The Webinar Blog

Using PowerPoint Notes To Create A Handout

A good slide deck for a live presentation makes a lousy handout. Conversely, slides built to be referenced as a leave-behind are wrong for use as a presentation. If people can read your slides and get all the information they need, there is no need for you to waste their time talking for an hour.

But if you give a good webinar presentation that is useful and beneficial for the audience, they are naturally going to want a way to reference your information after the webinar. A good leave-behind can help you reach more people as it gets forwarded to colleagues by attendees or referenced by registrants who couldn’t make the live session.

One easy way to create a useful handout from your graphics-heavy / text-light presentation slides is to add reference information in the speaker notes section. Summarize the key points you make vocally when you present each slide. This is an excellent exercise in preparing to give your webinar. The act of writing out your information for reference helps you clarify your thoughts and decide how to present each topic point. And in the process, you build your handout.

Once your PowerPoint is complete, with slides that pictorially support your message and notes that concisely encompass the information content of your speech, you have several options for creating an electronic document. There are enough options that I won’t go into them all here. Suffice it to say that you can export to either Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format in a variety of layouts. Here is an excellent article that takes you through the process of publishing to Word for older and newer versions of PowerPoint. And here is an article on publishing to PDF in PowerPoint 2007. I usually bypass the official Microsoft method and just print my notes view to a PDF file using an Adobe Acrobat printer driver.

Occasionally though, you don’t want to include your graphics in the handout at all. You might be worried about making your graphics available for others to steal. Or they might make the document too large and inconvenient for easy reference. Or you might have relied on animations and builds that won’t translate well to a static document format. Or you might just want to use your PowerPoint notes as the basis for a more detailed white paper.

Amazingly, Microsoft gives NO native way to export just your slide notes from PowerPoint to another document format. They always assume you want your graphical slide contents exported as well. Sure, you can export slides and notes and then delete the graphic images from the Word document. Or you can manually copy and paste each slide’s notes into a document. But these methods are time consuming and effort-intensive.

After years (yes, years!) of searching for a way to accomplish this task, I finally found it on an amazing site called PPTools. They provide a macro function that does just what I want. Fortunately you don’t have to understand a thing about macros or programming to use it. You just follow the instructions to open a macro editor, copy the code into the editor and click “Run.” – Voila, you have a text document with your notes neatly separated by slide, minus all graphics.

The site actually gives two different macro versions. One exports just the note text and the other exports slide titles and note text.

If you have never fooled with macros in PowerPoint, you’ll unfortunately discover that Microsoft tries to protect you from evildoers by disabling the functionality. So you’ll need to change a setting to enable macros to run.

Here are the articles you need to read from PPTools in order to use their code.

How to activate macro functionality, open the macro editor, and run a code sample

Code for extracting slide notes (first macro excludes slide titles, second macro includes them)

When you run the macro, it prompts you for a path and filename. It creates a text file and opens Notepad so you can edit it. If you prefer, you can open the file with Word so you can do formatting and change the font.

I’m so happy I found PPTools! It’s wonderful that there are kind people willing to share their knowledge and programming skills to help cover Microsoft’s oversights.

Technorati Tags: PPTools,PowerPoint,slide notes,presentation notes,PowerPoint macro

Educational Webinar For Associations

On October 15 I will present an educational session designed for associations that want to use webinars for promotional purposes, training, or member services. Peach New Media is hosting the session and has asked me to come in as a guest speaker and subject matter expert.

The cost for the training session is $149 and the seminar will be a full 90 minutes long, including time for audience questions. I am also taking questions in advance of the training to make sure I focus on topics of greatest interest to attendees.

There will be no marketing or promotional content… This is going to be real training, with detailed information. It’s a bit tricky, as I know I’ll have an audience comprising people new to web conferencing and old hands. I’ll be moving from basics to advanced tips, trying not to alienate either segment.

I’ll certainly be spending time on how to promote and market association webinars, as that is always a top concern. I’ll also talk about production steps, preparation requirements, delivery tips, and other factors that can spell the difference between success and failure of an online event.

To see more information and to register, visit the following link:

https://pkc.peachnewmedia.com/store/seminar/seminar.php?seminar=2466

Technorati Tags: associations,non-profits,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,online training,web training,Peach New Media

Recorded Presentations For Small Business Lead Gen

PresenterNet just published a wonderful concise guide for home-based businesses wanting to use recorded web presentations to help gather new leads. I was very impressed with the step by step practical suggestions and detailed guidelines for people who are not design professionals. They go right down to the number of words per slide to plan for when writing your script!

The guide is available as a PDF download from the web page, and amazingly you don’t even have to register to receive it! Pure altruism and a resource that anyone can benefit from. If your feed reader doesn’t support the interactive link in the first sentence, here is an explicit link you can copy and paste into your web browser:

https://www.presenternet.com/app/home-based-business/

The web page and the guide also refer you to a short sample presentation illustrating the concepts and showing how it all ties together. Note that although the document tells you to plan for five or six slides in your short presentation, the online sample seems more interesting than that. They use simple fade-in builds in PowerPoint to add visual movement and change, so you are never sitting back and looking at a static slide for 60 seconds. That is important.

Also important is that they use text sparingly and in short fragments to highlight and emphasize key items. You usually don’t want to animate your text with fly-ins and other fancy effects. They do a few subtle text effects that go about as far as you will want to take it. One of my favorites is to start with your text in the center of the slide by itself, then “slide” the text up to a title position to make room for the graphics you will introduce. Very natural, and very cinematic.

Rather astonishingly, there isn’t a drop of product promotion in the guidelines document. Kudos for putting out something that is purely educational and business beneficial, letting the provider stand out as a trusted resource and nothing more. I noted that the sample online presentation made use of some powerful and unique features in PresenterNet, and they didn’t even call attention to them! So I’ll do it here (I like helping to spread the word about unique web conferencing features, especially when the company doesn’t even know I’m going to do it).

Watch the presentation and notice how at various points they stop to let you interact with the screen. You can click checkboxes to indicate interests, move a slider bar to show relative interest in a subject, type contact information into fields… All without leaving the presentation or being presented with another window. They are embedded into the slides themselves using something that PresenterNet calls “InterActors” – embeddable controls that let the audience make inputs right in your presentation. The responses are captured and are available for reporting purposes. This goes beyond the standard polling facilities offered by most other web conferencing vendors, and works in live meetings as well as recordings. Very fancy indeed!

These are great resources and well worth your time to study. Thanks, PresenterNet!

Technorati Tags: PresenterNet,InterActors,lead generation,lead gen,marketing,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,online presentation,recorded presentation,online recording,webcasting,webcast

IDEAL Conference Expands Web Conferencing Accessibility

Thank goodness I can still be surprised in this industry. I just found out about a truly unique web conferencing product that deserves much more publicity than it has received. IDEAL Conference from IDEAL Group exists for the sole purpose of bringing online collaboration to members of the community with limited physical capabilities in a variety of areas. In other words, it contains an exclusive feature set designed to let the blind, deaf, colorblind, partial vision, and hard of hearing take part in webinars and web conferences.

The target customer base for IDEAL Group tends to be government agencies, federally funded businesses, and educational institutions that need to serve the entire community, with particular attention paid to Section 508 Compliance and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). I spoke with Steve Jacobs, President of IDEAL Group, who told me “We don’t compete with WebEx, GoToWebinar, Live Meeting, and other web conferencing products. We are a different solution that organizations turn to after those products fail to meet their accessibility requirements.”

I went through a lengthy demonstration of IDEAL Conference with Steve, and I found that I had to constantly remind myself of this niche purpose when looking at their implementation strategy. At first, some of the features seem confusing or limiting. But when matched with the extensive training and documentation that IDEAL Group provides on best practices, it falls into place.

The company and the product have their origins in special projects work at AT&T in 1991. Steve Jacobs was involved very early on in both volunteer and formal business incarnations of the work, which was controlled by NCR after a divestiture and from there to the independent company as it now stands. Jacobs himself has been intimately involved with accessibility concerns in government, business, and telecommunications for decades. He has chaired or participated in numerous government committees and co-authored the report that was used to develop the Telecommunications Act Accessibility Guidelines. This guy knows what his market needs and exactly how it has to work!

IDEAL Conference runs best when installed as a local client application on a Windows-based PC. However it also supports Mac and Linux users through a web browser client that has slightly lessened functionality. Most customers run the application as a vendor-hosted “Software as a Service” application. But it can be licensed and installed on a company’s servers as well. The product was developed from scratch and does not use another vendor’s code base as the underlying platform.

Going through all the accessibility-specific features would take quite a while to describe and explain, so I’ll just try to give a high level summary here.

The product integrates with screen reading technology that is commonly used by the blind. Examples include JAWS by Freedom Scientific and Window-Eyes by GW Micro. These products work on the basis of being able to focus on a particular computer window that contains text content. For this reason, IDEAL Group gives extensive guidelines on preparing PowerPoint presentation content for use in their system. You want to minimize or eliminate graphic images and place limited text content on each slide. When you upload your slides to the web conferencing room, they are converted to appropriate text coded web pages for use in the conference. This lets them be infinitely resized and scaled, while allowing text selection/copy/paste and complete compatibility with text-to-speech software.

The handling of typed chat content is interesting as well. The product contains its own internal text-to-speech functionality and each user can configure it to announce or suppress information such as participant entrance/exit from the conference, status messages, and typed chat entries. I tried it out with some abstruse terms and multisyllabic gobbledygook, and it worked like a charm. Because the product has to be accessible for those who cannot see menu items, every function and command in the system has a keyboard access, and menus can be spoken by the system to help users navigate through their choices. Each user can remap keyboard command shortcuts as necessary to avoid conflicts with other software in use simultaneously – since screen reader software or other aids might have their own command sequences.

In addition to spoken chat, users can change the color, size, and font of their chat windows to allow those with low vision or colorblindness to more clearly see the text. They can also close off the presentation area completely and dedicate their screen just to text communications.

For users who are hard of hearing and use hearing devices, there is an option to stream a very high quality audio broadcast that works better with Telecoil (T-coil) headsets that plug directly into a PC. This can offset the problems with high frequency loss and interference sometimes encountered on compressed audio streams.

Deaf users can run the web conference in conjunction with a live captioning service or a video relay service. These are not provided as in included function of the conferencing software, but IDEAL Conference has ways to include the video relay operators in a special mode that lets them bring their users into the collaboration as smoothly as possible.

Some features are not specific to the needs of limited physical capabilities, but were added because of the general nature of the users that IDEAL’s customers tended to included in their conferences. Because many of their conferences are designed for education and youth services, chat can be completely moderated, with each message vetted and approved before showing up to the conference group. You can even ban a user based on IP address, so they can’t just log on again under a different name.

Because government services often serve people with dial-up connectivity, the software is designed to let users enable a special buffering mode that helps them get all the content without losing internet data packets. They might see easily transmitted text appear first, with an indicator saying that audio is buffering. Then they play catch up as the buffer fills and plays the audio back smoothly.

To serve the needs of course validation and continuing education units, the software can time stamp and log chat messages and other interactions to prove that people were actively listening to the presentation content.

The conference recording capabilities are interesting as well. Conferences are recorded in a format that allows them to be played back inside a live conference. The moderator can pause the playback and insert additional commentary or take live questions and then proceed with the prerecorded content. This is a great option for those who present the same information over and over and don’t want to repeat the main information delivery while still providing live interaction with their audiences.

I was quite impressed with the associated training and tip sheets that IDEAL Group provides for meeting hosts and presenters. This isn’t just a question of learning how to use the product features… It’s a methodology based on understanding how to construct your content and run a meeting to meet the specialized needs of limited access users. The company really cares about how their product gets used and tries to ensure that the target end users will have as useful an online experience as possible.

I took a look at sample pricing and found it very competitive with other web conferencing technologies out there. Organizations can run small collaborative sessions or large auditorium style webinars for hundreds of listeners.

IDEAL Conference is an important and unique offering in the web conferencing world. Online collaboration should be accessible to all, but the implementation of traditional web conferencing products makes it very hard to achieve compliance with all ADA and Section 508 requirements. This is the first and only product I have seen that is designed from first principles to serve limited access computer users. If you want to reach this community, IDEAL Conference should be on the shortest of short lists for consideration.

Technorati Tags: IDEAL Conference,IDEAL Group,ADA,Section 508,disabilities,Disability Act,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online event,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,Steve Jacobs

Webinars To Wake The Dead

Catchy title, isn't it? I'm referring to "dead leads" -- The ones that didn't turn into hot prospects or customers. Too many companies focus their webinars purely on two groups... Existing customers and new leads. But Gary pointed me to an article on HubSpot entitled "1,200 Leads in 4 Weeks: A Lead Nurturing Success Story." In the article, Prashant Kaw lays out the results of a four-week program at HubSpot where they used webinars to re-engage with past leads that hadn’t matured.

The results are impressive. Prashant writes that on average they “re-awakened” just over 300 cold leads and 47 lost opportunities per webinar. I can’t imagine a company that wouldn’t be happy with that kind of result.

You might be saying to yourself, “What’s the big deal? We always send out invitations to our house list, and that includes every lead we’ve ever received.” Therein lies the problem. If you are going to make a program like this work, you have to target both the content and the pitch to the specific subset of your audience you want to reach. New leads need introductory material. You are introducing yourself and your products/services for the first time. Existing customers need more advanced material that assumes a familiarity with your offerings.

Cold leads need something in the middle. You don’t want to bore them with the same introduction that was ineffective the last time they saw it! And you can’t go overboard with details, inviting them to watch webinars designed for customers. You need to advance their understanding of your offerings and work on practical applications and benefits. Tell them in the invitation that the content is built especially for people who have seen an introduction already, and that this session will give them additional value and benefits. Then make it happen.

The biggest decision for you is your call to action. Do you want to encourage receptivity, or do you want to stimulate proactive behavior? If you plan to contact each attendee after the webinar, make that clear. Tease your audience with what they will get out of accepting your follow-up call or reading your follow-up email. Your job is to get them anticipating the additional contact and ready to listen to what you have to say.

If you want to keep things on an inbound basis, your job is harder. You need to give your listeners an overwhelmingly compelling reason to click a link or request more information. It is exponentially harder to get people to take action on their own than to get them to respond to your actions. One of the best things you can do during your webinar is to get their hands on the mouse or keyboard. If they are interacting with you and participating in your presentation, they are a little more likely to carry that interaction forward into a post-event action. If they just sit there and passively listen to you for 60 minutes, it’s tough to suddenly change the dynamic and ask them to take action at the very end.

Read the article. It should get you thinking about the ways you segment your invitation lists and the ways you target your webinar content. One size does not fit all. If you want to reconnect with cold leads, you need to make it happen with a conscious plan.

Technorati Tags: HubSpot,Prakash Kaw,lead nurturing,marketing,lead generation,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,web conference

The Dimdim Webinar Widget

My last post looked at an overview of Dimdim Webinar from the public perspective – what you can find on their website. Now let’s dig in a little deeper and take a look at one of the most prominently touted tools in the new webinar offering – the Webinar Widget. This is an EXTREMELY long and detailed post going through the entire scheduling and use process. If you aren’t into Dimdim details, it’s probably not worth the time investment. But for those of you thinking about using the product, some of my findings are important.

To get to the widget, we’ll have to navigate through the beginning steps of scheduling an upcoming webinar. You sign into your account in a browser and click a big button labeled “Host Meeting” – My highly personal opinion is that this is a bit too much of a hangover from their days as a provider of ad hoc meetings… It’s not immediately apparent that this is how you would schedule an upcoming meeting, but that’s a trivially short learning curve to get over!

You can enter a meeting name of up to 40 characters. You get to choose whether your meeting should take place immediately or be scheduled in the future. There is also a dropdown selector in the upper right that lets you indicate whether this should be treated as a “Meeting” or a “Webinar” – Notice that I almost missed that selector in this photo… I had to go back later and reset the choice. It wasn’t grouped with other obvious selection choices and your eyes don’t naturally fix on that solo setting up in the corner. [Click on pictures for full size display]

 

I like the fact that you can choose from a variety of repetition frequencies. The date selector is also an easy to use popup calendar (not shown here). One of the things that threw me on first usage was that I set items on this screen and noticed there were other tabs with additional settings. But there is a big green “Schedule” button in the bottom right. Do I move to the other tabs first and then schedule? Or do I schedule and then move to the other tabs. On my first attempt I made the wrong choice. Clicking the Schedule button closes the popup window completely. No more settings for you!

Okay, not to panic… I’ll just go back in and edit my meeting options. But where is it? The screen that comes up with “Upcoming Meetings” only shows events scheduled for the next seven days, and there is no selector to change the reporting period.

 

Ah, but there is another piece of text not immediately apparent as a selector. You can click on “Search Meetings” and get a more flexible search tool that lets you look for meetings in a time period or by keywords. It took me a moment to locate how to edit the meeting. Although there are clear, separated options for starting and deleting the meeting, the command to edit the meeting is tucked into brackets next to the truncated meeting name. Not my favorite example of user interface design, but again – a quick learning experience.

 

This time I was able to add some additional options for giving the meeting a password key (one password per meeting – Dimdim does not support individual attendee passwords).

 

Flipping to the Widget tab, we finally get to the point of this blog entry! I can construct options for my Webinar Widget.

 

Notice that Dimdim supplies me with HTML code to embed the widget on a web page or other HTML enabled document (such as a formatted email). For the technogeeks out there, you can see that widgets use Javascript, which like everything else in the world of web support may not run on every user’s computer. Individuals can disable Javascript applications. But it’s a common implementation these days and unlikely to cause widespread problems.

Time to put the widget somewhere and see it in action. I created a quick web page and embedded the code.

 

As you can see, the widget truncates long titles, but hovering your mouse over that text displays the full amount. I’m not too crazy about the fact that the agenda items on separate lines in my meeting scheduler are being displayed with an extra linefeed between them so people can only see one at a time with a not too obvious vertical scroll bar.

Also notice that Dimdim adds a promotional link to themselves. Rather than opening a new page, this pulls your users away from your site and replaces your content with Dimdim’s site. Naughty naughty!

Filling in an email address (Dimdim automatically filters for proper format in an [email protected] validation template) and clicking the Sign Up button changes the display to request additional registration fields. This is because I clicked the checkbox in my meeting scheduler asking for “Registration Fields.” As far as I can tell, there is no way to customize what is asked for or what is required/optional. (Small side note… I found that there is a minor bug in the tab order on the registration fields. Tabbing sometimes takes you to the next entry field, sometimes not.)

 

Upon filling in the information and clicking Submit, the user sees a brief thank you and an indication that a confirmation will be sent to his/her email address. The display clears and goes back to the default entry mode after a few seconds, which can be frustrating for the registrants if they weren’t paying attention and merely noticed there was some small type text which has now disappeared!

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I also selected a option in my setup screen to display a countdown timer, yet none shows on the widget. I couldn’t find any documentation about this in help or the online knowledgebase, but finally found a question in the forums from another user. It turns out that the countdown kicks in one hour before start time. I updated my test to try it out:

 

Interesting… It no longer gives me the option to pre-register! Now I have to wait until the exact start time rolls around. Let’s see how the display changes at that time:

 

Fair enough. I want to join in. So I click the button and I’m asked for my name, email, and the event password (since I set that in the meeting scheduler). But all is not well!

 

Ouch! It tells me I have to enter a “valid email id” – It took me a minute to figure out what’s going on. If you scroll way back up to my meeting options, I had clicked a checkbox saying “pre-registered email only.” So the effect is that no last minute interests can register or join by widget once it starts countdown mode. They are just out of luck. That would be a nasty surprise if it’s not what I had intended as an organizer. I thought the checkbox just meant people had to complete a registration form before being allowed in. Not that they had to complete registration some undocumented amount of time before my meeting starts.

I can’t believe you have read all the way through this. I hope the detailed walk-through has proved valuable. My overall impression of the Webinar Widget is that it is a nice idea with a few small implementation details that are either annoying or not immediately obvious. The lack of clear documentation and readily accessible help can be frustrating (Dimdim has NO technical support available by telephone or live chat – All you can do is submit problems in their user forum) and means that significant advanced testing of every possible option and scenario is critical.

My next posts will look at additional features of the product. Keep reading!

Technorati Tags: Dimdim Webinar,Dimdim,Webinar Widget,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online event,web event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Starting A Look At DimDim Webinar

This has been a busy week for DimDim. They announced the launch of DimDim Webinar and pushed out a “viral video” associated with the offering that seems to be having the desired effect of causing controversy and getting press. Conferencing News was not overly enthusiastic in their coverage of the promotional campaign.

The video makes for fun water cooler conversation, but I want to dig in a bit more to the meat of DimDim (rather than the cheese). I have long been aware of it as a low cost / no cost web conferencing option, but after a brief look some time ago, I decided that it wasn’t appropriate for the types of large structured web events I prefer to concentrate on. So I’ve stayed out of the fray. Now of course, DimDim has boldly thrown their hat into the webinar ring and it’s time for me to take a closer look at the product to see if it meets our needs for this niche of the market.

I’m going to do this as a multi-post series. I’ll start with some general overview impressions and observations and then move in to more of the details.

Let’s start with the price. This is simple… You can’t beat it. DimDim has actually managed to undercut GoToWebinar for the big audience market, which took some doing. $75 a month lets you schedule and hold as many sessions as you want, for any duration, with up to 1000 participants. I don’t know of anybody offering better capacity at a lower cost than that.

Diving in a bit more, I spent some time rummaging around the DimDim website, trying to glean information as presented to the public. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. I think the product team wanted to get their offering out to market before the marketing/documentation/web team was completely ready (not an uncommon occurrence – trust me… I worked in software development and marketing!).

DimDim already came in a variety of flavors, ranging from a free version for meetings of up to 20 people, to a professional fee-based version handling larger meetings, to an open-source version running a bit behind the hosted release but open to developers for developing mashups and integrations. If you try to get a clear understanding of the new or unique features in DimDim Webinar, all you can see is a not very helpful summary grid:

Notice that the maximum attendees for DimDim Webinar is shown as 100, even though you can find web page copy above it that says 1000. And showing the feature difference as “Advanced Webinar Tools” doesn’t tell us much. But we can always click the indicated hyperlink to see more details. Unfortunately, that is currently mis-linked to the new user account signup page. So it’s a bit mysterious what you get for the extra cash outlay.

They do offer links to PDF documentation on the page:

But the User’s Guide turns out to be for version 3.5 from May of 2008 and doesn’t address any of the Webinar features. The Pro Features document is a shorter glossy and is of more recent vintage – April of 2009. Unfortunately it doesn’t mention Webinars either and so we have no indication of what is truly new and different about this offering.

Tomorrow I’ll cover the two Webinar features that are emphasized in DimDim’s press release and website… EventBrite partnership and the Webinar Widget. Keep reading for looks at DimDim’s monetization aids and internal product features in use.

Technorati Tags: DimDim Webinar,DimDim,webinar,web seminar,web event,online event,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing