The Webinar Blog

Are You Spoiling Webinars For Everyone?

USA Today ran a column by Steve Strauss on the basics of business webinars. It’s a high level introduction to the subject for neophytes. Fine… I have no problem with Steve’s quick overview or his advice to businesses that are thinking of adding webinars to their communications mix.

The content of the column isn’t what interested me so much. It’s the first two reader comments published online (the only comments so far as I write this). I hope I’m not violating copyright by quoting them here:

1) “Ahhh… Webinars. Best way to get an quick 1h/2h break from work and do nothing. I don’t think I have ever been able to acquire or improve any skill through one of them. Just too many interruption, or other things that gets prioritized ahead of the session. Great as a speaker, fairly low value as an attendee.”

2) “Yeah, right, let’s have a webinar. You have got to be joking!”

Ouch. Do we have a problem of perception, a problem of personalities, or are webinars truly useless as a business tool?

The second comment doesn’t give us much to work with, unless the writer disagrees so vehemently with Steve’s column that s/he finds it ludicrous to even consider webinars as a business tool. I know this does not match reality… Thousands of companies are benefitting from expanding their marketing, training, customer communications, and other types of collaboration through webinars. So let’s assume instead that the ridicule implies that it’s ludicrous to attend a webinar. I’ll address that below.

The first comment has more meat, so let’s see why the writer has such a bad opinion of webinars from the audience perspective and evaluate whether your webinars are helping to perpetuate her attitude.

“Get a break from work and do nothing.” – Do your webinars force your audience into a passive mode? If you don’t address each listener as an individual and invite them to think, participate, and mentally apply the concepts you introduce, then you end up with audiences that view your webinars as an opportunity to “do nothing.”

“I don’t think I have ever been able to acquire or improve any skill” – Do your webinars consist of “data dumps” that replicate a white paper or textbook? Then you aren’t helping your audience acquire knowledge or skills. Use the unique advantages of visual and audio communication – along with the opportunity to collaborate with and engage your audience as active participants – to drive home key points, engage enthusiasm for your subject, explain applications of the factual information they can study offline. I give lots of webinar presentation training online. The comments I see indicate that my students feel they are acquiring and improving skills in a way they couldn’t do by reading a book.

“Too many interruptions” – Do you make it easy for your audience to drift away from your presentation? A monotonous presentation delivered in an abstract lecture style is sure to let interruptions take precedence. The interruptions are more interesting than you! Assume that your audience is constantly trying to do something else. You need to repeatedly recapture their attention and enthusiasm, again and again.

“Other things get prioritized ahead of the session” – Do your advance communications stress the value that your attendees will get by attending? They should be so clear on the benefits they will receive by attending that it is silly to let something else take precedence. If your confirmation and reminder emails only contain login information, you are setting yourself up to be the lowest priority task for that time period. Each email must succinctly restate the value proposition of your webinar from the audience’s perspective. Satisfy their self interest and the priorities will take care of themselves.

“Great as a speaker, low value as an attendee” – As you prepare and practice, do you listen to your presentation with an attendee’s ear? Are you quickly delivering the value you promised in your promotional materials? Are you being explicit about why each fact and concept you introduce is valuable and useful for your audience? Are you thinking about the speed and density of information transfer to make sure your audience can absorb the information and stay with you? If not, you are creating a webinar that is only great for you. And that’s not worth your time, energy, and money.

Your webinar can be the exception that surprises and impresses people like these commenters. It takes a commitment to think from your audience’s perspective during planning, preparation, and delivery. If you just knock together a monotonous, tedious data dump because someone in your company tells you that it’s your turn to present, you are not only going to drive away your own audiences… You’re going to turn them off webinars in general. And that doesn’t help anybody.

Technorati Tags: Steve Strauss,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,web training,online training,web presentation,online presentation

Webinar News Roundup

It may only be Thursday, but it’s a busy enough week in the webinar industry to justify another overview of interesting developments.

WebinarBase.com launched a listing and search service for webinars and webcasts. I wrote up my initial impressions in a quick post, but I have not worked with the site extensively. The list of webinar posting sites continues to grow… You can now choose from EventSpan, Finervista, WebinarBase, Webinar-Directory, WebinarHero and WebinarListings. Is there an app for that?

ON24 is doing some expansion. They added a CFO and announced new offices in Paris and Hamburg. This supplements their existing offices in San Francisco and London, making them a stronger multinational player. Local support is awfully nice when you are running an event.

Freebinar moved out of Beta and into general availability. This is a free web conferencing service for audience sizes up to 150. It is supported through displayed ads in the conferencing interface. The technology uses screen sharing for all presentation aspects, in the same vein as GoToMeeting. I did a quick check to make sure it runs, but a full review will have to wait a bit.

I just saw a site called TopTenReviews that posted their rankings of ten web conferencing products. I’m not actually sure when it was published, as they don’t put a date on their work. This can make it hard to tell how old the reviews are or which product versions they are comparing. That is important in a world of hosted applications where the technologies get updated frequently. But it’s good to have additional sources of comparison when shopping for a solution.

Sonic Foundry manufactures a hardware appliance to capture and stream webcasts originating from a local presentation room. They just announced a new smaller and lighter footprint for the device, making it easier to transport and situate in the room.

ViVu has a webcasting application that works in tight integration with Skype, allowing multiple video and audio connections. They have not publicly posted this news yet, but I have advance information that they have a new version of their software platform which adds archive and playback capabilities at no additional cost.

And to end on a light and playful note of schadenfreude, MSNBC ran a cautionary story about the dangers of getting complacent in a connected world. Always assume your audience can see and hear everything you do!

Enjoy your Friday!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,web event,online event,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,ON24,Freebinar,Sonic Foundry,ViVu,WebinarBase

Webinar Base Lists Webinars

I just got notification that Webinar Base has launched yet another entrant in the field of webinar listing/search functionality. Interestingly, the business seems to be based in Romania, which is one of the less-common business locations for webinar-related offerings.

The site has the usual bits of puffery on the home page… I don’t really think it contains “the largest collection of webinars and webcasts,” but I’m becoming inured to those kinds of statements by now.

Searching for webinar listings can be done by category or by keyword. There are 15 category options and some are non-intuitive as to what they might contain or whether they overlap with others. For instance, “Business Webinars” seems to cover a lot of ground and would include many of the other topics such as “Management/Leadership Webinars.” I found when I listed a test event that I could only choose one category to define it, which was a bit frustrating. I want my event to be found under any relevant search topic.

Posting a new listing involves filling in text fields on a web page. Interestingly, things like price and date are text fields as well. It could be a bit tough on the administrator to figure out which date format I’m using if I enter 6/8/10 in the date field. Apparently the date field should also include the time, since there is no other field for that, nor anyplace to indicate what time zone applies.

Entries are submitted for approval and posting by the site’s administrator. That always worries me in terms of both eventual scalability and critical path dependencies. If she goes on vacation or is otherwise occupied, your listing sits in a pending queue.

You can list free webinars for free, but fee-based webinars cost $9 per listing. There is an additional $49 fee to get your listing in the scrolling slider bar of “Featured Webinars” on the site’s home page.

Webinar Base has also started a blog with some general interest tips and pointers for webinar producers and presenters. As I write this, there are only two entries, but I’m sure they will be adding more over time.

Good luck to Webinar Base. They face some stiff competition from other established webinar listing services, but if experience has taught us anything, it is that there seems to be infinite room on the Web.

Technorati Tags: Webinar Base,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,online seminar

Showing Webinar Slides: Share or Upload?

Dave Paradi wrote a blog post about using Microsoft Live Meeting for the first time and running into slide conversion problems. He concluded that showing slides via screen share rather than upload is the way to go. I wrote a comment adding that Live Meeting has a little-publicized restriction preventing certain audience members from seeing animations in your PowerPoint, which the presenter may not even realize. Dave seemed to think that this put the last nail in the coffin for uploading slides.

I am not so quick to concede the slide display war to screen sharing. Let’s look at advantages and disadvantages to uploading vs. sharing:

1) Fidelity. Screen sharing is the clear winner. Every technology that uploads slides has to convert them from native PowerPoint to another format. In the process, strange things may happen. Color gradients and image fills can get messed up. Embedded fonts are almost always casualties… Anything that the conversion programmer considers “nonstandard” (or doesn’t have a license for) may get turned into another font. With screen sharing, you run your PowerPoint in PowerPoint. About the only problem I have seen is with conferencing technologies that reduce the color palette to boost performance. That can produce pixelated or blotchy images and bad display of gradient fills.

2) Animations and transitions. Quite a few upload-oriented conferencing systems convert slides to static images – JPG or something similar. This eliminates animation effects, builds, and transition effects from slide to slide. I don’t like telling guest speakers they have to redesign their presentation to suit the limitations of our software. But screen sharing is usually awful at any animation involving movement. It can handle a simple appear/disappear, but I don’t know of ANY screen sharing technology that can guarantee or even hope for a smooth display of scrolling, fly-ins, wipes, and other effects. My favorite for handling animations is a really good converter that works at keeping up with the latest versions of PowerPoint. Note that most conferencing products do NOT support slide transitions. A few go the extra step in their conversion process.

3) Non-PowerPoint slides. I can’t think of an uploading technology that lets you import Keynote slides to your conference. You would have to go through a preliminary conversion to PowerPoint format. And forget about using really offbeat solutions like Prezi. Screen sharing is the winner in this category as well.

4) Preparation time. Screen sharing comes out on top again. Want to make a last second change to fix a typo five seconds before your web conference? Go ahead! All you have to do is bring up the latest version of the slide deck on your desktop. Done. Uploading a slide deck and converting the slides to the vendor’s display format takes time. You have to do this step ahead of your meeting and you won’t have the freedom to make a last second change. Since NO web conferencing vendor lets you upload and integrate an individual slide, any small change means starting the upload and conversion from scratch. I still can’t figure out why nobody has introduced a way to replace a single uploaded slide with an update.

5) Scaling. This is one area where a good uploading process can score points over screen sharing. If your vendor converts the slides to a vector format, it can display them at any size and any resolution for any attendee. You never have to worry about whether your attendees have scroll bars and are only seeing a part of the picture or are seeing a tiny image in a corner of their huge high resolution monitor.

6) Performance. Another win for uploading. I have worked with too many presenters who create a series of slides at some point in their talk and flip through them rapidly: “Here’s the drag strip. You can see the staging light turn from red… to yellow… to green… And away they go!” That sentence is accompanied by three rapid slide advances, each with a picture. For a screen sharing technology to redraw an entire screen with a full color picture, it can’t possibly keep up with the presenter’s display. He or she doesn’t even know that the audience either missed seeing some of the slides or is lagging behind. The best of the conversion-based conferencing technologies do a local cache of the next slide or two on the attendees’ computers. They can more rapidly flip forward to the next slide, staying closer to the presenter’s display. And usually the presenter has the same redraw limitation as the audience, so she can tell when she is moving too fast for the technology to keep up.

7) Multitasking. It is usually very hard to run a PowerPoint in slideshow mode on your desktop and still see and work with your other presenter controls. You can’t see chat messages or audience questions or similar controls that give you extra functionality. I often end up logging in as a presenter on two separate computers – One to show the presentation and the other for looking at my presenter controls. Not very convenient. Technologies that upload slides usually show them in a window designed to work alongside the other conferencing control functions.

8) Annotations. A few years ago, no screen sharing vendor allowed markups on the shared display area. Now it is becoming more common, but still lags in universality behind the upload technologies – all of which allow marking up slides for the audience to see. And with uploaded conference slides, it is common for annotations to “belong to” a slide. When you return to the slide, you can still see your previous markups. Screen sharing has no concept of the individual slides, so you only get whatever annotation is currently on the screen.

9) Multiple presenters. When slides are uploaded to a conference room it is easy to let various presenters each take their turn moving through the slides. Everyone has the same performance. Some vendors prefer simultaneous control, some pass control from one presenter to another. Some let you swap between preloaded slide decks quickly and easily. With screen sharing, passing control presents more difficulties. Either the first presenter gives control of his keyboard and mouse to the next presenter (leading to delays and lag time in response) or passes local screen sharing rights to the next presenter’s desktop. This can cause problems with differing resolutions, pauses in the attendee view, and other distractions.

10) Backup and failsafe. For me, this is the overwhelming decider. If I am the main presenter on a screen sharing technology and I have a computer problem (freeze, crash, lost connection, etc), there is a significant hassle in swapping to another computer so we can continue the session. I need to have given the other presenter the same presentation, they have to be ready to bring it up and move to the same place in the presentation, there are potential problems with screen resolutions being different, etc. But with my slides uploaded to the conference room, I can immediately pass control to my designated backup person (moderator, co-presenter, etc) who keeps flipping the slides for the audience while I work from my hardcopy. Lost time and audience distractions are minimized.

As you can see, there are positive and negative aspects to both slide display approaches. My personal preference is based on being a moderator for large-audience structured events – not small ad-hoc person-to-person meetings. If I can, I will use a really good upload and conversion technology that stores the slides in the conference room, provides access for multiple presenters, lets me switch between slide decks, and preserves animations and slide transition effects.

Technorati Tags: slide display,slide conversion,PowerPoint,Keynote,presentation sharing,slide sharing,application sharing,web conference,web conferencing,web seminar,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar