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Adobe just announced “a major overhaul” of the Acrobat Connect Pro Community Site (www.connectusers.com).
Details are available here from David Yun, the “Community Manager” (Is that anything like a community organizer? David could be the next president!)
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Today’s reader question comes from Renee:
“I was reading through your blog and I noticed that you said that we shouldn’t post the recorded webinar as is. I have been doing that, but I agree with you. I have a very hard time sitting through recorded ones myself. How should I handle this? Should I record a shorter one that encourages them to attend a live event?”
I have indeed pointed out that people’s attention spans are shorter when watching a recorded event than when joining a live session. I like to work on post-production of archive recordings when it is practical to do so. The big exception is for fee-based sessions. You want paying members to see everything that happened so they don’t feel shortchanged. (They would probably still get more value out of a shorter, more focused recording, but you can’t make them believe that!)
You have a few options, in order of time and effort:
1) As you said, you could simply schedule another live session and make a promotional recording that invites people to the next event. This doesn’t really satisfy the needs of people who attended and want to review the material or the needs of people in other time zones who can’t attend your live session for practical reasons.
1) Make some basic cuts to “clean up” your recording of the live session. At a minimum, you should get rid of introductory technical instructions on how to type in comments, change the screen size, etc. Anything that the recording audience won’t be able to do. Cut out pauses where you were waiting for audience input as they answered polls or questions. Keep the recording flowing with pure information delivery.
2) Add additional edits to remove little vocal stutters and flubs. Get rid of long pauses, umms and errrs, searching for the right word. Remove distracting background noises where possible. Balance volume levels between speakers. Remove background hiss if possible. This is grueling work and you need to develop skills with a good digital editor (I use Goldwave). When I do this kind of cleanup for clients, I often go through the recording in two-second increments, removing sub-second problem noises. It takes a long time and each individual edit is inconsequential. But the cumulative effect produces a much more professional sounding archive that better holds the listeners’ attention.
3) Break your recording into smaller chunks. You can use an editor to split the archive into several smaller pieces. Give your recording audience a menu that lets them choose the subtopic of interest and lets them watch just that section. Maybe you can do a break at each speaker in a multi-speaker event, or at different topic concentrations on your agenda. You might need to overlay a short bit of wrapper at the start or end of these pieces so they don’t sound too abrupt.
4) Produce a new presentation (or several) built purely for recorded use. Ouch. This completely doubles your workload, but it produces the absolute best results. Write a real script, word for word. Record it with a high quality microphone. Cut down the information to just convey the key points. Recording viewers want to get in and out as fast as possible. Remember, a YouTube video has to be less than 10 minutes. Your recording should be that short as well!
I know… “I put in all that work and time to get the live event on the air. I don’t want to spend an equal amount of time just to have a recording of it!” It’s your choice. If the archive is purely a backup resource for people who saw the live show, you can get away with less work. If you are truly using the recording to grab new viewers and stimulate their interest, it makes sense to put in just as much work as you did on the live show. The recording will live for much longer.
(I usually stay away from actively plugging my services on this blog, but I should mention that I can do this work for you if you don’t have the skills, software, or time to do it yourself. It involves a lot of manual labor, and I charge accordingly, but it’s worth it to some clients. Use my Webinar Success contact form if you’d like details or a quote.)
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I just found a blog called “Collaborative Thinking.” It is written by Mike Gotta, a principal analyst at Burton Group. Mike’s one-line summary of his content is “Perceptions on collaboration and social software.” It’s a perfect complement to my blog. I concentrate on public webinars, while Mike looks at collaborative web conference meetings, Unified Communications, social networking, and all the other ways that collaboration gets tied in to work and life.
Mike caught my eye with a post entitled “Web Conferencing: It’s About Adoption, Not Deployment.” He asks why web conferencing hasn’t taken off like email, Twitter, Facebook, or other collaborative technologies. People are chiming in with a variety of insights and opinions. It’s worth a look.
My comment was that a problem (among several other factors mentioned by Mike and others) is that the technology gets saddled with the sins of its users. If you attend a lousy web conference (terrible slides, bad presenter, poorly organized, ineffective demo, etc), you might say “Well that wasn’t worth my time. I don’t like web conferences.” It takes dedicated time and effort to create a good web conference (even a small one on one meeting), whereas you can create a terrible web conference at the drop of a hat. And many people do.
What can you do to help speed the growth of web conferencing? Make your meetings something that others enjoy and want to emulate.
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I recently wrote a post about Why I Hate Speakerphones (over on Webinar Wire) in which I mentioned that even though the sound might seem all right while you are doing the presentation on the phone, the recorded version can show up little background noises you weren’t aware of at the time.
I’d like to add a similar warning about Blackberry and other wireless devices. I always tell presenters to turn these off, but they usually choose to just mute the sound or set them to vibrate, or whatever the proper terminology is (you can tell I don’t own one).
Everything seems fine during the call. Then I go to edit the audio recording and balance volumes and I find that there is a faint beeping noise being picked up on the phone line. This is a remnant of the wireless signal being received and transmitted by the device. It can get picked up by electrical cables, transmitters, headsets, and other hardware involved in the audio circuitry of your call. It comes across like Morse Code bloops and bleeps. Not very noticeable when you are concentrating on your presentation and listening over a low-fidelity telephone speaker. But wait till I get done cleaning up the sound, raising the volume of soft parts, and isolating background hiss. Suddenly you have a distinct set of tones underlying the spoken voice. And you can’t get rid of these in the edit… They are too mixed in with the foreground vocals.
Arrggh! C’mon people. You can afford to turn off your wireless device for the 60 minutes you are giving a public presentation. What are you going to do… Notice an interesting incoming message and tell your audience to wait while you answer it? Be bold. Turn off the power!
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This week we have a bumper crop of free education for marketing professionals (or others who simply have marketing as one of their many work duties).
You only have an hour or two left to sign up for my presentation today with Citrix on “Using Webinars To Engage Prospects.” You’ll see how to better work with your target audience before, during, and after your presentation.
That’s followed by tomorrow’s Adobe presentation with Michael Madej of IndustryWeek magazine. We’ll be sharing how to make webinars a part of your overall digital marketing strategy.
As always, my upcoming events are featured on www.effectivewebinars.com, so be sure to come back and check the list frequently. I’m taking a break for the end of year holiday slowdown, but I’ll be back in January with more freebies for you!
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Today’s hardcore technical question comes from Thomas, who writes:
I use GoToWebinar and want to play a video during my webinar (.wmv), I have gotten it to work sometimes and sometimes its just a black box that the attendee is seeing. I called GoToWebinar and they said they are working on getting that to work and that sometimes it does work. She said, "Go search the internet, I know someone gets it to work" This is where I ran across your blog, do you know of anyone doing it consistently or a place that may have more information on the subject?
Thomas, I think you are doomed to disappointment with this approach. GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar have excellent screen sharing performance, but they are not designed to stream a smooth full motion video clip. The software effectively takes a series of screen snaps and displays them in rapid succession (this is a gross oversimplification!). While this approach is enough for small movements that are localized, a video has all the bits in constant motion. It will always come out looking jerky and choppy for many attendees.
As to the black video square, I have seen this problem show up when you have "Hardware Overlay" selected in your video player. Assuming you show the video in Windows Media Player, right-click and check under Tools:Options:Performance:Advanced - Then try unselecting the option for "Use overlays". If this doesn't help, you can experiment with the options on that page for "flipping" and "video smoothing." I'm afraid I can't give you an exact answer to your specific problem, but this is the right area to concentrate on.
Here is the relevant entry from the GoToMeeting FAQ page (https://www2.gotomeeting.com/default/help/g2m/tips_for_success/faqs.htm)
Is video streaming supported in GoToMeeting?
While we do not yet support streaming video, our GoToMeeting technology is fast enough to keep up with screen changes on the desktop, so it appears as if it is streaming video.
Because more data is being sent to all meeting attendees, bandwidth usage will go up for all meeting participants. The amount will depend on the resolution and length of the video.
Also, certain versions of Windows Media Player with DirectX (Microsoft DirectX is an advanced suite of multimedia application programming interfaces (APIs) built into Microsoft Windows operating systems), will not display the video.
To enable video display for your meetings, you need to disable Hardware Overlay for your player. Please see your media player's help section for directions on how to disable Hardware Overlay.
The sad thing about this statement is that bit about "certain versions of Windows Media Player with DirectX will not display the video." That means that some attendees with certain configurations on their machines are simply going to be out of luck.
Your workaround (and it's a clumsy one that I don't particularly like) is to host the video clip on a website and ask your attendees to go link to the proper page during your meeting, watch the clip, and then close that page so you can continue with your presentation. You lose control of the synchronization of events, but they can all see it.
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This Thursday I will be presenting a free session on tips for running a successful webinar. Glance Networks is sponsoring the webinar, and you’ll have a chance to see their software in action. Glance uses the screen-sharing approach to web conferencing, with a very uncluttered, no-frills interface. So this will be an excellent learning experience for those of you who run web meetings and webinars with similar kinds of systems. You don’t have to include all the fancy bells and whistles of higher priced webinar technologies. Watch as I use voice techniques and simple slide interactions to get my points across. We already have several hundred registrants, so don’t miss your opportunity to get your questions into the mix.
Here’s a banner link, courtesy of EventSpan:
If that doesn’t work for whatever reason, you can always go to my upcoming events page on Webinar Success: www.effectivewebinars.com
See you on Thursday!
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Time is running out for a last minute registration to attend my presentation covering things you need to know for your first webinar. This is an introductory topic targeted purely at people who have never done a webinar. No question is too basic or too naive. You’re old enough now to learn the truth about webinars, and you might as well hear the facts from a professional, rather than picking up misinformation out in the playground at recess.
I’m presenting today in cooperation with Arkadin. You can register at this link. Showtime is 11am US Pacific / 2pm US Eastern, so don’t procrastinate!
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