The Webinar Blog

New Web Conferencing Vendor Evaluation Available

Adobe is offering the newly-released “Forrester Wave(TM): Web Conferencing, Q2 2010” for free download from their website. In a shocking and welcome departure from standard marketing practices, you don’t even need to fill in any personal information. Just click and download.

Adobe is obviously happy about Adobe Connect’s identification as a Leader in Forrester’s grid. To be perfectly fair, reading the report closely indicates the difficulties that Forrester had in coming up with significant product superiority in the field of small-group web collaboration. They state in the summary that “every product in our evaluation did well with meeting features. It was only in the strategy for collaboration and for Web meetings that vendors showed significant differences.” I would caution against making significant purchase decisions based on a vendor’s stated “strategy for collaboration.” Strategies in this field get changed rather quickly as companies get bought and sold, go public and private, and as products get offered and retired based on competitive and positioning factors. You can’t even count on pricing to stay the same for very long at a time (see recent pricing changes by Citrix and WebEx as examples).

I am pleased that Forrester made such a clear distinction between products and evaluation criteria targeted at small-group / ad hoc web meetings and larger, more formal web events. The latter types of applications can incorporate more features and more differences in implementation approaches. Too many evaluations lump both types of collaborative applications together.

The Forrester paper is an excellent research tool for companies evaluating web meeting solutions. Big thanks to Adobe for purchasing distribution rights and putting it out there for public consumption.

If your feed reader does not allow hyperlinks, here is the URL to access the white paper. Copy and paste it into your web browser:  http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/analysts.html

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Adobe Connect,Forrester,Forrester Wave,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,online meeting

Everything You Know About Presenting Is Wrong

That’s a deliberately controversial and hyperbolic post title. But good gawd, how the heck do we spread the news to more people that their preconceived notions about presentation construction and delivery style are so often SO WRONG?

There are quite a few wonderful online resources for learning about presentation best practices. I have mentioned several of them in the past. Read enough posts from enough experts, and you soon start to see basic concepts repeated over and over. There is a reason for this… All the fine points of skill development and technique improvement are worthless if the fundamentals aren’t there. And in the overwhelming majority of business presentations, the fundamentals are discarded in a heartbeat by overworked, under-rewarded presenters.

Jon Thomas at Presentation Advisors recently put together a top five list of improper presentation design practices, along with some common rationalizations for taking the wrong tack. I think every PowerPoint designer has heard these and despaired. It’s hard to fight for right when facing a “do it fast, do it easy” mentality.

Olivia Mitchell at Effective Speaking went even further on her recent blog post about learning styles. She referenced studies going all the way back to 1987 showing that the commonly held beliefs about personal learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) don’t tend to work in practice. You need to choose the right presentation technique for each piece of content, not for the imagined channel receptivity of individual audience members (aside from obvious instances of visual/auditory impairment and other physical barriers).

So forget for a moment about dogmatic guides such as the 1-6-6 rule or the 10-20-30 rule. Try helping your less enlightened coworkers understand why it’s a good idea to use some text and visuals together. Why getting the audience involved helps their effectiveness. Why the audience should be able to see what you are talking about. And most importantly, why it’s worth taking the extra time and effort to give a good presentation rather than just doing the minimum necessary to get it off their task lists.

Technorati Tags: Jon Thomas,Olivia Mitchell,presentations,public speaking,presenting,PowerPoint,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing