cheerful and confident attitude from a moderator running an organized prep session helps to calm jittery nerves in some speakers as well.

The moderator may choose to give standby messages to early participants on the line. When the event starts, the moderator can welcome the audience and instruct them on how to use their web conferencing console. He or she can give a formal introduction to the first presenter, making the transition sound smooth and professional.

While the presenter is speaking, moderators take care of several other functions. They watch for technical problems or questions typed in from the audience, answering standard queries such as whether slides or a recording will be made available later.

If the presentation includes interactive features such as polls or typed-in feedback, the moderator can remind the audience how to work with the software and can fill the silence that sometimes creeps in while the presenter waits for audience responses. This gives the speakers time to catch their breath and take a sip of water.

Moderators should be on a separate computer network from the presenters so that in the event of a speaker’s computer or network failing, the moderator can continue to advance slides and presentation materials while the speaker reads from his or her hardcopy backup.

A professional moderator also monitors the event for small problems that can be fixed with a quick comment. One example is a polite request to the current speaker to get closer to the microphone for better sound quality. If the web conferencing software allows private chat with other presenters, the moderator can communicate with speakers without the audience’s knowledge. The moderator can also keep an eye on the overall session time if Q&A seems to be extending too long and suggest when the last question should be taken. A moderator should close out the event with a clear message to the participants that they can close their conferencing console and hang up the phone.

A good moderator has a complete understanding of the web conferencing software being used. He or she is comfortable working with the interactive features of the software and explaining them to the audience. Moderators need experience in working with live events and must have the ability to deal with problem situations in a calm and professional manner. They should have introductory and closing scripts worked out and approved by the speakers. A clear, confident speaking voice is essential, as the moderator often sets the tone for the entire event and is the first and last voice the audience hears.

The functions performed by the event moderator may be assigned to several individuals if desired, but it is doubly important in these situations to have technical rehearsals with everyone involved so that responsibilities and handoffs are clearly understood. Many companies use a combination of their own webinar administrator, an event producer from the webinar technology vendor, and an operator from the telephone conferencing company.

Over many years of producing and delivering web conferences, I have been disappointed far too often with the quality of voice work I get from the random operators assigned to cover the moderator’s communications functions. The people may be part of a telephone conferencing service or production staff from a web conferencing technology company. I have more memories than I can count of listening to people reading stilted scripts in a bored tone, or tripping over the name of the conference, the presenting company, or the lead-off speaker. Poor diction is amazingly common.

My advice for ensuring the most professional sounding presentation you can deliver is to get a copy of all introduction scripts ahead of time. There may be one from your web conferencing provider and one from the telephone operator. Check them for accuracy and don’t be afraid to cut out extraneous information or change the wording to sound more natural. Have a pre-call ahead of your event start time and listen carefully to the people assigned to read your scripts. If you feel you can do a better job, simply tell them that you’ll deliver the introductory comments. It’s your event… Control it for success.

Obviously, as a web conference services provider, I also like the option of hiring an experienced professional to manage event moderating functions. A company like Webinar Success gives you the ability to work with a named individual who is explicitly assigned to your event and knows the ins and outs of working with the conferencing software, supporting your speakers and audience, and providing a professional tone from start to end.

But whomever you use, make sure you don’t overlook the importance of a quality event moderator.

Technorati Tags: moderator, presentations, moderating, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

Webinar News Now Available As An RSS Feed

Our Industry News page from the Webinar Success website is now available as an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. This makes it a lot easier to stay current on press releases, blog entries, and online articles related to web conferencing.

I have tried to make it convenient to access webinar news from several different use perspectives.

• If you just want to see the latest month's worth of items arranged chronologically, you can go to the news page, which remains accessible under the easy to remember domain name of www.WebinarNews.info. Items roll off this page after thirty days.

• If you want to get updates delivered to your favorite RSS feed reader, you can go to the generic feed source page available from Feedburner. Or you can use a button below for one-click addition of the feed to one of these popular readers:

 

• And if you want to browse through a collection of historical archives going back farther than 30 days, you can visit the webinar news history maintained as a simplistic blog. Please note that I only moved over the history starting this year. Sorry... the really old stuff is lost to the ravages of time, but it will all be saved going forward.

I know that I have many readers who also subscribe to Conferencing News, which maintains an excellent daily summary of items affecting the conferencing industry. The difference between our news collections is that I concentrate exclusively on webinar and web conferencing stories. They include information related to teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and some types of generic public webcast information that I omit. So it's simply a question of defining your area of focus and picking the appropriate consolidator. Or you can always read us both. Every so often one of us will grab an item that the other misses. But not often!

By the way, if you are a vendor and you want to make sure that your information gets into the Webinar News feed, make sure to put me on your distribution list for press releases and company announcements.

Technorati Tags: Conferencing News, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

Kolabora Publishes Review of VRoom

Robin Good over at Kolabora.com has published another one of his excellent and thorough product reviews for collaborative web conferencing software. This time the focus is on a product called vRoom, from Elluminate. The company is giving away free three-person meeting rooms using vRoom, so if you need a small team collaborative platform and have zero budget, this is worth a look.

Robin is always very good about including lots of representative screen shots and calling out both the good and bad features in terms of functionality and ease of use. Go take a look if this kind of software is on your radar.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collaborative technologies conference, Elluminate, Kolabora, Robin Good, vRoom, vendor selection, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting

A Webinar Use Case - Tom Blue

Tom Blue writes a blog called Marketing Revisited ("Lessons and Observations from the Marketing Trenches"). Last week he wrote a piece entitled "Harness the Market-making Power of Webinars." In his entry, he talked about how he had paid no attention to webinars until he was invited to be a presenter with Research In Motion (aka RIM... the company that makes the ubiquitous BlackBerry handheld communications device). Since then, he has incorporated webinars into his sales and marketing plan at client companies and is a firm believer in their value.

I love happy use case stories about webinars, so I called up Tom and had a chat about his experiences. He graciously consented to letting me write up the interview for this column.

As Tom wrote on his blog, he had been flying around the country as a spokesperson and traveling sales/marketing specialist for Nextel as they sold BlackBerry devices for use in the real estate industry. While the on-site seminars worked well in terms of audience attendance and sales, the approach didn't scale very well.

When RIM invited Tom to present on a webinar, he assumed that it would involve a lot of specialized setup and expensive technical production requirements. As with many people who haven't tried producing a webinar, he didn't realize that the basic requirements can be no more than some PowerPoint slides and a telephone! He was able to show up as a guest speaker from his own office, without fancy modifications to his computer or any production studio overhead.

He wasn't sure how a virtual presentation would go over with a non-technical audience spread out around the country, but was pleasantly surprised to see that the realtors on the line were receptive to the format and asked many questions using the webinar software's Q&A functionality. Tom says that the whole experience was "a whack-you-upside-the-head-with-a-baseball-bat revelation." This was a way to reach many more people with far less cost, planning, and inconvenience than his traditional live presentation format.

Tom moved on to work with other clients, driving their sales and marketing operations to stimulate growth. He now says that every new business venture or client case he is involved with gets a checklist item right up front... "What is the potential role of webinars in sales and customer service?"

He has been working since last year with a company whose name he has kept confidential, referring to its product as "SmartWare" just for reference purposes. I was a bit confused at first, as there is a SmartWare company on the web, but that is purely coincidence and shouldn't be taken as his client's real name. Tom has been following the success of their business operations on his blog in a series he calls "Real-Time Case Studies."

Tom has moved to a model where he does all sales presentations to prospective customers using webinar technology. He says that his two salespeople are able to handle a workload that would take five people to do in a traditional fly-and-drive mode where they visit each prospect for a live presentation. Tom estimates that if they were to switch to a live presentation model for sales that the extra internal costs in travel, meals, equipment, and staff would probably force them to double the product licensing fees they charge to customers.

He says that a typical sales webinar may be attended by just a few people or as many as 40. The audience can gather in one room or log on from their own computers and locations. Again, Tom wondered if online presentations would be effective as a sales tool. But he is completely convinced now. He says that they have an "astonishingly high" close rate and customers almost never ask for a followup live visit. They can literally close the deal and get the order remotely.

In addition to initial sales presentations, the company uses their web conferencing software for customer education and support as well. They run live application sharing to run the software on their own computers while the clients watch remotely to learn the proper way to install and configure it.

The success of webinars for sales and support has inspired Tom to look for additional ways to leverage the technology. For one thing, he would like to record his webinars for on-demand access and repeat use. The company has not yet built a library of past presentations for people seeking information. He also sees an excellent opportunity to introduce more community building among the company's customers. Because the company sells to educational institutions that don't compete with each other (at least in this particular application area), the customers tend to be mutually supportive. Tom sees web conferencing being used for group meetings where participants can share best practices and use-case walkthroughs, as well as helping each other with problem situations. He also wants to start using webinars as more of an initial public education and lead generation tool.

I asked Tom which vendor and web conferencing product they are using as well as the criteria they used during the selection process. He said that because one of the company's initial presenters was familiar with WebEx, they just basically fell in to using that product without a formal comparison and selection period. They use Meeting Center right now, as they haven't needed the more formal registration management and other features of Event Center for large inbound events.

I asked whether there were any frustrations and regrets so far and Tom had to think for a long time. He eventually said that there are occasional circumstances where an audience member will have difficulty logging in to the event or getting the connection established. But those are infrequent situations and they have always been able to overcome the initial problems. He said there hasn't been anything that has made him second-guess his vendor decision.

Many people are tentative about trying out webinars because of doubts about their cost, technical difficulty, audience acceptance, or effectiveness. Just as Tom found out, testing the use of webinars in your business can be much easier and less expensive than most people think. And the results can have a tangible effect on your bottom line profitability and customer satisfaction. I urge you to take the plunge if you haven't already tried them. If you are just getting started, my free educational presentation on March 8 will be perfect for you. It will give you an overview of what you need to think about from initial planning through delivery to followup. You can register at www.EffectiveWebinars.com and maybe even win a free hour of webinar consulting!

Technorati Tags: presentations, Marketing Revisited, Tom Blue, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, WebEx, webinar, Webinar Success

Webinars In Many Tongues

If you go to InterCall's home page, you will find the word "global" prominently featured. Their tag line in the logo is: "InterCall - Global Conferencing Solutions" and down at the bottom of the page the small type says "InterCall is the leading conference call solution for global business." Not only that, but before you go surfing around their site, you are forced to select your country and language preference from a list of 18 representative flags.

(Side note to the web team at InterCall... Why do you get a choice for the French language website when you click on Canada, but when you click on the country flag for France, you get an English-only website for "Europe"? Aren't Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany also "Europe"? They get to use their national languages. And why is the popup text for Germany translated as "Deutschland" while all the other countries have their names represented in the English equivalents? Oh heck... Website design is a pain even when you are working in a single language!)

With that kind of emphasis on global conferencing you might wonder how InterCall assists clients with large multinational audiences. For answers, I talked to Tiffany Killcreas, who is a nice person with the longest business title I have ever run across. Ready for this? She is "Senior Manager - Product Management, Surround the Call Features and Vertical Markets." You'd need a fold-out business card for that!

Tiffany told me that InterCall has partnered with IAL Services to provide high quality interpretation and translation for conferences conducted in multiple languages. InterCall packages and prices the services, and contracts with IAL to carry out the labor. In this way the client doesn't have to deal with separate sales groups, but gets the advantage of working with an experienced specialist. The two companies have been live testing their multilingual conference offerings for the past year and last month they made it a formally priced and publicized option for InterCall customers.

Maddalena Ragusin is Business Development Manager at IAL and she stepped me through their area of expertise and how they are working with InterCall. First I had to learn the nuances of terminology in this field. I would have called everything they do "translation," but they reserve that term for altering documents and electronic materials into another language. Translation can involve changes to content to account for cultural differences and local expectations (overcoming what I once labeled "North American egocentricity in the web conferencing biz.")

Translating PowerPoint presentations is easiest when they are created using the worst (but most common) technique. If the presenter merely dumps a bunch of sentences into bullet points, the translators can replace the text with no problem. But if the presentation includes text merged with graphic elements or if it makes use of PowerPoint animations, translation becomes more technically difficult. The translator not only needs to worry about getting the words right, but must preserve the formatting and functionality of the slide as a whole. Maddalena says that IAL's experience with desktop publishing and concentration on web seminars helps them tame this demon.

Interpretation is the term used for repeating a speaker's comments in another language to a live audience. It turns out that there are two ways to attack that task. Consecutive interpretation forces the speaker to say a phrase and then wait for the interpreter to repeat it in the second language before moving on to the next phrase. This back and forth choppiness removes much of the impact and effectiveness from a well planned presentation. The alternative is to use simultaneous interpretation. This is the classic version you see in movies and television coverage of United Nations meetings and other formal podium presentations, where the audience listens on a private line to the interpreter repeating the entire presentation at roughly the same time as the speaker delivers it. That's the format used in InterCall's support of formal web events such as investor relations calls or company-wide employee announcements and it requires specialized training and abilities from the interpretation staff, as well as the equipment and infrastructure to support the private audience channels.

Tiffany says that being able to offer professional simultaneous interpretation to their web conferencing clients is a big differentiator over others who only support consecutive interpretation or re-recording of an audio track to create an on-demand recording in another language. InterCall has the ability to create bridges and audio subconferences that allow people in many different countries to call in and listen on a local phone number in their native language. The interpreter listens to the speakers' line and provides a running commentary in the alternate language.

Maddalena mentioned that they IAL supports not only the formal presentation, but live Q&A sessions as well. That got me interested in the mechanics of how they make it work when an operator can only administer and activate question lines in the main (primary language) conference. I ended up forcing a number of people to race around to answer my questions. The typical method would be to exhaust all questions and answers on the main primary language line first. Those would be interpreted for the other language lines in the same way as the rest of the conference. Then the operator would transfer in one of the alternate language lines along with their interpreter. As each question is asked in the secondary language, the interpreter repeats it in consecutive fashion to the speakers in their language and translates the answer back to the secondary language. Any other languages listening in continue to get their own simultaneous translations as usual. Trust me, it makes sense if you sit down with a piece of graph paper and a crayon.

I ended up by asking Tiffany about pricing for interpretation services.Simultaneous interpretation on a conference has a 60 minute minimum and costs $6.50 per minute. Unless the language is Japanese, in which case the cost is $8.00 per minute. I asked Maddalena why Japanese costs more and she told me it has always been that way in the interpretation business. Japanese has too different a sentence structure and too many additional linguistic shadings that can change the perception of the content. Professional Japanese language interpreters are in high demand as the specialists of this specialized field. I asked InterCall to confirm that these costs followed the standard practice of being charged per person per minute, so that I'd have to pay quite a bit for a large audience. Tiffany told me that in fact the prices are per minute per language for the entire conference, not per participant. So to get your one-hour conference call translated into German with a live specialist would only cost an extra $390. That's a steal. I may start having my webinars translated into Lithuanian just for the sheer sport of it!

Technorati Tags: audio conferencing, IAL, InterCall, presentations, interpreting, teleconferencing, telephone conferencing, translation, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Win Free Webinar Consulting!

Yes, you read that right. As a special incentive to attend my upcoming March 8 instructional webinar with Adobe, we'll be giving away one hour of webinar consulting time to a lucky attendee. You can use your hour to get speaker coaching, review your event materials, critique a rehearsal or live event, or set up a plan of attack for producing a new webinar.

The March 8 webinar itself is completely free. It will last for one hour, beginning at 10am Pacific time, 1pm Eastern time. If you live in another time zone and want to get your local equivalent, you can use TimeAndDate.com.

I'll be covering a complete six-step approach to making your webinars more effective. I cover everything from initial planning, through the mechanics of production and promotion, to delivery and followup. There is information for people who work behind the scenes setting up and administering webinars, as well as tips and tricks for people who present the webinar online.

This is being put on through the good graces of Adobe and showcases their Acrobat Connect web conferencing product. You can listen over your choice of a telephone connection or your computer speakers. The platform easily supports both Windows and Macintosh operating systems (as well as most Linux systems that have a good Flash implementation).

To register for the March 8 webinar and get in the running for the free hour of consulting, go to www.effectivewebinars.com. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: Acrobat Connect, Adobe, presentations, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

Live Meeting Encounters The Borg

I should explain that title for the readers in our audience who didn't follow the adventures of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The Borg were an alien culture that snatched up other civilizations' people and technologies, "assimilating" them into a giant collective consciousness where individuality was nonexistent and bits and pieces of hardware and software were meshed with live creatures to form hive-like automatons, serving the common good. Once the Borg set their sites on a target, the eventual takeover was a foregone conclusion, as the Borg had the advantage of massive resources, advanced technologies lifted and adapted from everywhere, and a single-minded determination to take the pieces they found useful and destroy the rest. As they were fond of telling people who tried to fight back against their relentless onslaught, "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

Now that I have firmly established my geek quotient, we can move on to what this has to do with Live Meeting. I just noticed today that when I tried to go to the product page for Microsoft Live Meeting, I was instead directed to a site for Microsoft Unified Communications. It used to be that you could type in www.livemeeting.com or the even older www.placeware.com and go directly to the Live Meeting product page. Convenient and pretty much what I would expect, either as a current customer or a potential sales prospect. But some time very recently, Microsoft changed things. Ask for the product and you get a densely packed collection of information about the new Unified Communications conglomeration. Honestly, I can't even figure out whether I should refer to it as a product suite, a product offering, a solution framework, or something else. The page has no mention of either Placeware or Live Meeting, making it rather confusing to someone who finds themselves there after typing in a product name web address!

If you have the tenacity to dig through the tabs on the web page, you can make your way to the third tab, labeled "Unified Solutions" where you will find Microsoft Office Live Meeting listed in a column of eight product names under the generic heading of "Technology." Click on the product name and nothing happens. Eventually you will realize that the block of text next to it is an overview of the product and you can click again on a generic "Learn more" button. Voila! You finally arrive at the Live Meeting main product page. I will now do you a favor and tell you that the direct website address for the product is: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/livemeeting -- Use it wisely.

There was a time, many years ago, when I thought that Placeware was the niftiest thing since sliced bread. I liked working with their technology and their people. Then they got bought up by Microsoft and I immediately saw user interface changes I didn't like (I wish I still had the email, but I remember sending my account rep at the time a detailed list that set out obvious ways in which the product had been made more difficult to use). Now Microsoft has all but abandoned direct sales of the product (they still promote it through channel resellers) and has worked to remove easy acknowledgment of its existence on their website.

I still hold out hope that Microsoft Unified Communications will eventually include an upgrade to the Live Meeting product with renewed attention to it from a sales, marketing, and support perspective. But I have no evidence for that yet. It continues to look like Microsoft is throwing all its weight behind presence-based collaboration and is ceding the formal one-to-many presentation technology space to its rivals. A pity. But I suppose resistance is futile.

Technorati Tags: Live Meeting, Microsoft, Unified Communications, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webinar

More Conferencing Comparisons From Germany

Robert Harnischmacher wrote me to make sure I saw the new press release from www.webconferencing-test.com. They have extensively updated their website showing summary comparisons between five web conferencing technologies. When they first created this site, I was one of a number of bloggers and writers in America and Germany who got on their case about the wording in their comparison charts and what looked like a conflict of interest in their vendor relationships. Publicare (the owner of the site) has gone to great lengths to address these concerns very openly and extensively. I commend them for the public care (pun intended) they show in the new design.

As their press release states, the site is geared towards a comparison of low-cost group collaboration software appropriate for small businesses and the self-employed. This means that they don't place great importance on things like user registration management and reporting, presenter/attendee interactions, and other features that are useful in more formal, one-to-many webinars. For this reason, they chose to evaluate WebEx MeetMeNow instead of its Meeting Center or Event Center. Fair enough... I would agree that it's a better comparison with Citrix's base GoToMeeting product. But for some reason they chose to look at Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional instead of the lower-end Connect product, which is more geared towards the collaborative market. They might want to shift their focus with that vendor some time in the future.

They added Netviewer one2meet to their comparison chart. I'm not familiar with that company or software. Netviewer is a German company and it's nice that Publicare's German customer base has a locally-oriented product in their own language to consider.

Publicare's summaries on the site include a quick overall score comparison based on seven areas of consideration. As with "thumb-up/thumb-down" movie reviews, quick summaries should be taken with a grain of salt and used as a guide to determining which contenders you want to spend more time digging into in detail. Your priorities may not be the same as the reviewer's. This is true no matter who puts it together, and isn't a slam against Publicare.

The results page includes another small but telling functional improvement to the site. You now have easy one-click access to the vendor websites and free trial offers for each product. That is very welcome and much easier to use than the old site's design.

Their System Requirements table is very useful for quickly skimming through the operating systems and browsers officially supported by each vendor. This is a big help if you have specific platform needs.

I think the most ambitious page in the website is Publicare's attempt to summarize licensing models and costs, along with a calculation of virtual savings for a representative business changing their in-person meetings to online collaboration. You could use this as a basis for your own calculations to justify expenditures. Putting together a table of licensing costs for web conferencing software is like trying to herd eels... the vendors keep wriggling around with special packages, discounts for pre-purchase, bundled audio options, and so on. But this chart is a great overview for comparative purposes.

The features comparison table is again useful mainly as an overview to guide your more detailed investigation and experimentation. Knowing that all products on the chart offer "Chat" does not tell you whether you will like the way it is implemented. Maybe some offer both public and private chat modes, while others have public-only. How do you initiate a chat conversation... through a separate menu command or a simple right-click on an attendee's name? Can a meeting host mute an attendee's chat privileges if they start to abuse their rights? Again, those kinds of questions are beyond the scope of any table of this sort, and it's not a fault of Publicare. Just remember that you still have work to do after you review a table like this.

With all these changes to the site, I have changed my tune from angry skepticism to cheerful endorsement of Publicare's webconferencing-test.com. It is now a very useful tool for those seeking an introduction to some of the well-known collaborative meeting software products. Nice job, Robert and friends!

Technorati Tags: Publicare, vendor selection, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting

Cheap And Easy - Yugma Web Conferencing

I recently took Yugma COO Karel Lukas up on his offer to have a serious discussion about the product and the company. We spent quite a while talking about the current features of Yugma's web conferencing software, their vision for the future, and the company philosophy.

Yugma has been the company name from inception, but up until a month ago, they distributed their web conferencing software under the product name of LetsPowWow. They decided to start the new year with a new branding for their product and relabeled the software to take the same name as the company. So now Yugma sells Yugma.

Karel tells me that the company spent time analyzing how to meet the demands of the largest possible market for web conferencing software. They decided that the masses were calling for several features: They wanted something that was easy to learn and use, with a very simple interface. It had to work on a variety of computer platforms. And it had to be inexpensive. Yugma built a product dedicated to fulfilling those goals.

Karel says that while real-time group collaboration is the "sweet spot" for Yugma, it has also been successfully used for 1-to-many presentations with up to 50 people in the audience. Still, the product at this time doesn't support formal structured webinar features such as audience registration, password control, polling, and reporting, so I am more comfortable classifying it as a collaborative group conferencing product at the moment.

When you fire up Yugma, a Java applet loads in your browser. The product has been tested for proper operation on the popular Windows and Macintosh operating systems and common browsers on both types of machines. Linux is currently being tested for specific configurations. Your control panel appears in a simplified browser window running down the right side of your screen. You can move and shrink the control panel, but you can't resize its window. At the top of your control panel, you see a session ID number and a dial-in number for use during the conference. Although it is not a toll-free number, the conferencing is provided free of charge as part of the package, which is awfully convenient. No additional contracts or setup! The audio conferencing is provided through a partnership with FreeConference.com. At this time, Yugma does not support any internet audio capabilities.

As a presenter, your default action is simply to show your entire desktop to your audience. Options let you promote another audience member to presenter status so they show their desktop, or to cede control of your mouse and keyboard to an audience member so they can drive your computer. Yugma built in a priority override, so that any mouse movement by the host locks out the remote user from control for about three or four seconds. Therefore you can react to someone attempting to open or modify something they shouldn't simply by wiggling your mouse (and then shutting off the remote control option!).

There is a type-in chat window in the control panel that lets you initiate a private conversation with an audience member or lets people type in a public forum. Again, the product does not support large-scale webinar features such as role-based permissions that would let audience members send chats to all presenters or would let presenters answer a chat question with a private response (other than opening another chat window with that person).

A very simple interface lets you send an email invitation to one or more prospective audience members. It fills in your session id and a direct URL link to the session. You fill in email addresses and any other text you want to use.

Annotation tools let you place the usual assortment of lines, circles, rectangles, and highlighter overlays on your screen. You can adjust line widths and color very easily. You do not have the ability to add a text box. I found the annotation tools to be very easy to use and I liked the fact that you can slap them on top of anything you are displaying. Many other products only allow annotations on a special blank page whiteboard or on top of imported slides. I found a couple of small inconveniences in the drawing interface, such as hidden confirmation windows making the product feel like it had stopped working. Karel tells me that they have short-term plans for an upgrade release that will significantly improve the annotation and whiteboarding facilities.

We tested the smoothness and speed of desktop sharing with my worst-case "torture test" PowerPoint slide show. This uses a lot of detailed graphics, fancy slide transitions, and animated movement on the screen. I could see jumps in the polling and transmission of the screen images so that movements appeared as jerky discontinuities rather than smooth motions on the audience side. That is a common symptom for web conferencing products when attempting to broadcast full-screen graphics with lots of continuous redraws. My file gives the software a rather severe stress test. In more common usage, I was quite satisfied with the software's ability to rapidly display a drop-down menu or follow the presenter's cursor movement across the screen.

Karel is very proud of Yugma's "disruptive pricing" for the web conferencing services they offer. You can get the complete price chart directly from the company's website. The easiest way to try it out is with Yugma Free. As the name suggests, there is no charge for the web or audio portion of the conference and you can have as many sessions as you want, with each session lasting as long as you want. A session can have a maximum of 10 attendees. In the free version, you see a banner advertisement at the bottom of the control panel (currently just Yugma promotional banners, but the company plans to sell this space as a revenue generator).

Upgrading to Yugma Premium adds on features for remote computer control, scheduling sessions, recording a session, and storing files on the Yugma server for attendee download. Pricing is based on the maximum number of audience members you want to allow in a session. 10-member rooms are available for $9.95 a month, while a 50-person room is $99.95. That's ridiculously cheap, with additional discounts available if you prepay for 12 months of service.

Karel was very open with some other details about the software and the company and I thought I would share a few of them with you as points of interest. In order to get a new software product out the door quickly, the company decided to use offshore programming supported by a core local team. They based the software on an open source base and went with a Java approach to maximize cross-platform compatibility. Product planning right now includes the addition of larger session capacity, a pay per use pricing model, VOIP (internet audio), presenter video, and audience polling.

The company sees a great opportunity for inexpensive web collaboration in concert with Web 2.0 community collaboration. In much the way that WebEx has teamed up with AOL Instant Messenger, Yugma could tie in with internet community sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook, and so on. (DISCLAIMER: Those company names are my own representative examples and have no real or implied business relationship with Yugma that I know of.) I think this is a great path to follow and it could really open up the use and acceptance of web conferencing by the masses.

Karel shared some other long-term plans that were confidential, but gave me a good feeling about the company's prospects and chances for success. I like the way they are thinking and I think you'll be seeing some interesting announcements from them over the remainder of this year and on into the longer future. If you want to try out a very easy to use piece of software for web conferencing without breaking your budget, give Yugma a try.

Technorati Tags: application sharing, collaboration, collaborative technologies conference, LetsPowwow, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webinar, yugma

A Little Bit Faster Now, A Little Bit Slower Now

I truly do hate sitting in an audience and watching a presenter linger on a slide for five to ten minutes at a time, gabbing away. If you are going to use visual aids to help grab attention and support your points, it helps to change the graphics frequently. For one thing, you should be making a single, easily understood point with each slide. Your audience should take away a clearly defined nugget of information or conclusion with each graphic.

One of the most amazing presentations I ever saw was a video of a speaker giving a live presentation in front of a room. The subject had to do with branding yourself as an individual. The presenter spoke rapidly and used a new slide every two or three seconds on average. I'd guess that he ran through 100+ slides in a five minute presentation. (I have been unable to find that video with any of my favorite search engines, so if you happen to know what I'm talking about and can shoot me the URL, I would be eternally grateful).

For a slide to be even marginally effective at that speed, you can imagine that it must use no text and show a single, easily grasped picture that encapsulates a resonant concept in a clearly identifiable image.

Admittedly, a presentation such as that one is a novelty item. In a long presentation of 30 minutes or more, keeping up that kind of energy and pace would be exhausting and draining for the audience and speaker alike. But I'd like you to think of it in the same way that fashion shows highlight trends and styles by exaggerating them in the costumes the models present. Take away the idea as something to emulate in a more practical way with your own presentations.

Step one is obviously to reduce the amount of text you are using. If you are a typical slide show creator, you go about your creative process by thinking about what you want to say to the crowd and then writing it in bullet points on your slides. I recently saw a business blog where the author wrote, "I gave a presentation this morning at an industry conference. Here are the slides I used, in case you are interested." Very commendable. I took a look at the presentation. It was written like a white paper. I could read the entire content of the talk on the slides. That is great as a leave-behind or reference for people who couldn't attend.

But I couldn't help feeling sorry for the people in the audience at that conference. There were only a couple of options for the type of experience they would have. If they were close enough to the screen to read all that dense text, then they probably read it faster than the presenter could say it out loud. Therefore, on every slide they were sitting and fidgeting, waiting for him to "turn the page" so they could continue reading at their own pace. If they were farther from the screen, they couldn't read it at all, and felt like they were missing some valuable content. They eventually had to shut down their visual information gathering and sit back, treating the presentation as an audio-only event.

Step two is to take the time to incorporate interesting and engaging visuals that give some kind of contextual support for the information you are presenting. Try to avoid PowerPoint clip art and auto shapes in favor of photographic images. Use stock photo libraries available on the web. Some are free, many charge $1 per image or less. The power of photography is much greater than that of abstractions such as cartoon figures and geometric shapes.

Step three is to pace your talk and your slides. This is where things get specialized for a webinar environment. In a live presentation you can easily slip in "quick" slides. Perhaps you'll use a brief title card to introduce a new section. Perhaps you'll use two slides in rapid succession to show a transformation or comparison of two items. For small periods of time, you can be like that adrenaline-fueled presenter I mentioned earlier. But on a webinar, you have to account for delays and differences in the amount of time it takes all audience members to receive a new slide. Some people have slower connections, or are experiencing heavy bandwidth usage on their local network. Some have older computers with slower graphics cards, or may have joined late and haven't cached the presentation locally (if that's how your webinar technology works). There is no way to know in advance how long it may take everybody to see a new slide (Some vendors are now incorporating indicators for the presenters so you can see when slides have been received, which is a fantastic presentation aid. But it doesn't help you while developing your script and your presentation.)

My rule of thumb is that no slide should be on the screen for LESS than 10-15 seconds. That means you can't write a script that says: "Some examples of popular sports include: Football (*slide*), Baseball (*slide*), Hockey (*slide*), and Curling (*slide*)..." A portion of your audience will still be looking at football while you are talking about curling. You need to change your planned presentation to have a little more to say about each of those sports, to give the slides time to catch up.

If you want to show a brief title card to keep your audience moving along with you, that's fine. But again, make sure that you have some filler planned while you show the slide. Section titles are great places to say, "Let's pause for a moment here before moving on to the next section. I'll take a sip of water while you think about that last point." It's okay to be human when presenting. Just let your audience know how you are managing the flow and why they aren't hearing you for a moment.

I gave you a minimum time per slide, so I expect that many of you are wondering what my maximum is per slide. It's not quite equivalent, since there is not a technological problem with sitting on a slide. Just a psychological one in terms of holding your audience's attention. I usually shoot for an average of 60 seconds per slide when pacing my online presentations, knowing that some will be shorter, some longer. I don't like spending more than three minutes on a single slide, and that's really pushing the limit.

By the way, this is another example of how recorded on-demand webcasts differ from live webinars. A recording plays at a set speed that is the same for all viewers. You can go back to using short-display slides, secure in the knowledge that your audience sees them as you display them. If you have the time and the opportunity, it is more effective to create shorter, faster moving presentations for on-demand playback than you use for a live interactive webinar.

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint, presentations, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, webinar