The Webinar Blog

Web Conferencing For Training And Education

Stream57 put out a press release today announcing new features targeted at the use of their webcasting product for e-learning and training applications. This started me thinking... I've been noticing a lot more publicity and attention being paid to remote training lately.

Before I started Webinar Success, I worked in product marketing at a Silicon Valley software company. My uses for web conferencing at that time were primarily lead generation, sales presentations, analyst briefings, customer update sessions, and internal demonstrations of new product features or branding changes. My time spent running formal corporate training classes had been many years earlier, before web conferencing was available. So I'm still discovering new and interesting features and ways of applying the technology to training needs.

Of course some of the big enterprise-targeted web conferencing vendors have had specialized education and training versions of their products for years. WebEx Training Center (undergoing a name change to WebEx Online Classroom), Saba Centra, iLinc's LearnLinc, and Elluminate are examples of enterprise conferencing packages with features designed to support education.

Along with live collaboration products for educators, there are also companies specializing in products for creating on-demand educational presentations. Examples of these products include Brainshark (which I use on my website), Articulate, and Adobe Presenter. Adobe is really more of a hybrid, allowing users to present on-demand content inside of a live collaborative training session run with Acrobat Connect Professional.

When looking at remote training products, a variety of features become important in ways that are unfamiliar to those outside the domain. There are usually much more stringent requirements for tracking attendance, progress, and interim status for students than for casual attendees of a marketing-oriented event. You may offer a series of sessions that make up a total curriculum.

Testing features become much more critical and sophisticated than the simple polling and surveys found in most conferencing products. I have seen implementations where the product can create different tests for different students to minimize the opportunity for cheating. It's common for these products to shuffle the order of questions and answers between sessions. You may be able to configure whether the student gets to review correct answers, take another shot at an incorrect answer, or is forced to go back and review content before moving on.

Some products include electronic certification attached to a student's records after they successfully complete coursework and testing. The online system may link to a larger Learning Management System (LMS) to handle records maintenance and a variety of other administrative tasks. As you get into these types of integrations, you need to be aware of a new vocabulary of standards and abbreviations such as SCORM and AICC.

But even with all of these special considerations, the basic tenets of good presentation content and style remain remarkably consistent for any type of web-based presentation. Shy away from text-heavy visual content. Keep your voice engaging, enthusiastic, and varied. Find ways to acknowledge and interact with your audience. Speak to them as individuals rather than a group. Approach content and topic points from their point of view and exploit their self interest.

I plan to include additional emphasis on web conferencing for training over the next few months in response to the interest I am seeing. Look for upcoming webinars on the subject as I get the opportunity to talk about it with some of the vendors and experts in this space.

PS: My apologies to conferencing and collaboration vendors with training specializations if I didn't mention you in this article. I just listed a few names for illustrative purposes. If you'd like to add a comment highlighting your product and its applicability in remote learning, be my guest. This is one post where I'll accept some blatant self-promotion from the crowd!

 

Technorati Tags: Stream57,remote training,remote learning,e-Learning,web conferencing,webcasting,web conference,AICC,SCORM

Publicare Updates Their Web Conferencing Comparison

Publicare just announced an update to their comparison study of web conferencing solutions. The comparison site is www.webconferencing-test.com. I have written about the site before... At first in a disparaging manner, as I thought they were merely promoting a sponsored solution. But I changed my tune and now recommend that people doing an initial survey of web conferencing solutions spend time perusing the site. If nothing else, it helps you to organize your priorities and selection criteria so you can decide what is most important for you in making a decision.

Of course we all know the danger of simply looking at a rankings site and taking the summary information as the entire story. Even Siskel and Ebert came to loathe how "Thumbs Up" and "Thumbs Down" came to replace their longer, more complete film criticism and reviews in many readers' minds. But Publicare lets you drill down to the underlying test criteria it uses in coming up with the final scores and also includes some overview information on each product.

The comparison now features 21 products, mostly concentrating on the use of web conferencing for collaborative group meetings (typically in a small business or personal context) rather than larger public events in more of a broadcast mode. They have a smaller section that looks at enterprise solutions, but even here the focus is on collaboration rather than presentation, evidenced by the fact that they review WebEx Meeting Center rather than Event Center. So use the information in the proper context and you should get good value from their organized approach.

By the way, the site naturally leaves out plenty of competing alternate solutions. It's awfully hard to stay abreast of every conferencing solution on the market. Vendors are updating and introducing web conferencing products at a bewildering pace. That's why I try to stay focused on large event applications. It helps me stay sane!

 

Technorati Tags: Publicare,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,webcasting

ON24 Gets Litigious

When I see a headline in my news feed reader that says "On24 to sue Eesti Post" it sure as heck catches my attention! When I see that it's a story in Baltic Business News ("The leading Estonian business news channel"), I start getting confused. And when I realize that ON24 is the name of an online shopping site for residents of Estonia and Finland, I start to laugh. I guess it's not an appropriate topic for The Webinar Blog after all. But it's good for a Friday Funny appearance. Lawyers for the webcasting company can stand down from alert status.

Technorati Tags: ON24

You Can Say Webinar

This is going to be old territory for some of my long-time readers. But recent events show that the myth of "webinar's protected status" is preventing people from getting what they want from providers.

One of my clients (a very large company) got into an internal email chain about whether they can use the word webinar in call scripts. They said that operators hosting web events had told them they could not say "Welcome to our webinar" in the introduction, because the word was copyrighted.

I'm no lawyer. I took one introductory business law class in college, and that was a heck of a long time ago. But this is just silly. First of all, you can't copyright a word. Look it up at the Copyright Office website. You can copyright literary and recorded works, graphics, architecture, and choreography. You explicitly cannot copyright "titles, names, short phrases, and slogans."

So let's forget about copyrights. The proper thing to look for is trademark ownership. A trademark (or the related issue of service mark) can be applied to "a word, phrase, symbol, or design" or combination thereof "that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others." That's from the US Patent and Trademark Office website.

In general terms, you have to come up with something that identifies your version of the more generic thing as being specific to you. That's why the formal legal versions of trademark usage always use the trademark name as an identifier to a generic term. "Enjoy the benefits of a Kleenex tissue." "Make your copies on a Xerox copier." Kleenex and Xerox are trademarks. Tissue and copier are generics. Once enough people start using your specific term as the generic, you are in danger of losing your trademark protection. Thermos, aspirin, and cellophane all started out as trademarks and now have no protection because they were accepted as generics. Really successful brands face this concern after they have spent years trying to achieve that level of visibility. Google and WebEx are both slightly worried at the moment about people "googling each other" or "hosting a webex." The kind of problem you dream about having when you start out as an entrepreneur!

Anyway, the US Patent and Trademark office has a handy little search engine you can use for free to check on existing or past trademarks. Put in "webinar" and you get 9 hits in combination or alone. The word by itself accounts for three instances. All are labeled as "DEAD" - meaning the applications have been abandoned or declined.

If somebody wanted to try for a trademark on the word now, it would be awfully hard to overcome the generic status of the term. There are untold thousands of usages in print, radio, and electronic communications... All without any branding or trademark identification. And of course we just had Merriam-Webster grant the word official status as an English common noun.

Given that, I would argue that you are pretty darned safe using the word "webinar" any time and any place you want. Just as long as you don't claim it as your exclusive property. Opposing points of view are welcome... Especially if you currently claim to own the trademark on the word!

For those who want to track back posts on this subject, see the following references:

Legal Status of "Webinar"

We Oppose A "Webinar" Trademark (Conferencing News)

Trademark Controversy Followup

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,trademark,copyright

Innovative Features In Conferendum

I got an email from Wolfgang Berger in Germany, asking if I would like to take a look at a relatively new piece of web conferencing software from his young company, Conferendum.

I took him up on the offer, and we went through a demo, followed by a small amount of playing with the presenter's interface on my part. I haven't used it enough for a full product review, but I wanted to tell you about two innovative implementations in the software. Web conferencing products are getting more and more similar, so it's always fun and exciting for me when I see a product that introduces a new slant on a piece of functionality.

The first function involves making it easier for your audience to see content on a shared PowerPoint slide or work document (you can display a snapshot of content from most Microsoft Office documents). In addition to standard annotation tools such as drawing colored lines on the screen, you can specify an arbitrary rectangular region that you want zoomed.

The screen changes to show just the content inside your rectangle, expanded to fit the display area.

You can click a button to return to the normal display of the entire slide content whenever you are ready.

Some other vendors have ways to change display sizes, but this is the first time I have seen a rectangle selection tool used to pick a sub-area for magnification. Neat.

The second new feature was obviously inspired by Conferendum's international target market. They recognize that especially in European business, you deal with a lot of different languages. So they built in an integrated "Translation Room" feature. This is effectively what the e-learning vendors call a breakout room. You designate a language for the room (the choice is used purely for labeling purposes) and a named participant from your participant list. That participant becomes the translator for the room (translation companies would argue that the person is a "simultaneous interpreter" rather than a "translator", but we won't split hairs).

The translator hears the VoIP audio stream from the speaker in the main room of the conference. She translates, speaking into her computer microphone and all other participants in that translation room hear her translated audio stream, rather than the stream coming from the primary speaker. You can have as many of these rooms and separate audio streams as desired.

Again, the basic idea of being able to provide simultaneous audio interpretation is not new, but I like the built-in integration of the labeling and handling of the streaming audio. It seems to me that this would make a natural partnership opportunity for Conferendum and a translation/interpretation provider.

So good job to Conferendum for introducing some new ways to think about web conferencing functionality. If you want to check it out for yourself, they offer a free trial from their website. Oh, and by the way, the software is not intended for things like lead generation webinars... There is no registration or reporting included in the package.

 

Technorati Tags: Conferendum,Wolfgang Berger,web conferencing,web meetings,web events,webinar,webcasting,webcast,translation

Charging For Webinars - Part II

I don't often post follow up articles on my own blog entries, but "Can You Charge For Webinars" generated enough public and private comments that I thought it deserved another look.

First of all, I was probably remiss in not mentioning ConferTel as a webinar technology vendor that is set up for integrated payment processing with customer events. They are the technology suppliers for Business Expert Webinars, which I did mention. A number of streaming webcast vendors also have payment processing capabilities, which they will customize for their clients' needs. Stream57, StreamLogics, and ON24 are examples (there are others as well). ON24 also has the ability for self-service customers to use their registration management system for their events, although this is not the primary business focus for the company.

But the larger issue seems to be that some people took my article to be a battle cry against ever charging for webinars. I'll take responsibility for the lack of clarity... "The burden of communications rests with the communicator." But that was certainly not my intent, nor my belief. I have clients who charge for their educational webinars. They are right to do so, they are happy doing so, and I love helping them ensure their events are professional, valuable, and glitch-free.

I pointed out definite demand and interest in holding fee-based webinars, both at the start and the end of my article. But I also wanted to point out practical issues you have to be ready to face and plan for as an online merchant of information. Many smaller businesses and sole proprietor consultants (as I mentioned, I hear from these people a lot) just want to run a quick charged event and get money for their efforts. They are convinced the world will beat a path to their door to gather the pearls of wisdom emanating therefrom.

Walter Wimberly commented that in his larger size enterprise company, they run about 300 webinar classes a year, mostly fee-based. He pointed out the necessity of having good planning in place to deal with technical issues and clear guidelines on how you will work with your customers. He also said they use a separate accounting department and systems to do enrollment and invoicing. Points well taken.

Tim Bourquin said that "just because the perception of some people is that content should be free, doesn't make it correct." I couldn't agree more. But that doesn't mean the perception isn't there. I tried to point out that as a marketer and promoter of your events, you will be fighting a more difficult battle to get attendance at a pay event than you would for a free event. Plan for it.

And in a delightful demonstration of flat out chutzpah, Paul Colligan sent me "some link love" and requested a link back to his response blog entry where he refers to my article as a "silly blog post." Done, Paul.

Paul recommends running your registration and invoicing through third party software. He names a number of them (different ones than I named in my article). You then send all registrants a confirmation message with the login information to your event. Okay, you can choose to ignore security considerations and let people forward the login information to their friends. But you should at least be aware of the consideration and have it accounted for in your planning. I don't know why you would get your knickers in a twist when someone suggests it would be nice to have the option of preventing that if you want to as a provider.

He then recommends charging people to view a recorded podcast of the event. That's fine too... It wasn't the focus of my article, but I always recommend making a recording available after a live event. And charging for it is no different a consideration than charging for a live event. I mentioned Brainshark in my original article, which has an entire library of prerecorded content available for free or for a fee.

My summary in the original post was meant to indicate that there is a market demand for a single, pre-integrated solution for people whose time and skills are better spent doing other things than running invoicing systems and tying together different providers' software. If you use a webinar solution that includes full registration and attendee communications (Paul mentions GoToWebinar, which works great as a solution of choice for many small and mid-sized businesses doing webinars on a budget), shouldn't you expect it to handle this additional level of functionality? I do, and yet it's terribly uncommon.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,webcast,webcasting,web events,payment processing,event registration,Paul Colligan,Tim Bourquin,Walter Wimberly,ConferTel,Stream57,Streamlogics,ON24

Can You Charge For Webinars?

Of course you can charge people to attend your webinar, but is it practical?

It's often small businesses that ask me for advice and assistance with setting up fee-based web seminars. These may be consultants and service professionals who provide valuable knowledge and experience to their clients. They get paid when they go to a customer site and consult. They hold local room-based training classes and charge people to attend. It seems perfectly natural to extend their reach over the internet and offer that same professional value in a webcast.

Unfortunately, what seems reasonable in theory turns out to be fraught with difficulties in practice.

The first big problem you hit is crowd psychology when dealing with internet-delivered content. The public has come to expect information to be available for free on the internet. The same people who will buy a business book or pay to attend an in-room lecture balk at paying for content on the Web. The ubiquity of search engines, community forums and wikis, and free business collateral and product information have made the internet a virtual soup kitchen... All you have to do is show up and someone will fill your bowl with nutritional content, no charge and no questions asked.

The second problem arises in dealing with the webinar technology vendors. It's extremely rare to find a webinar vendor that has payment processing built in as an off-the-shelf solution. Vcall from PrecisionIR is one web conferencing product that offers fee collection as a registration management option. But the registration management costs extra. Several vendors will design and integrate payment processing as a custom professional services project, but this is seldom time and cost effective for small businesses trying out the idea to see if it will work for them.

The third problem with charging for webinars is administrative. Most of the big webinar vendors have a way to assign a password to an event. Only people with the password can attend. But if it's the same password for everyone, you can't stop an unscrupulous person from registering and passing on the login information to others. Secure login for a paid event should verify each attendee individually to make sure they have paid and are logging in only once. What do you do about people who don't attend? How about those who have technical problems or simply feel the content wasn't worthwhile? Are you prepared to offer refunds? Will you still have to pay your technology provider for those registrants?

Both Business Expert Webinars and Brainshark Content Network act as portal operations to give businesses a way to try out fee-based presentations... They manage the technical side of things and you submit your content as a provider. Of course you don't have the same control you would have in putting on your own event and you have to do some fee sharing with the portal company. They can also choose to reject your content if they deem it inappropriate for their audience or standards.

KRM Information Services produces fee-based webinars as a steady business, concentrating mostly on special-interest events targeted at associations and affinity groups. And there are a few companies out there that provide registration management as a separate technology offering, allowing it to be integrated with various web conferencing products. Corvent AMP, EventBuilder from Encounter Collaborative, and MeetingOne's EventPlanner are examples.

But there is a niche waiting to be served for low cost webinar technology that includes self-service registration management with payment processing and appropriate event security. Get busy, vendors!

UPDATE: Please read Part Two for more on this subject. Many people seemed to read things into this post that I never intended.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,webcast,webcasting,web events,payment processing,Vcall,KRM,Business Expert Webinars,Brainshark Content Network,Corvent,EventBuilder,EventPlanner,event registration

It's Called A Webinar... Look It Up

Merriam-Webster announced more than 100 additions to their Collegiate Dictionary yesterday. In a press release that is heavy on the fun of misheard song lyrics (a "mondegreen"), the president and publisher makes special mention of "webinar" - "One more example of the significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language."

So the next time someone complains about this non-word, I'll just direct them to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/webinar...

Webinar: a live online educational presentation during which participating viewers can submit questions and comments.

(I'll leave aside the fact that I have sat through some webinars that weren't very educational!)

 

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,linguistics,Merriam-Webster

A Top Web Conferencing Resource

Guy Kawasaki has been promoting a startup venture for a while now. It's called Alltop and is designed as a portal to key information sources on the Web. The site has a number of broad categories and in each category you can find listings of sites that reference the topic and a few of the latest articles.

Guy and his team hand pick sites for inclusion based on general usefulness and richness of content along with credibility, mentions in the community, and other factors.

Alltop recently added a category page for Event Planning. Among all the sites talking about best practices and key information related to live in-room events, you will find two sites dealing with web-delivered events (web seminars and web conferences). I'm proud to say that The Webinar Blog and Webinar Wire were both selected as Alltop trusted sources for information on web meetings.

Maybe some day there will be enough general interest blogs and websites on web conferencing to justify its own category. For now, I'm happy to keep supplying information of general use to vendors and end users alike.

By the way, if you want the inside scoop from a particular vendor of web conferencing technology, there are several blogs available with company news. I have gathered them into a sub-page on my blog for easy reference. You will find blogs from companies such as Adobe, iLinc, Intercall, ReadyTalk, WebEx, and more. If you are reading this blog on its own web page, you can see the link over in the right-hand column under the heading of "Other Pages".

If you are reading this post in a feed reader or on a syndicated site (a number of sources pick up and repost my articles) you can get to the list directly by clicking through to this URL: http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/detailed-blog-information.html

If you have a blog on web conferencing and aren't on the list, shoot me a quick email and I'll be delighted to add you. More public information benefits everyone. And if you don't have your own blog, don't forget that you can submit posts on Webinar Wire as a contributing author!

 

Technorati Tags: Alltop,Event Planning,Webinar Wire,webinar,web meetings,web conferencing,web conference,web events,web seminar,Guy Kawasaki