The Webinar Blog

Survey Results About Webinar Attendees

A big thank you to VirtualEdge.org for their tweet alerting me to a recent article on Webinar User Trends. WTG Webinars of the UK conducted a survey of attendees coming to a variety of web events. The company says they had over 10,000 registrations in 2010 and they received more than 1,000 responses. Their audiences are primarily from the UK and Europe, followed by North America, with representation from other geographies as well.

I don’t want to just reproduce their results here… You should go read their article on the source site to see all the nicely plotted pie charts on a variety of questions. But there are a few items I found particularly interesting.

1)  21% of the respondents said they find out about upcoming webinars on LinkedIn. That surprises me. Not because of the reach and power of LinkedIn… I now take that as a given. But I haven’t seen it heavily used for promoting webinars, and this response seems excessive given the number of webinars the average LinkedIn user is likely to trip across. But it does show that if you subscribe to a business interest group that allows notifications of upcoming webinars you should definitely take advantage of the promotional opportunity!

2) There is a fascinating disparity in the answers to two closely linked survey questions. One asked what drives people to register for a particular webinar. The overwhelming response is “Topic.”  It has a 62% response rate, with “Speaker” coming in at 13%. Well and good. But when asked “What do you use webinars for?” the respondents put “Opportunity to hear from leading industry speakers” in the lead at 39%, followed by “Educational resource” at 34%. Your takeaway? Try your damndest to get a notable name or highly credible speaker talking about a topic of interest to your target demographic.

The problem with this approach is that all too often the experts in the topic are absolutely terrible at communicating their information in an interesting and engaging manner on a webinar. This survey did not address satisfaction levels or problem areas, but many other surveys have pointed out a groundswell of frustration at speakers who just read bullet point slides at the audience. A great way to get around the problem is to use a tag-team approach. Use the expert’s name to assist with your drawing power, but include a strong presenter to work on the visual materials (slides, etc) and to lead the conversation… Drawing out and commenting on the facts and insights that the expert has.

There is nothing new and innovative about this approach… It has been used on television and radio for decades. But it is still uncommon on webinars and deserves more use in this medium.

If your feed reader didn’t preserve the link to the WTG Webinars article in my first paragraph, you can access it through this shortened link: http://bit.ly/WTGarticle

Technorati Tags: WTG Webinars,web seminar,webinar,web event,online seminar,online event,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

omNovia Tweaks Their Feature Set

I end up using omNovia web conferencing quite often for my business needs and for client events. One of the tricky things about their approach to software development is that a new feature refinement may come out at any time… They don’t schedule and announce formally numbered release versions. I just noticed a group of feature updates on their product enhancements page, so I thought I would mention them here for the benefit of other users and for people doing comparative research on webinar technologies.

1) Polling Improvements. Thank goodness! I’ve been waiting for this. They increased the number of slots for response choices from 5 to 8. They also added an option to allow “Select all that apply” kinds of questions (“Select one answer” questions are the other option). New reporting lets you download polling results into spreadsheet format and programmers can integrate the results into database/CRM systems through an API.

2) Custom Music for eCurtain. omNovia has the concept of an electronic curtain you can drop over your display space. Attendees see the curtain and your desired custom message telling them to wait for the show to go on. You also have the option to play music, and now you can upload your own mp3 file to play while the curtain shows.

3) Content Divider Resizes For All. An event organizer can set up the room display to have two side-by-side content display areas. This is pretty snazzy. You could show a live or recorded video on one side and slides on the other, as an example. The presenter can choose whether to show side 1 or side 2 taking up the entire screen or to show them side by side. The new enhancement is that the presenter can move the divider line to the right or left to expand and shrink the areas given to the respective content, and the display will change accordingly for all participants. It used to be individually controlled for each participant.

4) Instant Invite For Presenters. You used to be able to invite attendees to join a meeting already in progress. Now you can invite presenters the same way and they will get a link giving them appropriate authority when they enter.

 

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

New Certification Program For Digital Event Specialists

I received word today of a fascinating new training and certification program being offered by The Virtual Edge Institute. They say they plan to start a course in June that will teach “the skills and strategies necessary to successfully plan, build, design and execute a virtual events program that achieves business objectives.”

This should be an enormous help for event specialists to expand their knowledge from the traditional aspects of physical event organization into the digital age. Understanding all the aspects of setting up branding and venue design, how to describe and sell space to exhibitors, how to plan for and build a timetable for deliverables from suppliers and participants, and a hundred other things are all different from the techniques and best practices used for physical events.

This is obviously geared more towards virtual events that use avatar-driven analogies to physical venues. That technology is still in the early adoption phase, with only a few major vendors in the space. But it is definitely going to grow, and it overlaps my area of focus with interactive webinars and webcasts becoming the common information delivery mechanism (replacing speeches in auditorium rooms and breakout rooms as physical events would have).

I have considered the idea of offering a similar certification program for virtual presenters, as there are techniques and skills that are different from the traditional stage presentation training many of us have had (or have learned through trial and error). The problem is that while there is a well known and recognized job description as an events specialist, where certification could help get you a job or could show your continued skills development with an existing employer, the corresponding job function is awfully hard to find for speakers and presenters. Relatively few companies have employees hired as official presenters and spokespeople. Random employees get called upon to speak on their area of expertise, and having certification in presentation techniques is unlikely to prove tangibly valuable beyond the (hopefully obvious) improvement in their own skills.

What do you think? Would virtual presentation certification be helpful to you or to your company?

Technorati Tags: Virtual Edge Institute,meeting planning,event planning,events specialist,virtual event

Learn How To Build Marketing Presentations

Don’t forget to register for my educational webcast on how to build effective marketing presentations. MediaPlatform asked me to be their guest expert this week and the talk is scheduled for Thursday, February 24 at 2pm US Eastern. What time is that where you live? Click on this link for a conversion chart (and why aren’t you providing this convenience to your registrants?): http://bit.ly/dMXNLA

This is one of the ultra-rare presentations where I appear on video as well as using slides, so it’s an opportunity to see how video impacts the dynamic of a web event. We are keeping this session short… Under 45 minutes. I’ll give tips and tricks in a lecture format for about 25 minutes, then we’ll open up the floor and just answer your questions for the remainder of the time. It should be a great chance to learn a lot without wasting time on fluff. As always, I promise you that I won’t waste any of my time trying to market myself, my services, my company, books, DVDs, or time share ownership opportunities. This is pure best practices talk.

I will be concentrating on tips for creating marketing presentations that you can deliver via a web meeting, but to be honest, most of the advice translates to any kind of marketing presentation (particularly for the B2B world).

I’m looking forward to answering your questions!

ACCKKK! I forgot to include the registration link!  Here it is: http://bit.ly/eoU43G

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,marketing,presentation training

Why Not Schedule Tweets On A Webinar?

Several webinar software vendors have integrated Twitter into their technology. But I don’t know of any who can solve a request from my friend James…

James would like to be able to preconfigure a list of tweets, each tweet associated with a specific slide in his presentation. When a particular slide gets displayed to the audience, the corresponding tweet automatically goes out on the designated Twitter account.

This would make life a lot easier for a one- or two-person webinar crew who have other things to concentrate on during the presentation than typing or copy/pasting tweets. I can certainly see the value in working out your pithy summarizations of key concepts and synchronizing them with your presentation. It would be a great way to keep a steady flow of information going during your event, it makes it easier for others to retweet important items without having to restate them (perhaps incorrectly), and it could encourage more back channel conversations on each subject.

Obviously this would only work with technologies that upload slides and know what is being shown during the webinar. Conferencing products that rely purely on screen sharing (such as GoToWebinar) don’t have the concept of advancing through slides… They just show whatever happens to be displayed on the presenter’s screen at any moment. So the only implementation I can think of for them is to have a queue of tweets that you could press a button to send in sequence. That’s not quite as nifty as having the software take care of the send for you.

What do you think? Valuable?

Technorati Tags: Twitter,tweet,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Update on iLinc 11

Last month I wrote a short post about iLinc activity scheduled for February. Now it’s February and I have a little more substance to report. First, the details of their virtual user conference (iConnect) are firmed up. It will be held online on February 23 over the space of five hours. There is a PDF agenda on their web page so you can pick the subjects of interest and plan to log in and out to see the things that matter to you. Doesn’t that make more sense than flying to a city, renting a car, getting a hotel room, and then having to hang around and take the interesting with the uninteresting over the course of a day or two… artificially stuffed with sessions in order to justify the time and inconvenience of traveling? I thought so.

I also had a chance to see a sneak preview of the new iLinc Version 11 interface in a web conference with the iLinc brass. James Powers (President/CEO), Guy Cournoyer (VP of Sales), Ethan Abrams (VP of Product & Technical Operations), and Pat McGraw (Senior Solutions Engineer) all appeared on camera simultaneously, with a matrix of webcam windows that I could move around my screen, docking them in a horizontal or vertical strip or clustering them in a group. At one point I noted a serious reduction in video performance, with blocky pixels and color banding (reduced color palette), but Guy said he was running on settings for low quality, small window performance. He changed his settings and came through in proper clear and non-artifact-laden form. I did not notice a lag or lack of synchronization between the audio and video in the four simultaneous streams.

The main web conferencing console has been organized more simply and consistently, with all commands placed in a command bar at the top of the screen. In certain cases (such as going to screen share or full screen content mode) the command bar auto-hides so that you need to move your cursor up to the top of the screen to show it again. This is not immediately intuitive, but the learning curve is about a half second. Interestingly, iLinc chose to de-emphasize the commands in order to place focus on the content of the conference, whatever it may be. So the command bar and text/icons are all black on grey, which felt a little weird in our highly color-branded society. I think I would get used to it quickly, and I certainly appreciate the focus on content over the delivery mechanism.

My favorite new feature continues to be the addition of explicit real-time captioning. A meeting host can designate a participant (either presenter or attendee status in a webinar situation) to be the real-time closed caption typist. Other attendees can choose to display or hide the caption stream in a thin strip below the main content area. But what is really cool is that you can provision several different captioning streams and let users choose which one they want to see. So in a multilingual event, you could provide the ability for attendees to choose from a French or English or Spanish translation stream. Or thinking more creatively, you could have a stream with trivia facts about the company and product. Or a stream for an engineer to comment on design features and details while a marketing person does a product overview – to satisfy technical audiences while not boring business attendees.

iLinc is one of several conferencing vendors who have supported a proprietary multi-file hosted record/playback format. It allows for a great deal of functionality in the recorded content, but limits the distribution of the recording. They now allow a meeting host to choose whether to use the full featured version that captures all activity during a meeting or to create a more simple single-file Flash recording. The Flash version can be downloaded, distributed, or hosted elsewhere. The Flash version does not capture chat or live display of web media (side note: This is a cool feature that lets a presenter show media such as a YouTube clip without having to upload the media file). I guess I can live with that, but I was disappointed that it also leaves out displayed polls and poll results. It can be hard for a playback viewer to understand what was going on during polls if they can’t see the basic questions and answers. iLinc says they are working on this for an upcoming enhancement. I was encouraged to hear that iLinc has the ability to convert a recording from one format to the other on request, but it’s not a user-accessible utility.

There is some new reporting functionality that will allow hosts to consolidate and analyze poll results after a session, but I did not see that in action. I like the concept and I’m in favor of more vendors jumping on this idea!

I also didn’t look at Salesforce.com – related features, since I am not a CRM guy. iLinc says they will soon be able to export a meeting chat transcript into a Salesforce record, which seems to me as though it would have some specific but limited benefits if you are holding a meeting with a particular client. In larger multi-company meetings, the amount of extraneous information in the chat log would probably be overwhelming and inappropriate for storing with a single contact’s data.

To use a standard old cliché, this is definitely “an evolutionary rather than revolutionary” release. That’s not a bad thing. Reeducating an existing user base is not to be taken lightly, and being able to gradually extend and refine functionality while letting people continue to use the product they have learned is worthwhile.

They hit their pre-announced release date and customer availability will begin on Saturday, February 19. In the world of commercial software, that’s worth a shout out in itself!

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

Does Web Conferencing Hurt Business?

I just saw a short online article summarizing results of a survey sponsored by CareerBuilder.com. The article had the provocative headline “Survey: Cutting business travel cuts business.”

It opened with two bullet points in bold face on a highlighted background:

• Less business travel adversely impacts their business, say more than a third
• ‘Some companies are revisiting their policies’

Wow! Sounds pretty bad. Especially when combined with a lead-in sentence of “… But such penny pinching might have had unintended consequences, suggest results of a recent survey…”

However, when I read into the article, I found that things were not as glum as the sensational audience grabbers suggest. First of all, the survey showed that only 30 percent of the surveyed companies had cut back on business travel last year. That’s less than I would have thought. And of that 30 percent who said they reduced travel, only 37 percent of them said it negatively impacted their business.

So my interpretation is that almost two-thirds of the companies who have tried reducing business travel find that they are able to maintain or improve business results while saving costs, time, and employee inconvenience. Nice!

Deeper into the specifics, the article says that 42 percent of companies say they rely more on phone/web conferencing now to conduct business with clients. 31 percent of them say they get “just as much out of virtual meetings as face-to-face meetings.” Again, this is impressive. Virtual meetings are not and should not be replacements for every type of meeting need. But the fact that a third of respondents say they work just as well as F2F shows the huge current and potential benefits in virtual collaboration.

Oh, and that quoted fragment in the opening bullet points? Turns out the full quote is that some companies who have NOT yet reduced travel are revisiting their policies to “maximize the effectiveness of their business travel initiatives.” Sounds like there is a lot of room left for further reductions in travel, to be replaced by something just as effective (in some – not all – cases), but less costly and disruptive.

If I were writing this same article, I might headline it: “Survey: Cutting business travel shows great potential”

But that wouldn’t be as alarmist and wouldn’t fit in with the media’s fixation on playing to fear and doubt. Tsk.

Technorati Tags: CareerBuilder.com,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,business travel,virtual collaboration,business results

Social Advertising For Fee-Based Webinars

I just got notice of a new service called RippleFunction. No, it isn’t a party where they serve very low cost alcohol. It refers to the “ripple effect” of promoting events through social media contact networks.

The concept works as follows:

1) You plan a webinar or webcast for which you charge a registration fee (the system works just as well for local physical events, but that’s not my focus area). Let’s say you charge $100 to register.

2) You create a special discount code for people who share the promotion through the Ripple network. We’ll assume 10% off for a $90 registration.

3) RippleFunction gives you some HTML/Javascript code for a banner bar you can put on your web page. It lets people know that if they click to spread the word and share the promotion on their social account, they will get a secret discount code for their own registration. If you aren’t a web programmer, you can have RippleFunction host the promotional event page with your page embedded inside theirs as the content. Effectively it results in the same look… a promotional banner at the top and your event copy below.

3) When a person clicks the link to share your event promotion, they get the discount code sent to them which they can use for their own registration. Hopefully they don’t just turn around and retweet that code out to the universe. Instead, others should see the same offer… “Share this promotion and benefit by getting a discount code you can use.”

4) RippleFunction takes 10% of your original ticket price for all sales made with the code. So in our example, you end up with $80 revenue ($100 full price – $10 for the discount – $10 to RippleFunction). They also provide analytics showing the number of the number of shares through different channels, the top influencers who caused click throughs, and so on. 

I’m not sure about this… As with any marketing approach, test and measure is the only way to see if it works for you and your audience. It does have the potential to let greed carry the message. But it limits the network somewhat because the only people with an incentive to help share the information are people who want to sign up and attend themselves. You don’t get a benefit from “altruists” who don’t want to attend but are willing to help spread the word to others out of the kindness of their hearts.

If you try it, let me know how it works for you!

Technorati Tags: RippleFunction,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web event,online event,social networking,social media

Wisconsin Okays Webinars For Law Firms

While making my daily slog through the entire global set of all webinar-related press releases, blog posts, magazine articles, and rap songs (Why… What do you do with your evenings?) I came upon a curious legal opinion by the Wisconsin State Bar Professional Ethics Committee. Their conclusion is not at all curious. It’s curious that they felt it needed confirmation at all.

Informal Opinion EI-10-01 finds that if a law firm holds an informational webinar or hosts a recording on their website, and puts up a disclaimer stating that the webinar is just general legal information and not advice designed to assist clients, and says that watching it does not create a lawyer-client relationship between the viewer and the firm, AND requires the viewer to click a button agreeing that the webinar is not a legal consultation and does not create a lawyer-client relationship… Well then, by golly, watching the webinar probably does not constitute the automatic initiation of a lawyer-client relationship between the viewer and the firm.

Whew! Dodged a bullet there.

Technorati Tags: Wisconsin State Bar Professional Ethics Committee,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Learn Webinar Skills Next Week

I will be offering free educational webcasts next week on topics of interest to those who present or support web seminars. As always, full descriptions, time zone conversions, and links to registration are available at www.effectivewebinars.com – but for your convenience, here is an overview.

Citrix Online is sponsoring a “lunch and learn” session for audiences in Sydney, Australia. The rest of the world will have to learn before or after lunch. This is a good one for my fans in the South Pacific (including the poor souls stuck in Hawaii who have to get up at 7am to hear most of my sessions). I’ll be discussing and demonstrating ways to make your webinar presentations more interactive and engaging for your audience. This is always a much-requested topic in my general sessions. The date is Wednesday, February 9 for Australia, which translates to late in the day on February 8 for America. Registration is at http://bit.ly/h0YrKA

Back in the USA (as Chuck Berry and Linda Ronstadt would put it), Adobe is sponsoring a session on Thursday, February 10. I’m testing a brand new topic with tips for webinar moderators and facilitators. I’m interested in seeing whether this has the same kind of draw that presentation topics have. As far as I know, nobody really concentrates on teaching this important area of expertise. Registration is at http://bit.ly/eQdDAa

Both events are free and scheduled for one hour, including time for your questions. I hope you attend… If I end up just talking to myself it gets boring, as half the time I know what I’m going to say.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,presenter training,speaker training