The Webinar Blog

WebinarListings.com Provides Another Venue For Promoting Webinars

WebinarListings.com has announced its beta testing availability for event organizers to post announcements about upcoming web seminars on the site and for viewers to search for webinars of interest. The venture posted a press release yesterday quoting the founder, Rachel Levy. As you would expect, it is free to post or search for events, although posters can pay to upgrade their listings to featured status (the site currently offers a chance to become a “premium beta tester” with free featured listings). The press release says that there are currently around 100 events listed in the database.

I snapped the following table from the website showing a summary comparison of basic versus featured listings:

I tried out the service by listing one of my upcoming webinars. I found it easy to navigate the entry boxes letting me specify the title, description, date/time, and cost (which is a text entry field, so you could potentially list currencies or discount codes). I found it strange that the site asked me for a Twitter ID associated with my company, although on reflection I assumed that this would be used to help promote the event on Twitter. And I also noticed that paying for a featured listing uses PayPal, but requires you to manually enter the transaction ID you get back from PayPal, which is an unusual extra step for an ecommerce site.

The site requires you to enter a Captcha authentication to make sure you are not a spambot. I entered the code incorrectly and received a terse message on a new page telling me to use the back button on my browser to fix it. When I used the back button, all my fields were cleared out and I had to start over from scratch. That’s rather frustrating!

Upon successfully filling in all the information and submitting it, you get a message that “The administrator will review and approve your Webinar shortly, and you will receive a confirmation once it has posted to the calendar.” While it is admirable that they want to make sure each listing is appropriate, I have a hard time seeing how the approval process can scale to handle large volumes of listings if the site becomes widely used.

WebinarListings.com opens its home page with a sentence saying “This website is a central source for ALL upcoming Webinars, from business to health, from the U.S. to Europe.” But the international aspect may be somewhat inconvenient for other countries. English is the only language on the site and you can only list and see event times in “ET” – there is not even an explanation that ET stands for US Eastern Time. There are no time zone conversions available.

I must point out one sentence that is incorrect on the site’s instructions for submitters. It says “This is the only centralized site that allows you to publicize your Webinar to people who are interested in learning about what you have to say.” (The boldface is theirs.)

Actually, there are several other webinar listing sites that I have covered in this blog (including my own late, great, unlamented attempt at the same concept, which is why I get so picky about details!). Choices for third-party aggregators and search providers include EventSpan, Finervista, Webinar-Directory.com, and WebinarHero while several webinar technology vendors now offer integrated promotional assistance through social media links.

Be that as it may, I am always keen on seeing more awareness of and access to webinars in the marketplace and WebinarListings.com should be a welcome addition. I am sure they will enhance or fix the little things I noted in this review, as that is the whole purpose of a beta period. But the concept and basic implementation looks solid.

UPDATE April 1: I have been corresponding with Rachel and it looks like the Captcha problem I found is a special situation most people would never hit. It only occurs if you have two "Add Webinar" pages open in separate browser tabs. She also pointed out that I completely missed a toolbar at the bottom of the web page that offers instant translation into any of 10 non-English languages. Very cool indeed!

Technorati Tags: WebinarListings.com,Rachel Levy,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online event,web event,web meeting,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Which Webinar Vendor Will Add Magnification First?

Hey web conferencing vendors… Here’s a request for you and a chance to differentiate your functionality from your competitors. As far as I know, there isn’t a single web conferencing product that includes local magnification as a feature.

What do I mean by this? Suppose you are displaying a poorly designed slide of the type seen all too often in technical presentations. Tiny text, lots of little icons, arrows connecting various parts of an overall architectural diagram. The presenter is trying to lead the audience through a discussion of the details.

It would be enormously helpful to let the presenter drag a “magnification box” around an area of the slide. The enclosed content would appear in overlay, blown up to a larger size.

This is a concept that has been around in desktop computing for a long time. I found a web page with links to dozens of magnifier utilities for various operating systems: http://bit.ly/9xlAuq

There are lots of approaches to the interface design. Some utilities use an on/off toggle and a fixed area around the cursor. When the functionality is turned on, everything within a set distance around the cursor gets magnified. Some utilities let you choose the level of magnification. Some display the magnified content in a fixed-size box, others in a resizable box, others in a dynamic overlay that moves with the cursor. You can pick the implementation details that seem to make the most sense to you. Definitely try out some of the freeware utilities available on the web.

Here is an example showing a locally zoomed region on a slide. I used DesktopZoom for this one. Click on the picture for a larger display:

First one to market gets a big plug on my blog!

 

Technorati Tags: magnification,zoom,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting

Third Party Event Management Systems

I noticed an active discussion thread on the LinkedIn group for B2B Lead Generation. Somebody asked for recommendations on event management software that runs over the web. There were many comments from helpful participants, which I will list in a moment.

Many of the lower cost web conferencing applications have no built-in facilities for letting people sign up in advance to attend your web seminars. Others may have basic functionality, but are missing advanced features such as full customization of registration pages, predefined dropdowns for common selectors such as Country and State, source tracking (a parameter that lets you figure out which promotional channel led to someone accessing the registration page), or flexible reporting layouts.

When using a third-party registration system in conjunction with your web seminar, there are additional considerations that may not be immediately apparent. For instance, it is very helpful if people can attend your event by using a pass-through link that sends them through the event management system so that it can record who attended and who did not. That is an uncommon feature for third-party systems and you typically need to search for an event management system that is already integrated with your preferred web conferencing technology.

Some of the event management systems I know of that are specifically designed to integrate with web conferencing packages include:

Act-On Software (works best with WebEx)

Attendee Metrics Platform from Corvent (works best with Microsoft Live Meeting)

EventPlanner from MeetingOne (works best with Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro)

Here is a list of other online registration and event management systems that were suggested on the LinkedIn thread. These do not constitute my personal recommendations, and in many cases I have never worked with them. But it’s nice to have a starting point for research. I have omitted ones designed primarily for tradeshows and physical events or for personal dinner/birthday parties.

• Cvent
• Eventbrite
• evocos (based in the UK)
• RegOnline
• Event Wizard
• Event Wax
• etouches

Please feel free to add comments with your experiences or additional recommendations.

Technorati Tags: event management,registration,registration management,Act-On,Attendee Metrics Platform,EventPlanner,Cvent,Eventbrite,evocos,RegOnline,Event Wizard,Event Wax,etouches,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online event,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting

omNovia Adds Payments, Language Channels

I have been recommending omNovia web conferencing quite a bit lately, as it fills many different usage needs with a nice combination of power and user-friendliness. I first reviewed the product in July of last year, with a follow-up shortly thereafter.

It’s now eight months since those writeups, so I think I can talk about omNovia again without being accused of undue favoritism or special favors (By the way, I don’t resell web conferencing licenses, I don’t accept advertising from web conferencing vendors, and I don’t engage in kickback deals with any vendors. If I say I like something, it’s because I like it.)

The company has been adding and refining features in a steady stream. They put their “Recast” recording feature into full development (mentioned at the end of my original article) and then added a way to play back a recorded session either on its own as a live event - including registration for new audience members, or as content included in a live event so that a presenter could introduce the subject or answer audience questions.

They also wrapped technology and services in a bundled offering called “StageToWeb” – designed to help producers integrate local in-room presentations with remote audience participation.

Another nice little feature addition of late is the ability for hosts and presenters to highlight audience questions and comments in different colors. Since the colors have no built-in meaning, you can choose your own interpretation and actions. I immediately saw it as valuable when you have a moderator reading audience questions in a live question and answer session. Each presenter could use colors to indicate “Don’t ask this one” and “Ask me this one”. Or if you have various people responsible for answering audience comments via chat, you could use color coding to assign comments to the appropriate helper.

I’m particularly pleased about the addition of payment processing as an option for omNovia customers. Now you can elect to sign up for this extra-cost option and include fee collection as a part of the signup and registration process for an event. omNovia is using PayPal as the payment processor of choice, so to collect money you must have a PayPal business or merchant account that is set up and verified for payment collection.

You link your PayPal account internally to your omNovia account as a one-time setup task (No programming involved… Just fill in the proper information fields). Then you can create any webinar as a payment-required event with its own pricing and discount codes. Pricing can be specified in US Dollars, Euros, or British Pounds. You can set up special discount codes, each with a reduction off the list price given as an absolute amount or as a percentage.

There is also a fancier integration for customers doing programming with omNovia’s APIs to integrate single sign on systems. You can set up different registration links and prices, for instance to offer one price to members coming from their logged-in account page and a different price for “outsiders.”

Payment is entered with standard credit card information, rather than using PayPal’s front end. So your registrants don’t see any PayPal logos and don’t need accounts. Payment goes directly into your own PayPal merchant account. There is no “collect and distribute” buffer through omNovia, who also does not see the entered financial information.

There are no built in facilities for processing refunds. You are on your own to deal with no-shows or dissatisfied viewers. [UPDATE March 30: Somebody has been reading my posts! You can now initiate a refund directly from the omNovia Event Manager console. Nice.]

The second big new enhancement is the ability to set up events with “Multi Channel Rooms.” Each room is associated with your choice of a supported language. As attendees log in, they are greeted with a choice of which language they would like to hear. You need to set up a presenter or interpreter associated with the audio stream in the subordinate channel room. That person would listen to the stream coming from the main room and then simultaneously translate it and speak into the second room’s audio line. Participants would hear the translated audio.

The system shows the same visual presentation content to all participants, so I could foresee a useful future enhancement (not planned or announced… are you listening, omNovia?) that would let a company create a translated version of their slides and show the translation in the second channel room. The subordinate rooms would be slaved to the master, so that when the presenter moved a slide forward in English, it would move the slides forward in the other rooms simultaneously. Wouldn’t that be nifty?!

UDPATE MARCH 23: omNovia asked me to clarify that you aren't actually managing two separate meeting rooms with separate logins. It's all conducted in one virtual meeting room and the choice of language stream at login determines which audio and chat channel the user sees. Sorry for the confusion.

I really enjoy seeing continued development and innovation in web conferencing and I love reporting on feature additions, especially when they are relatively uncommon (each of these last two features have been introduced by other web conferencing vendors as well, but they are still very rare). If you are a vendor and are feeling jealous of this coverage, let me know what is new and innovative in your product!

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

Free Webinar On Presentation Skills

Sign up for next week’s free webinar where I will be giving tips and best practices for online presenters. This is a great opportunity to get advice on how to become a more comfortable, confident, and effective webinar presenter. If you are a moderator or event organizer, let your presenters know about this session and suggest that it will make them feel more relaxed about their presentations.

ConferTel is sponsoring the webinar and you can register on their site. If your feed reader doesn’t support hyperlinks, just use the following short form registration link: http://bit.ly/9f7HT8

The session will last one hour, starting at noon US Pacific / 3pm US Eastern. For other time zones, click here.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,presenter training,presentation training,presentation skills,speaker training

Improve Audience Engagement – Stop Being So Polite!

Your mama raised you right. When someone helps you, you thank them. Good for you… That is the right thing to do in life. Now stop doing it in your webinars.

One of the most frequent questions I get as a consultant and speaker on the topic of better webinars is “How do I make my webinars more engaging for the audience? How do I make people pay attention? How do I make them interact?” The usual expectation is that I’ll say something about how many audience polls per hour to include, or how to use the whiteboard, chat, and other web conferencing features.

But I prefer to start from the simplest of premises: Approach everything you do from the perspective of your audience. Today’s lesson is this…

YOUR AUDIENCE DOESN’T CARE WHO SUPPORTED YOU!

I see webinars all the time where the speaker’s opening slide is a list of other people who worked on the research being presented, or were involved in carrying out a study, or are members of the department or group that put together the presentation. BOOORRRRIIINNGG!

Yes, you should acknowledge and thank those individuals. It’s the right thing to do. But do it on your own time. Send them a card. Buy some doughnuts for the team. But keep it out of your public presentation. For the simple fact exists that your audience does not care. The fact that those other individuals helped work on the project is the least interesting thing you could present from the audience’s perspective. You are basically giving your audience permission to stop paying attention while you take care of your own housekeeping and internal back-patting.

The same thing holds true at the end of your presentation. If you are the speaker, don’t bother thanking your moderator or webinar support team for their help in making the event go smoothly. Thank us afterwards. We appreciate the thought. But don’t weaken the impact of your presentation by distracting the audience so that the last thing they hear is unimportant banter. Close strong, with a summary of the benefit the audience has just received and a suggestion of how they should use this new information.

If you are the moderator or facilitator on an event and you have the final word to the audience, a very brief thank you to the speaker and audience members is usual and expected. Keep those short. Write them out. As you make each thank you, reiterate why the audience should feel grateful:

“Jim, thank you for sharing your insights and practical examples that we can put to use in our own businesses. And finally, thank you to each of you for taking time out of your day to improve your business skills and knowledge.”

One sentence each. Brief and done. Don’t let the power of your webinar be cannibalized by multiple repetitions of thank you’s and a general feeling of “Are we done now?”

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

Don’t Give Green Hats In China

I tripped across a press release today with the strange headline I used for this post. It turned out to be an announcement of a two-day course on international business protocol. That got me thinking about international differences in webinar behavior.

Making generalizations is always a dangerous game… We have to realize that individuals are individual. Any one attendee may have personal preferences and expectations that run counter to the generalization you make for his or her culture. And sometimes your view of cultural behavior may be more of a reflection on you than on your audiences!

But I’m still interested in whether my readers can provide tips and observations on things they have noticed in general to be true when working with cultures other than American. Perhaps you come from another culture and have noticed American webinar practices that don’t play well in your country. The majority of my readers are American, and we can all benefit from some well-intentioned warnings and examples.

I will start the ball rolling with an impression I have from presenting to Japanese audiences. In general they are less prone to participate in informal or unstructured interactions during the presentation. They typically do not type questions while I am talking and are not as likely to jump in with questions and comments if you open the phone line and ask for feedback. Interactions work better if they are structured with a clear break from your own presentation delivery. So a formal poll will elicit more responses than a request to type general comments.

How about cultures where it seems improper for the moderator and presenters to address each other by first name during the webcast? How about cultures where starting with a joke would be seen as unprofessional or disrespectful to the business setting?

Please add your comments to this post. Let’s enhance international understanding and webinar effectiveness!

(By the way, a green hat in China apparently symbolizes that the recipient is a cuckold. Fortunately, this is unlikely to be a problem in webinars. Unless you give away some pretty unusual gifts to attendees!)

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,international business,international customs,international culture

Unisfair Improves Webcasting Production In Latest Release

I don’t normally cover the “Virtual Events” space as defined by the few vendors that offer products and services in this area. The concept encompasses much more than my particular focus of webinars and webcasts. The idea is to create an online analog of a physical large-venue conference or trade show. The online environment typically has representations of buildings, rooms, even outdoor spaces. Visitors are represented by avatars (I guess that word no longer needs explanation) and you can have online interactions with other guests, sales and marketing representatives, press, and support personnel.

One of the big names in this space is Unisfair, which today announced Version 9 of their Virtual Engagement Platform. I got a demo of the latest version from their Senior Director of Marketing, Joerg Rathenberg. Joerg told me that they are trying to move away from the concept of creating a single event for a company, such as a three-day user group meeting. Instead, they are encouraging clients to create “always open” virtual venues where people can come and go within the construct of the digital location and request information or see provided content at their own convenience.

Recorded and live webcasts are a part of the content offerings that visitors might want to take in. Joerg explained that within these kinds of virtual environments, it is unusual for companies to stage truly live webinars. Because of the large audience reach and the overall time, effort, and expense that is involved in setting up, promoting, and running a virtual space, companies usually prefer to create their content ahead of time. This lets them do retakes if necessary, add multimedia, and generally ensure the most professional impression they can offer. But that can mean additional production expenses, involvement of outside video production services, and intermediary video formats that have to be imported and integrated into the virtual environment.

To help clients make the process easier, Unisfair has included a “Webcasting Studio” as a component of Version 9. It is part of the main venue builder software console and lets companies produce their webcasts as a self-service function. They can load up slides, video clips, and other multimedia content. They can hook up webcams (unlikely) or professional video cameras and capture the video feed of one or many presenters. They can switch between slide decks and presenters during the course of the presentation.

Once the content is created, there are two ways it can be used within the online venue. You can schedule a live session at a particular time and in a particular “room” just as you would at a physical conference. Attendees arrive and find themselves in the online analog of an auditorium room where they can watch the presentation. But they also have the ability to interact with the presentation staff in the ways we are all familiar with by now… Answer polling questions, respond to surveys, and type questions for the presenters. Behind the scenes, the presentation staff has the ability to chat with each other in private and prioritize audience questions for answering.

The second way to let people see the content is through on-demand access. This eliminates live interaction and response from the presenters, but allows the content to have ongoing reach and effectiveness.

Joerg told me that Unisfair has no interest in competing against standalone webcasting providers such as Stream57 or Streamlogics. Unisfair webcasts are meant to live purely within the confines of their own virtual venue and require the facilities of the virtual engagement platform to support playback, tracking, and interaction. But by adding the same kind of functionality to their environment that the standalone vendors offer, it gives companies an all-in-one content creation and delivery mechanism. It makes sense to me.

While I did not have a chance to see a live webcast session (or “simu-live” if you prefer), I watched an on-demand playback and it operated smoothly and problem free. The surrounding cosmetic features to give it the feel of an auditorium presentation did provide a little psychological familiarity and made the playback seem like less of a cold, impersonal internet console. Joerg says that as with all serious webcasting solutions, scalability is a priority, and they regularly do automated stress testing with many thousands of simulated viewers to ensure proper operation under heavy loads. They have also supported events with a few thousand real attendees, so the scalability is not just theoretical.

I’m happy (but not at all surprised) to see that webcasts are deemed important enough as information delivery and audience interaction vehicles to be included as part of an overall virtual engagement strategy. The next time you see a virtual event or venue advertised by a company, check it out. It’s a fascinating experience.

Technorati Tags: Unisfair,Joerg Rathenberg,webcasting,webcast,virtual event,virtual engagement,online event,online conference,virtual conference,virtual venue

Lessons From A Video Webcast

I did a webcast with IVT today (yesterday by the time you read this). In the presentation, I gave tips for improving your appearance and professional image in public business webcasts. We had a good turnout and lots of interesting and interested questions from the audience. I thought I would try to list a few brief lessons from my own experience.

1) People loved the prerecorded segment, shot in a nice setting with a professional camera, sound, lighting, and cameraman. One person wrote “This is the best webcast I have ever seen!” Then I switched over to my computer webcam for a live Q&A session. Comments included: “Why is the sound so bad?” “Why did the quality go down so much?” “Are you purposely trying to make the webcam section look bad?”

I readily and cheerfully admit that my work desk and office are terrible for video. I have poor lighting and an awful setting. But I can’t move it for a video webcast. I need to be near my hardwired connection (never try to do video over wireless) and my telephone (to talk to my webcast production team). I tried to set up ambient lighting and did a pretty good job of making sure I was clearly visible without severe glare or shadows. But the contrast between the professional setup and my desk was night and day. My sound was not the greatest either. I started with a lavaliere microphone hooked into my computer microphone port. But my producer told me that the sound was out of synch with my webcam image. So I had to switch back to the webcam’s internal shotgun microphone. That is never a recipe for high quality audio, especially when compared to the professional setup the audience had just seen. Lesson? You get what you pay for. If you want a professional appearance on camera, you need the specialized equipment and expertise that has been developed for that purpose. Get thee to a studio or have a crew come to your location with the right equipment.

2) We shot the prerecorded segment twice – once in long shot and once in closeup. IVT did a nice job editing between the two for the playback. My cameraman was great about keeping me framed, in focus, and with good sound. But he didn’t tell me that in the second take, my hair was out of place. It wasn’t a big deal, but it affected the illusion of zooming back and forth between shots as if I were talking in one unbroken recitation. Lesson? Never trust a cameraman to check your personal appearance details. That’s not their job, their training, or their interest. Your best bet is to have someone assisting you to check all appearance items. If you can’t do that, keep a mirror at your shooting position so you can check everything immediately before a take.

3) I tried out a new piece of software for this production. Called Script-Q, it is a teleprompter program that lets you scroll your script on a computer screen. I could control the speed and direction of the scrolling, change the font size, etc. I just used a wireless mouse held below the camera frame. I set up my laptop screen immediately below the camera lens and nobody could tell I was reading. It worked like a charm. The software gets my recommendation. But if you are going to use a teleprompter script, practice, practice, practice! You want to sound like you are talking, not reading. That means you need to go through the entire speech, out loud. Probably three times. That’s boring. But it lets you learn what is coming next. Then you have to practice using the teleprompter. Reading scrolling text correctly is tricky. You want to keep your eyes focused in one spot and let the text flow into that narrow vision field. It’s hard to fight the urge to scan the entire screen and let your eyes flow down to the bottom of the page.

4) We did two complete runthrough rehearsals before the live webcast. And we needed them. It gave us a chance to check all the technical inputs and connections, practice using the webcasting software and template, rehearse handoffs between the host and the guest speaker, etc. Then there were the usual glitches and unexplained behaviors to iron out. The live webcast went smoothly and professionally. It wouldn’t have if we had “winged it” and just assumed everything would come together.

IVT recorded the session and is working on post-production now. It should be posted soon on their website: www.ivtweb.com

Technorati Tags: IVT,webcasting,webcast,video production,teleprompter,Script-Q

Tips For Video Presenters

Time for one of my famous “Last minute signup alerts.” I am giving a special presentation on Thursday, March 4 covering tips for how to appear better on camera when giving a webcast or video presentation.

You will see me presenting in a prerecorded segment with a quality video setup and then in a more informal webcam setting while I answer live questions from the audience. It will be easy to compare the two and see how the mechanics of the shoot affect your perception.

IVT is hosting the webcast and we are using their software, so this also gives you a chance to check out their delivery environment.

I don’t cover this subject very often, so take the opportunity while you can.

Date: Thursday, March 4
Time: 10am US Pacific / 1pm US Eastern

Registration link: http://bit.ly/ivtvideo

See you on camera!

Technorati Tags: IVT,video production,video tips,webcast,webcasting