The Webinar Blog

omNovia Adds Slide Transitions

Earlier this month I wrote up a rather long review of omNovia web conferencing. I mentioned that although slide transition effects were preserved upon uploading a PowerPoint deck to the meeting room, conference participants could not see those effects occur during a meeting. The gang at omNovia must have been listening, because the production system is now showing slide transitions faithfully. You can have slides do vertical or horizontal wipes, fades, and other fancy tricks to get from one to the other. It even retains the ability to do an automatic transition based on timing rather than a mouse click. This means you could set up a PowerPoint deck that moves through an entire presentation by itself.

The ability to show slide transitions is extremely rare in web conferencing products that use slide uploads rather than screen sharing to show the presentation. It’s worth giving omNovia a special mention for adding this. The performance of the effects in my testing has been very smooth and faithful to the behavior as seen on my desktop in PowerPoint slideshow mode. That smoothness is something that is impossible to guarantee in screen sharing applications, as the screen polling, transmittal, and reassembly steps can’t keep up with the large graphic redraw requirements of a full screen animation.

Kudos!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,omNovia

The Art Of The Survey

I am a great proponent of using a survey or feedback form at the end of your public webinars. It not only gives you valuable feedback you can use in your analysis and refinement process, but it continues a dialog with your participants, demonstrating that the end of the session is not the end of your interest in communicating with them.

From a technical delivery standpoint, you can expect the response rates to go from best to worst with each of the following methods for asking people to respond. Note that some methods may not be available with a particular web conferencing technology:

1. Use co-browsing to open up the survey form on each participant’s screen while still in the session. Ask them to complete it then and there.
2. Use an automatically displayed form that comes up for each participant as they leave the session.
3. Display a live link within your session and ask participants to click through to it and complete the form.
4. Send people a link to the form in a separate follow-up email after your event and ask them to click through.
5. Display or tell people a URL during your session and ask them to go to that address on their own after the session.

In general, the less of an option they have, and the less proactive they have to be, the better your response rates.

The design of the form also affects your response rate. The most important factor is the number of questions you ask. It is easy to err on both the low and high side when composing survey questions. The quick rule of thumb is that every additional question you include lessens the chance of a person completing ANY of the survey. Yes, even if you ask for one key response at the top and then tell them everything else is optional, people will look at a page full of questions and instantly decide “I don’t have time to deal with all this.” You have lost them and no amount of explanatory text in the survey will help.

But you can also frustrate respondents by asking questions that are too general and should be split up. The most common is to ask a question about “Quality of speakers” in a multi-presenter event. If one speaker is very good and another is bad, what does the participant answer? Do they average it out? How does their response help you? Both you and the respondent know that the question and answer have no practical value. They are just angry at your attempts to make them spend time on a nonsensical query. Take the time to duplicate the question and ask it about each speaker. And if you don’t plan on using that guest speaker again anyway, don’t bother asking at all. What’s the point?

So think carefully about your post-event survey. Is every question necessary and valuable to you? Do you absolutely need the information? Sales and marketing teams are notorious for wanting every piece of qualification and demographic information they can think of jammed into a questionnaire. Then most of the information is never used. “But we might need it some day.” Yes, you might possibly. But here and now, you need more responses to the critical questions that will help you make your web seminars better. Try to enforce a ruthless concentration on that goal.

One final thought. Always include at least one open-response text box asking for general thoughts, impressions, and comments. Many people won’t take the time to write anything, but the ones who do will provide you with insights and feedback you would never get through multiple choice answers to your preset questions.

Technorati Tags: survey design,feedback form,webinar,web seminar,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Thinking About Webinar Replays

I spend most of my time on this blog writing about planning, preparing, and delivering live, interactive webinars. But there is another component to the presentation world that deserves attention – webinar replays. There are a surprising number of options open to you when thinking about how to archive your live presentation. What format should it be in? Do you edit it, or leave it exactly as it went out live? Where do you host it? Do you use an integrated tool from your webinar technology vendor, or third-party recording software? Should you break up your recording into smaller chunks? How about re-recording it just for archival purposes?

On Wednesday, August 19, I’ll be giving a webinar in conjunction with Brainshark concentrating on these topics. We’ll look at the considerations for making the on-demand version of your webinar as effective as possible. You can register by clicking here or if you aren’t using an interactive reader, copy and paste this address to get to the registration page: http://tinyurl.com/mjatsd

We are trying to collect information on common habits regarding webinar replays before the event. I’ll use these to help focus my presentation on the information that will be of greatest help to you. We’ll also share the results for everyone to see. Even if you can’t make the live session, I would appreciate it if you could take two minutes to participate in the survey. We’re running it in an unusual format, using a recorded presentation to capture the information, so you might like to try it just to get an idea of a new way to interact with users in an asynchronous mode. You can click here to run the survey recording (turn on your speakers!) or copy the following link into your browser: http://tinyurl.com/lq2erv

Thanks for your participation, and I hope to see you online on August 19!

Technorati Tags: Brainshark,replay,recorded session,recorded presentation,webinar,web seminar,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

An Embarrassing Webinar Could Win An iPhone

Packetel is running a fun promotional contest that should get their name out there and also provide some amusement. You can submit a web conference blunder, faux pas, goof, or embarrassing moment and be in the running to win an iPhone.

Details are in this press release. I don’t think anybody can top the guy who was caught with child porn because he couldn’t figure out how to turn off his screen sharing application, but I’ll be eager to see what people come up with. If you want other examples, you can always look at this story in the Wall Street Journal about how to embarrass yourself online.

Packetel’s web conference service is known as Turbo Meeting and they offer it in both a SaaS (vendor hosted) model and as a locally installed device on your own network. The contest runs through the month of July.

Technorati Tags: Packetel,Turbo Meeting,webinar,web meeting,online meeting,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Must Your Webinar Be Interactive?

In my last public presentation on webinar presentation skills, I received a question from a listener asking what you can do as a presenter when your audience doesn’t participate or interact. And today I saw a very useful blog post by Julia Young of Facilitate.com on tips for running interactive webinars.

Julia’s tips are spot-on, and I urge you to read, absorb, and apply them. But I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment, just to stimulate discussion.

First I’ll address something that Julia writes in her introduction to the topic:

“If we were designing an in-person meeting, workshop or training session, would we assume that participants would be working on their email, having side-conversations or searching the Internet? I think not!”

Ask a college professor this question and you’ll get a very different answer. People coming into the workforce (and the terminally hip trendies among the older crowd) are absolutely going to multitask. And despite your wishes as a presenter, the fact that you are working with an audience sitting at uber-connected multitasking computers makes it a fundamentally different experience and behavioral expectation than when they are sitting in chairs staring at a presenter in the front of a room. This is one reason I am cynical about the practical value of “attention meters” in some web conferencing products that purport to tell you whether your audience is paying attention to your content based on whether the web conferencing window has focus on the desktop.

I prefer to work on presentation style and techniques that subtly (or not so subtly) refocus attention on your content and your presentation, over and over, in a continuous barrage of attention recapture cues. I assume that people are multitasking and drifting. So I use vocal pitch and speed changes to recapture their auditory attention and interest. I use verbal directions that tell them to refocus on the screen: “So, as you see at the top of the first column…” or “Look at the picture I used to illustrate this concept…” And of course I use direct interactions through chat dialogs, polls, whiteboards, or other technology features.

But let’s face an unpopular truth. There are times when you simply don’t get the participation you wish you had. You ask people for suggestions or comments in the chat field and you get nothing. You ask for voting on polls and see that only a quarter to a half of your audience is bothering to respond. The root cause is most commonly a gap between what you are asking and the audience’s self-interests. If you ask polling questions obviously designed for your benefit rather than the audience’s, there is no reason for them to participate: “Do me a favor and help me with this research… Do you currently have a contract with a web conferencing provider?”  Instead of giving value to your audience, you are asking them to give you the value. And it’s pretty transparent that they are giving you ammunition to come after them with a sales pitch. No wonder they aren’t interested in joining the game.

But even when you have strong content and do everything right, you can simply get an audience that prefers a passive experience. I have done stage acting, stand up comedy, and tour guiding. Anybody in those professions can tell you that the exact same material, delivered exactly the same way, can get completely different responses from different audiences. Sometimes it’s cultural. When I give presentations to a mostly Japanese audience I know to scale back my expectations for interactive responses and typed questions or comments during my presentation. It is considered rude to interrupt a presenter, and there is even a cultural reticence to comment on the material after he or she finishes. (I’m speaking in broad generalities of course.)

Sometimes it is just a weird, inexplicable group dynamic. This can sometimes happen when one individual takes command and barrages you with questions, comments, and attempts to answer other questions from the audience. The other members can simply give up and let the juggernaut take over the role of group spokesman. Other times you never know why you aren’t getting the response you are used to. So when it happens, what can you do?

Here’s a bit of heresy for you: … Stop trying so damned hard!

Have you ever heard of the term “flop sweat?” It’s a performing arts cliché applied to an actor or comedian or public speaker who tries harder and harder to win over an audience, becoming ever more desperate and visibly shaken at the lack of response. You can generate the same impression if you keep waiting longer and longer for people to answer your polls, urging them ever more stridently to type in comments, or trying other interactions with no results. What you are doing in this case is attempting to impose your will on an audience rather than modifying your presentation to meet their preferences and psychological comfort zone.

You have to disassociate yourself from your own predefined concept of what indicates success or failure of your presentation and associate yourself instead with the way your audience wants to take in the information. So instead of vainly trying more and more interaction techniques on unwilling subjects, eliminate the remainder of your polls. Stop urging the audience to answer questions via the chat window. Instead, concentrate on supplying detailed and valuable information in more of a straightforward discourse. The important thing is not to sound disappointed or to make an indication that this isn’t your preferred method of presentation. If they want to hear a lecture, then by golly you’re going to give them a great lecture!

Of course you leave the window open for them to interact and give you feedback. But if they choose not to, that can be okay. A great lecture, delivered well, with valuable content is every bit as effective a communication vehicle as an interactive session. It’s just different. And if you are willing to work the way your audience wants instead of forcing them to work the way you want, you’ll all end up happier.

So have I just told you that interactivity is a bad thing? NO, NO, NO!!! Given the choice, I want to engage my audience in multiple ways: visually, audibly, and kinesthetically. You should plan for interactions, making sure to frame everything in terms of the value TO THEM of participating. But remember that lack of interaction is an interaction itself. It helps you to read your audience. And on those rare occasions when they want to listen passively, have the courage and the flexibility to respect their group behavioral preference and give them the presentation they want.

Technorati Tags: Julia Young,interaction,group dynamics,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

omNovia Web Conferencing Review

I have been using omNovia web conferencing on a number of client projects lately and I suggested to the folks at Publicare that they give it a look on their test list of web conferencing products. Publicare published their mini-review of omNovia with a fairly low test score and highlighted several negatives.

I was interested, as I tend to look at products from a different perspective than they do and I have a technology preference list that would be substantially reordered from theirs. That's not a slam against their testing procedures or results. It's an acknowledgement that products can be suited for different purposes and the user's priorities will determine which comes out in the lead.

Publicare tends to concentrate on suitability for collaborative, participatory web meetings. I concentrate on more formally structured large web events that are primarily a "one to many" or "few to many" information dispersal mechanism for large audiences. My clients have different priorities for the software functionality and I'll use omNovia as an example to highlight some of the differences in focus. This should prove useful both as an examination of concepts and as a mini review of the product, since it is not well known in the industry.

By the way, I should state disclaimers up front. I am not a reseller of omNovia and I have no financial stake in their business, including advertising. I have worked alongside them as an independent service provider on a couple of client projects where they supplied the technology and I supplied the client support services. They also hired me as an outside consultant on a single project to perform an internal product review and test in order to point out areas for product enhancement. This gave me a chance to dig into all areas of product functionality in a much more comprehensive fashion than I might otherwise have been able to.

omNovia uses Adobe Flash technology as the underlying platform for operation. That means it is largely unaffected by choice of operating system or browser for each user. But users must have a fairly recent version of the Flash Player installed on their computer - release 9.0.28 or later. As Publicare points out, presenters who want to use screen sharing or session recording must be on a Windows operating system, as those functions use locally-installed EXE programs.

I am a big fan of Flash-based web conferencing for the instant access it allows when joining a session. Presenters and attendees use a web browser link to access the server-hosted Flash application and they are almost immediately in. There are no wait times for software programs to download and install.

Inside the meeting room, controls are simple and mostly intuitive. I have had great success working with guest presenters who don't have time for more than a quick familiarization run-through before a conference. They can easily find the forward and backward arrows that let them advance through their slides sequentially. There is no preview, thumbnail, or table of contents list for loaded slides, although you can jump directly to a slide by entering the slide number.

(Basic screen layout, reduced in size)

PowerPoint slides are uploaded to the meeting room (on the server) in advance of the meeting and go through a conversion step for use in the session. The upload and conversion speed is average for this kind of software approach... Give yourself ten minutes leeway for a large deck and you should be fine. You have a choice of picture quality to use during the conversion and I find that Medium is sufficient for all but the most demanding photographic images. Transition effects when moving from slide to slide are not shown to attendees (strangely enough, the presenter can still see them), but other PowerPoint animations are retained - both on-click and timed. Both .PPT and .PPTX files are allowed, but you can't upload Macintosh Keynote slide decks. My PowerPoint Torture Test passed with flying colors... All color gradients, complex animations, nonstandard fonts, and small text were reproduced faithfully. You can have multiple slide decks uploaded and waiting for use, with a simple mouse click selection process to choose the one to display to the audience.

There is a chat pane below the slide area and a participants list to the left of the slide area. You can change the relative size of the panes, including a single click icon to expand the slide display to full screen. But you cannot change the relative location of the panes. The moderator can select whether the chat panel is private or public - meaning whether audience members see comments from other participants or whether comments are seen only by presenters. Presenters can answer chat entries privately or publicly. Moderators can also set up another chat tab for presenters to use, where their comments are not seen by the audience (perfect for team support and private notes during a session). Presenters can also initiate private chats with any audience member, which open in their own named chat tabs. This is useful for managing an interactive troubleshooting session with an individual.

Presenters can annotate on top of slides with the usual assortment of boxes, circles, lines, text, or red dot "laser pointer." You can change colors and line widths at will. Individual annotations can be dragged to a new location on the screen or deleted. You can also delete all annotations.

(White board annotation examples and toolbar)

Presenters can also upload documents or web links that attendees can access during the session.

There are a few unusual features that deserve mention:

• Moderators can choose to display an alert message to all attendees that shows in a pop-up window, accompanied by your choice of highlight color and an optional audio alert. You can have the message disappear by itself after a set time, or remove it manually.
• Presenters can click an icon to display a world map showing the approximate location of all participants.
• My favorite is a countdown timer that can be displayed to all participants or to presenters only. I use the public one to note when a break time or local discussion session will end and I use the private mode to remind my speakers how long they have left for their presentation section.

omNovia does include audio streaming as an integrated feature, and is set up for VoIP operation where presenters and optionally attendees can plug in computer mikes or headsets to speak through the conference. This is controlled through Flash recognition of your local devices and I have run into setup and configuration headaches when trying to get everybody online and speaking. My preference is to use their optional iBridge feature. This lets me run a telephone audio conference where my presenters call in on their phones. The moderator then uses the conferencing software to dial in as another participant on the audio conference (you hear prompts through your computer speakers and enter any necessary codes using the computer keyboard to connect). From then on, all telephone audio is broadcast out to the audience on their computers. This gives participants the option to listen through their computer or over the telephone, which makes everybody happy. The iBridge integration is more convenient than using a hardware patch cable to connect a phone to your computer microphone input and it works with any third party audio conference you care to use.

 
(iBridge audioconference connection and countdown timer)

The software includes polling functionality of course, but this is somewhat limited in comparison to other implementations I have seen. Polls can have a maximum of five answer choices and you cannot ask a question with "Select all that apply" functionality. The presenter cannot close the poll window for all participants when it is time to move back to the slides... Each person must close it on his/her own machine.

You can show Flash movie clips to the audience by uploading them or by using a link reference to a URL. Movies are shown in their own tab and you cannot include videos that are embedded in PowerPoint slides.

One of Publicare's negatives concerned "transfer of presenter from one attendee to another." This is one of those areas where I didn't find the proper functional control on my first review. Participants tagged ahead of time as "presenters" all come in with their own ID and password and each has full control over the conference, with the ability to advance slides, show movies, review and answer attendee messages, etc. Attendees come in with lesser rights and capabilities. But a presenter can click on an attendee name in the participant list and grant him or her speaking rights via VoIP microphone or "Images Control" to let them advance slides, show a movie, or run application sharing. Another click and they are back to normal "view-only" attendee status. That seems like a reasonable transfer of power as needed.

One area where I think Publicare really missed some functionality is the one where I spend most of my time... Setting up formal events as a moderator. There are a lot of configuration controls and capabilities that the moderator has access to as a separate function outside the meeting room. Some of these are implemented particularly well and deserve mention.

You can schedule events in advance, with tremendous control over the event specifics. This includes an integrated registration system, where you can set up custom registration fields that include dropdown responses, checkboxes, radio buttons, and text entry. You can distribute links to the registration page with a custom parameter that may be used to track the registration link source (for instance, to monitor the effectiveness of various promotion channels). You get to control when attendees can start entering the room and can even place a limit on whether people can enter after the event has been going for a certain duration (maybe to prevent students from getting attendance credit by showing up for the last five minutes of a course?).

Registration can be open to the public or restricted to those in a pre-set list of email addresses (if you are holding a private group meeting for instance). Publicare missed a feature here, as passwords can be created for a single event, rather than being generic for a meeting room that gets reused.

Email customization is a strong point. When you create an event, omNovia creates a sample email invitation text with the registration details, but you have to copy it and send it through your own choice of email delivery system. omNovia does not want to be in the business of bulk mailings to the public, as this opens them for spamming abuse. But once people register, you can customize the registration and reminder messages that they get automatically from the system. In an unusual bit of flexibility, you can create both text and HTML versions of the automated emails and omNovia will attempt to send the HTML with the text as a backup. You can schedule up to two reminder messages to be automatically sent at specified times before your event. You also have the ability to create followup messages for all registrants, for attendees, or for no-shows. These are not sent out at a set time after your event... You need to go back into the software and click a button to send them out.

omNovia also recently integrated their system with Twitter so you can send a Tweet about your event ahead of time or you can send Tweets during your session.

Some unique setup features include the ability to configure a banner display click-through in your meeting room that can be used for advertising or to send people to your website. You can place a graphic on your registration page, and you can even show people a video after they register. You can also set up a link to a web page that gets shown when people exit the meeting session (I often use this to link to a SurveyMonkey survey to capture attendee feedback).

There is no direct integration of payment processing, but omNovia has a published API that allows a web programmer to take a payee from their shopping cart system and ship the data to omNovia to be entered as a registrant in the desired event. The registrant then gets all the appropriate confirmation and reminder messages from the omNovia system.

Attendance reporting covers the basics, with the ability to see who registered (and when), who attended, and custom fields.  A separate room report has more details including IP adresses and time spent in the meeting by each attendee.

For me, the weakest aspect of omNovia at this time is its recording feature. As I mentioned earlier, recording is run as a local Windows application on a presenter's machine. There are quite a few setup and configuration choices that could be confusing for nontechnical specialists who don't know about things like frame rates and codecs. You do get the choice to record the entire screen or a selected rectangular region, but audio is picked up from your computer's sound card, with the potential setup confusion that entails. They also made a strange decision to always capture the cursor with a big fuzzy yellow glow around it. Since you can only record as a presenter, your recording captures private presenter-only displays. I would rather have it capture things as my attendees see them and use the broadcast audio straight off the server feed. To be honest, I usually end up using Camtasia to do the recording on a separate attending computer. [I added an important update on additional capabilities after writing this - please see bottom of article]

For my uses as a professional administrator and moderator of structured public webinars, omNovia has been very satisfactory. I like the setup configuration flexibility it gives me, my guest speakers have been very happy with the simplicity of operation inside the meeting, and attendees usually appreciate the fast access to events and choice of audio when integrated with the iBridge phone connection. I'd be happier with greater flexibility in polling and a serious reworking of the recording feature.

I can understand why it might not suit the needs of small group collaborative sessions quite as well as other software designed for that purpose. You can't promote attendees to presenter status and screen sharing is operating system dependent (as well as suffering in performance in comparison to the leaders in that functionality). I believe omNovia's strengths lie in setup of formal events with predetermined speakers, where registration and structure of the overall event is a priority. Its ability to work with complex PowerPoint animations, Flash movies, registrant communications, and unique features such as countdown timers and Twitter integration make it a contender for an enterprise platform where a dedicated administrator can learn how to drive all the configuration options.

UPDATE (July 3): I just tried out a new option for recording events in omNovia. Known as "Recast", it is currently in beta, although generally available to customers upon request. Recast records an event directly from the broadcast server as an audience member would see it and saves it directly to the omNovia server under your customer account. Upon playback, all interactive features of the event are available, exactly as if the viewer was watching the live session. They can answer polls, enter chat messages, etc. This would be valuable for companies who want to make viewers think they are watching something live while avoiding the time commitments of running multiple sessions. A free option during the beta, omNovia plans to charge for usage based on the number of people who watch the recorded recast. The downside of this recording option is that the event can only be run from the server... You can't download and distribute or re-host the movie file. You also can't edit it to clean up the recording... It faithfully captures everything that happened during the live meeting session and plays it back exactly as it occurred. That may be a good thing for legal discovery and formal archival, where you have to prove you haven't manipulated or edited your archive. If you can live with having your archive exactly as it played live, this takes care of my recording concerns... It doesn't show presenter-private information, it doesn't show unwanted cursor controls, and it does record the audio cleanly from the broadcast audio stream.

Technorati Tags: omNovia,Pulicare,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast

Social Media and Webinars

Today’s topic comes from Bob, who asked a question through the Web Conferencing Community Forum:

I'm in the Healthcare space and regularly host live webinars with physicians and other healthcare professionals. The meetings can have a number of objectives, marketing and training being the most frequent. Obviously, there are lots of smart folks in these rooms with plenty of knowledge and insights. And I believe a value of our webinars could be for the audience to share amongst themselves.

That said, I'm wondering if some aspects of Social Media could help. We're doing polling and using chat and have Q&A sessions.  Have you seen/used any other techniques to engage the audience and make them active contributors during a webinar?

The only attempt I have seen at linking Social Networking with a live webinar during the actual session is to have a Twitter discussion running at the same time. As a matter of fact, I wrote a post about this on Webinar Wire (You Got Your Twitter In My Webinar!) last year.

Since you are already using an open chat session in the webinar room to stimulate group feedback and discussion, I don’t see Twitter as offering any particular benefits for the attendees. The one thing it might do is open up the discussion in real time to people who can’t attend or choose to not attend the webinar. You could potentially expand the discussion to a larger community if they happen to be following the Twitter thread and contributing during the course of the event.

But generally, social networking is better at extending your reach before and after the live session. You can help promote the event to your network of contacts ahead of time, collect questions and topics of interest from them that they want to see covered during the session, and keep the conversation going after your live event is over (probably posting a link to your archive recording as well).

Getting more interactivity during an event is usually a case of cutting down the amount of lecture material you prepare and planning to open things up, acknowledge your audience, and work with them more during your time together. You will find that this is a double-edged sword however. A small percentage of your audience will tend to contribute heavily, perhaps skewing the perception of important items or swinging the conversation to their private concerns. Some members of the audience who prefer a more passive learning experience can get frustrated if they feel another viewer is monopolizing the conversation and taking time away from your brilliant words of wisdom. It’s a bit of a balancing act.

If your conferencing software has a strong whiteboarding tool, try running some “brainstorming” exercises during your talk. Write down responses from your audience and then use those as a jumping-off point for additional discussion. Remember that the amount of interactivity you can control and manage goes down as your audience size goes up. With 400 people on a conference, it is unlikely that you can even read all the messages coming in from an enthusiastic participatory group, much less respond to them. Be sure to have a plan for dealing with concerns that don’t get addressed… Which can be a great way to tie in social networking again. Post the questions and comments to your network and invite responses or commentary, along with your own answers.

I’ll mention one last caveat about polls. To make them effective at stimulating participation and interactivity, they must be presented in terms of the audience’s self interests. If your polls tend to be demographic in nature, or self-serving for you as a presenter, your audience feels that they are being treated as experimental subjects, providing you with value, but getting none themselves. You should be able to accompany every poll with a statement of “By answering this question, you will benefit in the following way…” Possibilities include knowing more about how they compare to the community of their peers, or getting you to focus your remarks on areas of greatest importance to them, or getting you to talk to their level of expertise and prior knowledge, or helping to determine what webinar topics you should present in the future.

I hope this gives you a few ideas you may not have considered already.

Readers: If you have a comment on this topic, please add it using the Comment feature on this blog. If you have a question you would like me to address publicly, you can post it at the Web Conferencing Community Forum, just as Bob did.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Web Conferencing Community Forum,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web event,online meeting,online event,webcasting,webcast,social networking

VoIP Gives Me A Headache

In recent weeks I have fought with VoIP difficulties on webinars using three different web conferencing technologies. Is VoIP truly ready for prime time?

A bit of background first for those unfamiliar with the terminology and concept. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. In our particular niche - looking at web conferencing – it refers to letting participants use a microphone or headset connected to their computer as a way to let other meeting participants hear their voices.

This is subtly different from “broadcast audio” or “streaming audio”, which deals with the transmission of sound out to participants’ computer speakers. The sound in that case may come from a telephone call patched in to the web conference or from recorded audio clips being played as part of the meeting content.

VoIP is a great concept. When it works correctly, it offers several potential advantages:

• It removes a separate technology (telephones) from your meeting equipment requirements and places focus solely on the computer.
• It reduces the complexity of instructions you need to send out to participants, since there are no telephone numbers and codes to remember.
• It can reduce costs by eliminating telephone connection charges.

Unfortunately, VoIP is prone to several disadvantages as well:

• Not everyone owns a computer headset/microphone. If your participants don’t have the right equipment, they are helpless (I think it’s fair to say that everyone has access to a telephone).
• Computer-connected headsets require configuration for use. Many web conference participants are not experienced or patient enough to go through the right steps. You are dealing with a computer peripheral that has drivers to load and interactions with Control Panel settings. Simply getting your computer to select the headset as the input/output audio device to use can flummox users on occasion.
• The interaction between the conferencing software and the headset can potentially be confusing (to use a charitable term). I have had cases where the order of connection can mean the difference between success and failure. I’m not saving myself any time in connection instructions if I have to tell participants to connect their headset first. Then select it in Control Panel. Then start the conferencing software. Then confirm a popup box that lets Flash recognize the device. Then run a test step to set audio levels.
• This isn’t a fair ding against the technology itself, but the nasty fact is that most of the computer headsets I’ve come across out there in the general community are of appallingly low quality. Businesses all too often seem to tolerate purchases of VoIP headsets as a lowest-possible-cost toy rather than as a valued business asset.

Even when everything else works, computer headsets in webcasts sometimes exhibit random behaviors that are nothing short of mysterious. I was on a webinar yesterday where my headset worked fine until I had to replug it right before show time. Then it switched to a feedback mode where my audio was picked up by the mike and rebroadcast. I sounded like I was talking in a giant tin can. I had an event where my client as the primary speaker could use her VoIP headset right up until I connected mine on another computer under a different login, at which time she was blocked out. The vendor couldn’t explain it at all. I gave a training session where we used collaborative participation with audience members on computer headsets. One person could never get his headset to broadcast through the software. One person’s mike was live the entire time, even when explicitly muted in the webcast software.

When these things happen, you can easily spend long, frustrating periods of time trying to diagnose and repair the setup by long distance. And that’s a recipe for disaster with your audience. As soon as they start concentrating on the technology rather than your topic and content, you have lost the battle for effective achievement of your goals in holding the meeting. With my training class, I spent a short time trying to solve my audience’s problems, but ended up rescheduling the session with the promise of a telephone dial in.

All in all, I’ll reserve VoIP participation in webinars for internal business sessions with coworkers I know. Ones where I can tolerate some fumbling and frustration if things get muddled. But for public sessions and webinars where I need to rely on voices actually making it all the way into the web conference without exception, I’ll stick with the telephone as the input device of choice.

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