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?
