The Webinar Blog

Think Local, Webcast Global

One of my clients is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, located in Oklahoma. They are a membership organization fostering scientific research, advancing the science of geology, promoting technology, and generally bringing a centralized voice to professionals in the petroleum geology field worldwide.

Part of their mission is to provide educational opportunities for their members. Traditionally this has been done with local seminars and classroom training. Now, with the guidance of Susan Smith Nash, Director of Education and Professional Development, AAPG has extended its training sessions with webinars. In addition, they now offer asynchronous e-learning. The education division invites guest speakers from a variety of companies and educational institutions to share highly specialized expertise with association members.

Yesterday we held a webinar on a technical topic with a title so long that it would take up much of this paragraph and you would still have no clue what I was talking about. But it was a subject of great interest to a certain niche subset of their membership. They signed up a subject matter expert to lead the session and put it on their website.

Signups came from all around the globe. We had attendees from Cairo, Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, the UK, Uruguay, Colombia, New Zealand, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Norway, and the USA.

Then our speaker got called to Russia on business and ended up giving the webcast from his Moscow hotel room at 11pm! He had never given an online presentation before and he was an absolute champ… Using annotation tools to mark up his slides in a way he couldn’t possibly have done in an in-room setting.

The AAPG managed to serve all those people, in all those countries, with a speaker situation that would have forced cancelation of a local event. The ability for a headquarters education group to concentrate purely on the content of their events without having to deal with international logistics, room rental, travel, and high costs is breathtaking when you think about it. They think locally about what they want to deliver and it magically becomes a reality for a global audience and presentation team. If you are looking for a justification and business case for webinars, take this as exhibit A.

Technorati Tags: AAPG,American Association of Petroleum Geologists,Susan Smith Nash,webinar,web seminar,web training,online training,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

How Should Your Web Conferencing Product Evolve?

I use a variety of hosted web conferencing products. Hosted means that I don’t install and maintain the software on my computer or corporate server… I access it over the web, relying on the vendor to keep it available and updated. Other terms for this include Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud computing.

A key debate in whether hosted or site-installed software applications are “better” centers on the issue of updates to the software. If you install a software application on your company’s computers and the vendor releases a new version, your IT team can delay installation until they have tested the new version for compatibility, notified corporate users, created a training or orientation program (if necessary), and decided whether the upgrade is beneficial or detrimental. If you use vendor-hosted software, the decision is out of your hands… One day you log on and find that you are using the new version.

An up-side to hosted software is supposed to be that the vendor has the flexibility to quickly add features and functionality without making customers go through a big release/install process. If the vendor wants to slip in a new bit of functionality or fix a bug, they can just do it (hopefully with due consideration for whether it could mess up existing customers). But this type of incremental update is exceedingly rare.

Most software vendors create versions of their software. Big changes that might cause incompatibility with existing operations get a new integer number. Small bug fixes and incremental additions are tacked on behind the decimal point, as in “Release 7.1.4” The vendor proudly announces each new version’s availability date and the collection of changes included in the release. They save up enhancements until it is reasonable to do a full production release.

Last week my hosted version of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5 got an update called Service Pack 1. My ReadyTalk Web Meeting account jumped up to version 6. Nice packaged bundles of feature changes, saved up and introduced as a set.

But at the same time, my omNovia account went through a series of mutations like a Haggunenon facing an oversized dining table (look it up). They added the ability to expand a video image to fit the screen. They extended registration to let one person register multiple guests for an event. They combined some registration and attendance reports. They added the ability to export chat transcripts to Microsoft Word. They fixed a problem causing a slide conversion error. Each was added as a separate programming change. There were no version numbers, no formal release notes… Just a notice on their Product Enhancements web page and RSS feed or a notification that the bug had been fixed.

omNovia is one of the few software companies I know that is willing to just throw in a feature or fix a bug on the fly without saving it up for a packaged release. I have had occasions where I reported a bug or an inconvenience on their support page and received an email hours or days later saying “Try it now.”

Taking the omNovia approach to product development is an exciting form of dynamics in software provisioning for your user community. I can certainly argue the negative side of the debate… “You never know what might change and when. I don’t want to keep retesting the software and retraining my users on a daily basis. I like to have a formal release notes document that summarizes all changes since the last release.”

But the positive debate is strong as well… “I don’t have to wait for the next release cycle to get my bug fixed. I can learn about and try out one new functionality addition at a time, rather than being hit by a big new release that changes many things at once.”

The various approaches to software development and customer implementation fascinate me as a former software product manager and as a current software user. Which side of the argument do you come down on? Write a comment and let me know.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro,ReadyTalk,omNovia,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,release management,software development

5 Tips For Webinar/Webcast Speakers

Stream57 hosted a live webcast about webcasting on Tuesday with a panel of experts in a Times Square studio. I was unable to participate live because of other obligations, but they asked me to record a very short video with some thoughts and insights about webcasting best practices. One of their questions was: “What are the five things every presenter needs to know when holding a virtual event?”

They seem to like the answer, because they featured it on a dedicated little teaser page. It’s only two minutes long, so I obviously don’t go into a lot of detail. But if you’d like to hear my top five recommendations in summary format, sit back and watch this clip: http://www.stream57.com/webcasts/jack/molay.html

Technorati Tags: Stream57,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,presentation tips,presenter training

ConnectSolutions Covers Web Conferencing Spectrum

ConnectSolutions put out twin press releases today covering an acquisition and a web conferencing platform offering. In addition to being specific developments for the company, the news also demonstrates some trends in the web conferencing space.

The acquisition was a company called Xuggle. Their specialty is software to transcode and manipulate audio/video streams. Companies are increasingly asking for smooth, large screen video as a part of their web communications strategies. One of the things that can make this difficult is the number of incompatible formats that video can be processed in.

For example, I recently recorded a video Q&A to be used as part of a streaming webcast for a vendor. I asked them what format they wanted the video in. They said “AVI.” Well, my Camtasia video production software gave me five different internal coding formats for an AVI file. I didn’t really understand the differences in each format and the webcasting company wasn’t sure which one they could use. I produced the video, sent it to them, and sure enough… “We’re having problems viewing that video. Could you try it with another codec?” This was followed by “Oh never mind. We figured it out.” The underlying technology of video is way too complicated for mere mortals to understand. Good transcoding software can really help.

The second announcement introduced a scalable suite of web collaboration products bundled under the mouth-filling label of “The ConnectSolutions Real-Time Collaboration Platform.” You have to give them points for clarity if not succinctness. The idea behind the platform is to provide software solutions optimized for different audience sizes.

The small end is covered by ConnectYou.Me, a product intended for one-to-one collaboration such as sales demos or technical support sessions. In the middle is our old friend Adobe Connect, which is flexible enough for a wide range of audience sizes on standard uses such as training or marketing webinars. And big webcasts going out to thousands of viewers fall under the domain of Podium.

ConnectSolutions is hanging their hat on the fact that organizations can have a single-source supplier for a set of solutions that handle different applications and needs, while having one point of contact for support, billing, licensing, and so forth. I can imagine this being attractive to companies that are seeing employees, departments, and office sites individually select a mishmash of solutions from various vendors.

Making video easier to use in web conferencing and enterprise consolidation of vendor solutions are both going to increase in importance, so it looks to me like ConnectSolutions has picked a viable strategy for their efforts.

Technorati Tags: ConnectSolutions,ConnectYou.Me,Podium,Adobe Connect,web conferencing,web conference,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,web collaboration,online meeting,online conference

ReadyTalk’s New Web Conferencing Release Adds Polling Flexibility

ReadyTalk just announced the release of Web Meeting 6, a new version of their web conferencing / web seminar software. The full press release is available on their site, and mentions several improvements such as social media integration with Twitter and Facebook.

Surprisingly to me, the press release only makes passing reference to a functionality advance that I find significant. ReadyTalk added several types of polling questions that most other providers don’t offer. When adding polls to your conferencing presentation, you can add the always-popular multiple choice question or a multiple answer question (“Select all that apply”).

But ReadyTalk now lets you add some fancy new types of interaction as well.

They have given you two types of pre-canned answer choices… Yes/No and Agree/Disagree. These can obviously be built using standard multiple choice polls, but having them pre-made makes it easier to add one of these in a meeting on the fly without requiring much setup time.

Ranking polls let the audience assign priorities or other rankings to a set of choices:

And there is also a freeform text entry poll, which can be a nice way to keep responses to a specific question out of the chat queue and visible only to the presentation team:

I hope more conferencing vendors will follow ReadyTalk’s example and give us additional audience interaction controls. These are great tools for recapturing audience attention and letting your audience guide you as a speaker. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your audience rank your presentation topics to let you know how much priority/time you should give to each subject?

 

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

Web Conferencing Kicks Ash

Planes are finally starting to fly over Europe again, but the backlog of travel woes will take days to unwind. As I write this, Scandinavia and the UK still have flight restrictions in place, thanks to Iceland’s volcanic temperament.

Publicare Marketing Communications in Germany issued a very short press release this week stating that web conferencing service providers reported an average increase of 58 percent in conferences compared to regular workdays.

I was interested in how they came up with that figure, so I contacted Publicare’s managing director and asked how they were able to get quantitative data so quickly. Robert Harnischmacher helped fill in some of the background for me. He pointed out that the information was self-reported by a variety of web conferencing providers which are named in the press release. There was quite a bit of variance in the reported increases, ranging anywhere from 7% to 130%. He had contacted Cisco as well, but their information came in too late for inclusion in his average. And he also wanted to acknowledge that the figures are not weighted in any way to account for the base number of web conferences for each vendor used as a starting point.

The 58% figure isn’t really as important as the indication that web collaboration has been seen as not only a standard business practice to help supplement in-person meetings, but as a viable emergency measure to replace business travel when it becomes impossible.

I did a little checking myself with some of the European-based web conferencing vendors I know, asking if they had anecdotal evidence of increased business attributable to volcano effects. All my contacts reported extra work caused by the travel embargo. I was particularly interested in larger webinars and webcasts as opposed to small ad-hoc web conference meetings. The larger web events are traditionally planned and scheduled far in advance, so scrambles on this front might not be as numerous, but would be significant.

Rob Holmes at Podia, based in the UK, told me they had scrambled to provision three impromptu webinars for clients who had already arranged large meetings and couldn’t get their people to them.

Joe Garde at Online Meeting Rooms in Ireland showed me some clips where meeting speakers had webcast their presentations to groups in physical halls because they couldn’t travel to the event (including a professor who webcast his violin playing to an audience in the National Concert Hall). Joe summed it up as: “Put it this way… I’m exhausted!”

Roland Steinmetz at Meeting.ie in Ireland agreed that he was seeing more inquiries and signups since the travel ban went into effect. He pointed out that audio conferencing also got a big boost from companies or smaller groups that couldn’t arrange or afford video production services.

And even though America is not in the path of the ash cloud, we have felt the effects as well. I spoke with Nick Balletta, the CEO of TalkPoint – a webcasting technology and services provider here in the States that handles large events. He gave me two examples of webcasting filling in for stranded travelers. Goldman Sachs had an international emerging markets conference in New York. The European contingent of attendees was unable to attend, so TalkPoint changed their support from what had been planned as just recording some sessions for archiving purposes into a last minute full-fledged live webcast of all sessions at the conference.

Another TalkPoint example was McDonald’s worldwide convention in Orlando, Florida. They had planned to include some limited webcasting of a talent competition, but were suddenly forced to provide live webcasting of the entire conference for all the attendees unable to get international flights to Florida. Nick told me that the call for support came in on Saturday and they went live with the international webcast on Monday.

Therein lies the greatest benefit of webcasting as an emergency backup. Instead of needing to book physical spaces, arrange seating and stage setups, food service, and signage, you add your extra arrangements once, at the delivery point. Everyone else just logs in from wherever they happen to be stuck in the world.

Web conferencing, webcasting, webinars… Call them what you like, but remember that they just might save your bacon the next time travel becomes an issue.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,Publicare,TalkPoint,Meeting.ie,Online Meeting Rooms,Podia

Webinar Times Need A Time Zone!

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I can’t help shaking my head in bemused exasperation when I see a webinar promoted with a starting time but no time zone. Even if your subject is intended for a local audience, others are going to see the announcement as well. You might as well be explicit about which time zone you are using.

While we are on the subject, it’s worth remembering that United States time zones have different abbreviations inside and outside of Daylight Saving Time. The difference can be critical for foreign audiences trying to figure out their local equivalent. That means you cannot use “PDT” and “PST” interchangeably… They signify different global times. Figure out which one applies to your event date and use it correctly.

If you are reading this from outside North America, our most commonly used time zones covering California to New York are:

• Pacific (PDT or PST)
• Mountain (MDT or MST)
• Central (CDT or CST)
• Eastern (EDT or EST)

A “D” in the middle indicates that the time is in Daylight Saving Time. An “S” in the middle indicates Standard time. Some of our states do not observe Daylight Saving Time when the rest of the country does.

If you are promoting your US event for an international audience, it is important to use a more specific time zone indicator. If you say your webcast starts at “10:00am Eastern” or “2:00pm Central” you may confuse people in Europe, Australia, and other locations that use those same shorthand time zone designations.

Time zones and time conversions can be confusing. Your best bet is to include a global lookup for the event so anyone anywhere in the world can see the starting time in their local time. I use an online tool at www.timeanddate.com. If you use their Fixed Time World Clock, you can put in the starting time and day of your event in whatever time zone you like. Click a button and it generates a page with the corresponding time for major cities around the world. Just include a hyperlink to that results page and your potential audiences can look up their local starting time no matter where they are. The site keeps track of all local Daylight Saving Time variances so you don’t have to. Here’s an example of a results page. I wrote this blog post at 2:20pm in Raleigh, North Carolina. You can see what time that was for you by clicking here.

Let’s all work at avoiding angry emails from webinar registrants who tried to join the event at the wrong time because they misunderstood the instructions!

Technorati Tags: time zone,TimeAndDate.com,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

ON24’s New Webcast Delivery Platform Breaks New Ground

Last week ON24 issued a press release announcing a new version of their webcasting platform. The press release concentrated on “Social Webcasting” (their term) as the focus of the release, making you think that integration with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook is the major feature of interest.

That integration certainly is present, with the ability to display a Twitter feed inside an event and let people post without changing windows. But after seeing a demo of the beta version, I have to tell you that the social media integration is small potatoes compared to the quantum leap in user configurability and control that ON24 is about to provide.

Mark Szelenyi (Director of Product Marketing for ON24) took me through the beta on its first day of availability, showing off the operation of the features. I was blown away. For the first time, each attendee of a webcast can completely control the display to suit himself or herself. Want to move the window showing PowerPoint slides over to the left of the screen? Just drag and drop it. Want to hide the live video feed of the presenter? Just close that window. Want to see the Twitter feed associated with the event’s hashtag and add your own tweets? Resize that window, move it around, let it overlay part of another window, then shrink it out of the way again.

The entire browser window becomes your sandbox as an event attendee. You can play to your heart’s content without affecting other users. There is no fixed console at all… just the wide open expanse of the browser page, showing whatever content windows the organizers have elected to make available, with a row of icons across the bottom of the page to let you access each function.

  (Click picture for full size image)

I have seen web conferencing/webcast systems that let an administrator configure the viewing display for the attendees, but this is the first time I have seen the users in control of their own viewing experience to such an extent. Of course administrators can elect to fix things in place if they want a bit more structure to their event environment. Each content window has flags to choose whether it is movable, resizable, shrinkable, and so on. Companies will also be able to add their own custom links and functionality by adding widgets to the console.

Everything runs in Flash, which makes it cross-compatible with a variety of browsers and operating systems (but keeps it off the iPad for the time being). Companies should be able to add Flash video clips and Flash applications such as games within their webcast.

The new product is scheduled to complete customer beta testing by the end of May, at which time ON24 will start using it to run full-service turnkey events for their clients. By July they plan to make it available to self-service clients who produce their own events. The new platform will coexist with the existing – more static – display choices that rely on Windows Media, Real Player, or Flash. Customers choosing the new option will pay a premium for the advanced features.

ON24 is also at work publishing and documenting a public API so third-party developers can add their own functionality as widgets for the webcast console. One application that immediately occurred to me would be a way for companies to add a live transcription box to a webcast to support the hearing-impaired. Users could choose whether to display the live subtitles or not. I hasten to add that this is not an out-of-the-box capability provided by ON24. It’s just my own example of how an open platform could be put to use once people start working with the interface.

Mark said there will also be new reports available to summarize audience usage of the various components in a webcast. The new delivery system will tie in with ON24’s existing registration, audience management, and lead scoring systems when running a scheduled event.

I think this is a fantastic advance in making webcasts more attractive, useful, and engaging for attendees. I can’t wait to attend one of their first production events when the system goes live!

Technorati Tags: ON24,social webcasting,Mark Szelenyi,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing

Reviewing A Twitter Feed From A Webinar

I did a webinar today with KRM Information Services. We had a really receptive and active audience. KRM heavily promoted the webinar through Twitter and dedicated a hashtag to the event. During the event, they kept the Twitter feed for that hashtag visible in the event console for all attendees. They also dediscated some of their staff to pulling out key learning points from my presentation and summarizing them in the feed.

I did not try to monitor the Twitter feed in real-time while presenting. I find it too distracting and I start losing my train of thought in what I want to say and how long I should spend saying it. But looking over it afterwards is quite interesting. You might want to use your favorite Twitter tool (I use TweetDeck) to review the feed for #engage2010 (Remember, you have to scroll backwards because almost all tools show the most recent posts first).

I can see a number of things:

1) People give immediate indications of whether you are meeting their expectations. One person felt I spent too much time on a topic she already knew, even though it was promoted as a key deliverable of the session. The internet makes linear content delivery difficult. We each expect that we can jump past unwanted information and instantly access the thing we personally want to hear. That’s difficult to accommodate in public webinars.

2) People will use Twitter to indicate technical problems that may be local to their machine. One guy wasn’t seeing updates in the feed and someone else didn’t see the presentation slides moving. That information used to be private conversations with the technical moderator!

3) People can easily get confused over where you expect responses to interactive questions. I asked for typed chat responses in the conferencing software and some people put their answers into the Twitter feed. Presenters need to be more explicit about where the audience should type for different uses.

4) Some of the things that seem to resonate and get retweeted really surprise me! As a presenter, remember that EVERYTHING you say is important. What you think of as a “throw-away line” may be revelatory to an audience member.

One last point… If you are interested in Twitter as a “backchannel” for webinars, you can’t get a more comprehensive or authoritative discussion of the subject than Cliff Atkinson’s book “The Backchannel.” It is the current go-to reference on the topic. And an informative and easy read.

Technorati Tags: KRM Information Services,KRM,Twitter,Backchannel,Cliff Atkinson,twebinar,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online event,web event,web meeting,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Learn About Webinar Engagement Techniques

Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 14) I will be joining professional speaking coach Andy Goodman in a free webinar sponsored by ReadyTalk. We will play tag team on a slew of best practices and practical examples of how to capture and hold your audience’s attention during a web event. As an added bonus, we’ll be using the special preview version of ReadyTalk’s latest release, so you can get an exclusive sneak peek at their latest features and functionality (this is NOT a product demo or marketing presentation though, so please don’t expect that as the focus of the event).

It is scheduled as a one-hour webinar starting at 2pm Eastern (click here for time zone conversions).

If your news reader does not support hyperlinks, visit the following URL to see more information and register -- http://bit.ly/rttoe2

I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: webinar,Andy Goodman,web seminar,online seminar,online event,web event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,ReadyTalk